Reviews

You are controlling a girl - Yumiko - in a set of dark rooms. Your objective is to light up all candles in rooms simultaneously. You light up a candle simply by stepping near to it.
There are also ghosts in the maze, visible only for a while when lighting strikes. They randomly blow off candles you have previously lit, so sometimes you must re-light a candle you already lit before.

That about sums it. The game features 128k music and quite nice graphics, but it runs really slow and becomes quite frustrating after a while, because there's absolutely no way you can affect the gameplay. You cannot walk faster, choose a wiser route, kill ghosts, make candles burn longer or do anything - besides patiently lighting candle after candle and returning to the places you already were and relighting candles you already lit.

Games should be challenging, they should be about improving player's skills and thus getting further in the game in each play. With this game, there's nothing to improve or think about; you will simply play up to the point where ghosts will blow off candles quicker than you can possibly light them up, ending up in an infinite loop of pointlessly walking between some two sections of the maze, always lighting candles in one of them, while the ghosts are blowing off the candles in the other one.

It would be nice to give more thoughts to the gameplay next time.

The gaming mechanism of this game is intelligent and entertaining and some (most) of the levels are pretty challenging.
I spent several hours finishing the game and I had fun.

But that's quite all for the PROs of the game.
Now for the CONs.
The most serious drawback for the game is the characters movement speed. Optimal speed setting of your ZX Spectrum emulator for this game is somewhere about 300%-400% of the original Spectrum speed. This distorts the music and sounds, so you need to turn those off, but no serious harm, because they're nothing special anyway. Changing characters movement from (very slow) walk to jumps or very quick steps would significantly improve gameplay.
Also, at the end of the game, after finishing all the levels, some of which were kind of tricky, I would expect something more than just the word "congratulations". At least "Thanks to you, Oddi has successfullly escaped the castle" (and saved the princess/killed the evil wizard/sold the stolen treasure/lived happily ever after) would be nice.

At the first glance, this game looks like it's going to be great.
Then, after a while, you realize that you don't really understand anything in here, don't know what to do, and it quickly starts to get boring.

But there's a third phase as well, if you give it enough time and effort: when you start to comprehend your goal and ways to achieve it. Then it becomes quite interesting and entertaining.

It's partially because the mechanisms of the game are quite hard to comprehend.
For example, you cannot really slay any monster, but with one slash, you can immobilize it, and, if done immediately afterwards, with a stab you can make it disappear along with all other monsters (and other "illusions" around) for a short time.
And another confusing aspect of the game is that it also features a really tricky maze, one of the most interesting one I have ever seen on Spectrum. The rooms` vertical connections are completely independent from the horizontal connections, which not only makes it almost impossible to orientate in, but also makes it very hard to even somehow write down / paint.
For example, while going four rooms right and then back four rooms left returns you into the initial room (and the same applies for the UP and DOWN directions), going UP - RIGHT - DOWN - LEFT leaves you in a completely different room, which could easily be very far away, if you used a different route!
Therefore, there can be quite a huge number of possible routes between any two rooms.

As a result, you could theoretically probably get very quickly from any room to any room on the map, but you probably won't be able to, because you'll be unable to find the shortest route. Maybe a specialized routing program would be useful here. Anyone for the challenge? :-)

This game is remarkable and really unique for several reasons. The great, big fire breathing dragon over a whole third of a screen, with separately animated head, tail, wings and claws; the beatiful parallax scrolling; the undeniably great atmosphere; but most of all, the fact that there's no energy bar, there are no lifes, the only indicator of your condition is a giant, beating heart! I've never seen anything like that in any other game.
Also the fact, that to beat the game you need to keep TWO characters alive, not just yourself... and you can't really affect the behavior of the witch, even though most of the time she's just clinched on your back.
But you will learn to dread those moments when a spider shoves her off your back and you need to turn around as fast as possible and quickly pick her up again, before one of the spiders crawls to her and eats her...

I've loved this game since I was a kid and I love it still.

This game, although quite a simple one, has a certain degree of addiction to it.

The player controls an airplane, which is able to maneuver up, down, left and right in an isometric corridor, shoot the front gun and drop bombs (by pressing DOWN and FIRE simultaneously). Score points are rewarded for destroying objects - tanks, buildings, boats, cars, another airplanes in the air or landed, either by the front gun or by bombs.

The airplane starts on a runway and needs to gather certain speed (100) before it can take off; the player also must land again on such runways regularly to refill the fuel, bombs and to repair the plane.
If hit by a tank, one of four key airplane parts (F, M, B, G) starts malfunctioning - the gun (G) or the bomb (B) mechanism occasionally jams and cannot be used for a few seconds, the fuel (F) tank leaks or the maneuverability (M) worsens - the controls start to react sloppy. The damage can be repaired at the next runway and it is quite necessary to do so, as if all the parts are done for and the plane gets another hit, it goes down.
Besides of that, crushing into things (a building, a tree, the land, another airplane etc.) also takes the plane down immediately, as well as premature attempt to get off the runway without reaching proper speed first, or running out of fuel. Occasionally the plane can also be taken out when landed on a runway by a bomb from an enemy airplane!

Overall I'd say this game is really entertaining for some time, when you get the hang of it.

A fine, although quite tough shooter. It's not easy to go through that narrow corridor and avoid all the objects and enemies.
Powerups (look like question marks) make your life a bit easier - it's cruicial to collect at least one as soon as possible and immediately activate the first powerup - speed. The powerups work like this:

1-2 points: speed up
3-4 points: weapon upgrade
5-6 points: force field
7-8 points: shield

Nice 128k music, both intro and game over.
With a bit of patience you should be able to get at least to the first boss.