Producer: The Edge
Retail Price: £8.99
Author: Michael St Aubyn

Old Mr Crutcher has, to put it bluntly, snuffed it. This puts his widowed wife in difficulty, because before he passed to a better place her spouse had taken it into his head to hide her jewels from potential thieves.

So, after a bit of lateral thinking, she decides to employ a thief to find them for her.

As The Edge's game begins, this tea leaf is in her spacious home, about to begin his search. He can move in all directions through the house, exiting through one doorway and appearing in the doorway of the adjacent room. The thief can also climb stairs and leap onto furniture.

One room is seen at a time, in 3-D and great detail. Each is furnished with such items as tables, chairs, telephones, bookcases and paintings. Each object is independent of every other, so a telephone that rests on a small table can be pushed to the floor. Other items can be picked up and dropped.

The careful manipulation of these objects is important to solving the puzzles that will lead to the missing gems. There are numerous sub-problems which can earn welcome points: for instance, pocketing the snooker balls or picking up a bottle when carrying a glass add to your score.

The 12 gems are hidden in a variety of places, some obvious, others in more obscure positions. There are hidden passageways to be discovered, pictures to be moved and disguised wall safes to be uncovered before all the jewellery can be found.

But it's not as simple as it sounds - the products of the late Mr Crutcher's bizarre scientific experiments see to that. Some of the rooms are patrolled by savage mice and budgies that can take down a criminal's life force faster than a long stretch in the nick.

When a jewel has been picked up, it must be taken the bedroom of Lady Crutcher and dropped before her.

COMMENTS

Joysticks: Kempston, Sinclair
Graphics: superb - every object is individually designed to look as near to the real thing as possible
Sound: simple, poor spot effects

This 3-D arcade adventure surpasses even the great M.O. V.I. E.. It's the closest thing to real life on the Spectrum. Nearly everything you can do in a real house is possible in Inside Outing - even down to jumping on the pool table and kicking the balls into the pockets. And the superbly drawn and animated graphics (you wouldn't think you could get so much detail on a wine bottle) add to the lifelike affect. Inside Outing is set up very like Piranha's Nosferatu, but everything seems much more realistic - the graphics are more solid, and there are many more objects (like a pile of plates in the dining room, each one of which is an individual object which can be picked up separately). The jewels are also hidden in the most strange (but obvious if you've seen a lot of thrillers) places - I even found one in a wall safe behind a painting. It all makes Inside Outing a gem of a game.
PAUL [94%]

At first Inside Outing reminded me of MO.V.I.E. - but I was let down. This is a novel game with some lovely 3-D graphics and lots of detail in every room, but in monochrome it looks very plain. And it soon gets boring just walking around a house.
DAVE [76%]

The inlay says 'never before have you seen a 3-D game as impressive as this!' - but The Edge produced the classic 3-D arcade adventures Fairlight and Fairlight II, which are far better than this. The objects in this 3-D house are so out of proportion they make the whole game look stupid (the phone is twice as big as the tables and chairs). Despite these faults, Inside Outing is quite playable and it's easy to make all the necessary moves. But it's all been done before much better...
NATHAN [75%]

BLUE PRINT FOR BURGLARY

When we offered Rachael J Smith an Outing, she said goody! But when we locked her Inside an old, dark house she was driven to The Edge of distraction!

FAX BOX
Game: Inside Outing
Publisher: The Edge
Original Program By: Michael St Aubyn
Conversion By: Timedata/Pamela Roberts/Mike Smith/Hagar
Price: £7.95
Reviewer: Rachael Smith

Eeek - sneak thief Smiffy here, trapped and unhappy. Not that I've been banged up (in gaol, you pervy little pustule) No, I just saw all these milk bottles and newspapers piled up outside the big house on the hill you know, the one which used to be owned by the late, local, loony professor, and I couldn't resist it.

I'm a member of my neighbourhood watch, see (I watch out for places where the occupants are away). So I thought I'd check the front door and gor blimey (as me old friend Mr Knuckles used to say) whatdya know - it was open. What else could a buxom burglar do? I broke an entry.

And that's when strange things started to happen - like the door swinging shut and staying that way! All the windows were locked too. Seems like old man Crutcher (Rest in Pieces - what a messy explosion that was!) had crutched me good. But that wasn't the biggest surprise. Blow me down, guv, if the house wasn't empty after all.

Yes, I strayed into Lady C's bedroom and what do I see but the old bat herself, flittering around and waiting for me. "At last," she cried "a member of the criminal classes There's never one around when you need one."

