I played all the early Gilsoft adventures along time back, & recently discovered this one which I knew nothing about, with the only mention at the time seems to have been in an introduction in one of Derek Brewster’s Crash columns. With time on my hand I decided to look at it, & although very dated as most text adventures of this time are, it did at least hold my interest for a while.
Unlike most of the adventures of this period, this one concentrates mainly on its atmosphere & story, which it does with descriptive locations & pages of script detailing a story at different parts of the adventure, which is more like a simple modern Interactive Fiction game. It is very similar to the author’s earlier game Africa Gardens,though I thought that was poor due to its lack of any help & unfriendly parser. Although there are puzzles throughout, they are not numerous & in most cases easily solved, with probably the most difficult near the end, which is how it should be. To help you with any problems, the game has a nice help system, with clues within, which I thought was nice.
The introduction starts with you in a travelling fair, where you encounter a fortuneteller, who through his crystal ball, points to another world & transports you there. The locations are your basic fantasy type ones full of forests, valleys, wastelands etc, moving on to a Egyptian Sarcophagus where you discover your main quest, in how an Egyptian noble was murdered by a jealous priest, who sets a curse on his soul so he wanders forever & not enter the afterlife, & the game goes on in this vein.
As well as the good help system & story & descriptions, the other pluses are sensible puzzles, relevant vocabulary, no dead ends, & any deaths that I could see (though there is one animal lovers amongst us might not approve of). Unlike many early Quill games there is also no object limit that you can carry, & in a nice touch all the unnecessary items are conveniently disposed of at times in the adventure. There is a weird maze near the end of the game, but this is based around what is in the differing descriptions & not needed to be mapped to progress.
If you are looking for a Level 9 type game or a game of depth & quality this is not really for you, but if you have a little time on your hands to waste, you could do worse than this, & could even play with the walkthrough if you want to save time. Why it wasn’t better known I am not sure, as it doesn’t have a lot of the faults the early Quill games had, & is interesting if nothing else.
Remember the early days of adventuring when you had sparse descriptions, slow & basic parsers, limited inventory, simple puzzles, death from hunger, & the wonderful mazes. If you do, you will love this as it has all these & more, as you go back once again to the prehistoric age, though not literally. In fairness the game is in only 16k, & came as part of a compilation with an unfriendly puzzle game called Tasks. The author later went on to do the Quill, which explains why the parser is very similar to that, & this is obviously not a serious adventure.
The plot is that you have come separated from your time machine, which you need to take you back to the present, though considering the locations cover countryside, farmhouse area & passages underground, with present day objects, it is hard to say what era the present is supposed to be. You encounter around a dozen moveable objects in your travels, plus a few unmovable ones, but that wont help you much when you have to map an extremely tedious maze, which seems to cover 2/3 of the game world, & have only six objects at your disposal to map it with. To add to this you have the dreaded hunger bug, where as you know if you fail to eat for a little while you drop dead with starvation.
Without the maze & the sloth like parser, the game would be completed in minutes, as the puzzles are extremely basic, with hardly anything to do. I would definitely not recommend this, unless you are a glutton for punishment, as this is certainly no Lords of Time.