Then she went on to explain why shed lured me into her horrible house. Seems her stiffy spouse had odd ideas about security and instead of consigning her sparklers to the local Barclays he'd hidden them around the mansion. Only problem was he'd popped his clogs before telling her where they were stowed.

"So I thought who better to find them than a burglar?" her ladyship summed up. There are twelve diamonds and limited time so you'd better get cracking - as in safe-cracking." "And what if I say no?" I asked, thinking that NULFI (the National Union of Light-Fingered Individuals) wouldn't be too keen on this sort of non-profitmaking activity. "In that case I'll feed you to the budgie," she smiled.

Feed me to the budgie?!! Listen, anything less savage than an alsatian don't scare me, so... Argh! The ex-Prof was into genetic Meccano and built himself a killer canary and some monstrous mice to guard his crumbling pile.

The thing that really sets Inside Outing apart is that, as well as providing enough nightmares to keep mappers awake for ages, there are also fiendish problems inside the rooms. Imagine searching your bedroom for a lost pin it could be in a drawer, under a plate, behind a picture. Anywhere!

Label: The Edge
Author: Michael St Aubyn
Price: £8.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Graham Taylor

Now there have been quite a few 3D room-based games since Knight Lore first stunned everybody.

The Edge changed things a bit with Fairlight I and II which took the basic game look and added an extended range of possible options - objects to collect and the like.

But even that wasn't the end of it - now we have Inside Outing possibly the most sophisticated 3D room game yet.

Inside Outing is set in an authentic Hammer horror type mansion. You are a burglar, an expert in the dodgy arts. Specifically you can find things that other people have hidden. Valuable things. This time, though, you're one of the good guys. The lady of the house has actually employed you to search the house, there to hunt out twelve missing jewels hidden by the deranged previous owner of the mansion.

Still with me? Anyway the jewel hider was a mad inventor (some surprise!) and the result of his bizarre experiments provide the principle obstacles in the game. Not bats and vampires in this family ruin but giant canaries and massively enlarged household pets. You may be surprised just how intimidating a canary can be...

Actually the plot is pretty much your standard looky-collecty stuff but here is the awesome bit: virtually everything can be moved and virtually everything has an authentic weight and momentum. You can push and pull tables around, move pictures - perhaps to reveal something behind? You can not only push the snooker table around - you can jump up on it and push the snooker balls down the holes!

This is the closest to a miniature world in a computer I've ever seen. In other games you would try something silly and it would fail. In Inside Outing you try something silly and it actually works!

Sometimes the problems are not dissimilar to Knight Lore or Head Over Heels. For example in one room the way out is made inaccessible by a great pile of furniture. The objective then is to move it all out of the way, the problem being a giant mutant canary which (presumably by its deadly pecks) drains your energy pronto. Attempting to tough it out just doesn't seem to work - your energy never lasts long enough. The solution must be to find something to distract or stun the canary with. But what?

The use for the mysterious lumps of cheese was easier to guess - there are these giant rats you see...

Other problems are in the Fairlight mould - assorted objects just crying out for a use to be found for them or subtle combinations of objects which get you other objects which solve another problem...

The nearest point of comparison with Inside Outing is Get Dexter - a superb game which was just about the only game that ever made me wish I had an Amstrad. The virtues of both games are that they are very detailed, with stylish graphics and utterly ingenious puzzles.

You'll soon learn to search everywhere in this game - leave no picture unturned, no table unmoved.

Without a doubt the best 3D game since Head Over Heels.

THE EGDE'S LITTLE GEM

Isometric three dimensional games still make an appearance every once in a while and if the game's good as this,then why not?

Inside Outing is a witty isometric romp that has the player roaming through rooms that would grace many a stately home. The object is to collect 12 hidden jewels and take them to the lady of the house - who spends her time wandering aimlessly around in one of the upstairs bedrooms. Collecting the jewels is far easier to say than do however, because many are hidden and only reveal their whereabouts after the player has solved a puzzle. Colourful graphics add a lot of atmosphere to a game that bears more than a passing resemblance to Get Dexter.

RELEASE BOX
C64, £8.99cs, £14.95dk, Out Now
Ams, £8.99cs, £14.95dk, Dec 87
Spectrum, £8.99cs, Dec 87

Predicted Interest Curve

1 min: 70/100
1 hour: 75/100
1 day: 80/100
1 week: 60/100
1 month: 30/100
1 year: 10/100