Producer: Players
Retail Price: £1.99
Author: Mark Gipson

Shrewsbury Key is a reasonable graphic adventure with a novel storyline. The game has you start at York Railway Station and it's up to you to navigate your way to Shrewsbury, making use of the train 'The Shrewsbury Key ' to start your journey. The reason for going to Shrewsbury is to find the fabled, diamond encrusted Golden Key which lies there.

There are two things I'd like to point out straight away about this game, in order to save a lot of frustration. In the instructions the game warns that it is verb/noun only, and you'd better believe it. At one stage when I was told to catch a lift, I tried CATCH A LIFT with no success, but CATCH LIFT did the trick. The second thing to be aware of is the exacting requirements set on input. You can get away with EXAM for EXAMINE, but words like TICKET must be spelt out in full, although thankfully, words such as WHEELBARROW can be shortened to WHEEL.

If an awkwardness in language wasn't enough, then the plot can be pretty confusing too. At the rough wooden fence outside York station. Examining the fence gives 'The fence has a small hole which could easily be made bigger', and on KICKing the fence, ' The fence has a hole big enough to squeeze through'. But try as you might there is no way the program is going to let you through it, even after all that encouragement.

It is in fact possible to complete the game without going this way, and if this is true then I take a very dim view of the tease which had me almost smashing my computer in frustration. Of the two bins in the story, the first bin can be SEARCHed, but the second cannot for some unknown reason. On this occasion, as in so many others, the replies are less than helpful.

The logic of gamesplay is not good either, what with a storekeeper accepting a sneaker in exchange for a trowel. Or how about the Wheelbarrow which you buy for £30, which should leave a £20 cheque for the store (a curious way of receiving change from a store in the first place). But on checking your inventory the cheque is £30 - with no explanation as to why it should have suddenly increased in value. There are many examples of where the plot isn't quite zany enough to be amusing, but it is annoyingly quirksome enough to get you irritated.

Shrewsbury Key isn't too bad for the asking price, although the pictures are simple, they are at least colourful, and the character set has been redesigned. Slightly annoying is the program's insistence on the first key entry being used as a signal for the rest of the location description to scroll up, therefore you sometimes look up to the screen to see the first letter of your input missing. Even when you learn to avoid this the program still runs more slowly because of it. The story is a bit thin, as is gamesplay.

COMMENTS

Difficulty: easy
Graphics: cheap but colourful
Presentation: alright
Input facility: verb/noun
Response: average

Label: Players
Author: Mark Gibson
Price: £1.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Reviewer: Gary Rook

Shrewsbury Key is a second budget adventure from Players - and unfortunately this one does show its budget origins a little too clearly.

Adventure games are renowned for having weird and wonderful plots that mix ideas taken form diverse sources, science fiction, fantasy etc. But Shrewsbury Key has one of the strangest plots I've ever come across.

You live in York and have somehow discovered that there is a wonderful jewelled key hidden somewhere in the city of Shrewsbury. Travel there - by British Rail - and find the key. Why? Greed, I suppose - no other reason seems to be given. Me, I like a little more explanation to my plots.

Unfortunately, far too much memory has been devoted to providing the game with some of the most simplistic graphics it has been my misfortune to see. They're terrible. It would have been far better for all concerned had the author just forgotten about the pictures and used the memory space they take up to improve the text adventure.

You begin outside York British Rail station trying to get on the 12.30 train to Shrewsbury. If you go in the only direction you can at the start of the game, you find yourself in the station lobby. Search everything - don't be afraid of getting your fingers dirty. They say money is filthy.

While the obvious next step, after having found the filthy lucre, is to buy a ticket, I suspect that you will need the money for something else later in the game. So why don't you try and sneak on to the platform through the fence?

Don't worry about not finding the right train or the right platform - York, it would seem, only has one of each.

Once you're on the train, sit down quick. If you are still on your feet when the train starts, you fall over, break you neck. and have to restart the game.

Don't be too afraid of the drunken yobbos who get on the train at Leeds: they won't hurt you. They are just a convenient plot mechanism the author can use to have you thrown off the train in Huddersfield. Strange place, Huddersfield. Interesting graffiti in the toilets, but they drive like maniacs.

Anyway, that was about where I gave up on this less than scenic tour of northern England. I admit I've had better train journeys, I wonder. Could British Rail sue?

Wish I could say the same for Shrewsbury Key from Players at the same price. Your aim here is to travel from York to Shrewsbury and find the jewel-trimmed treasure chest hidden in the abbey church. You begin outside York station and must first do exciting things like examine a rubbish bin and buy a ticket, the major problem initially being the fussy vocabulary. Finding yourself with a train to catch, what command would you enter? GET TRAIN, CATCH TRAlN, ENTER TRAIN, GO TRAIN, ENTER CARRIAGE, ENTER DOOR... something along those lines? No, what the program wants is CLIMB ABOARD, which took me quite a bit of finding. The train's about to leave, but if you type WAIT before you SIT DOWN you fall over and break your neck as it moves out. Ho-ho-ho, end of game. Football hooligans climb aboard and you all get flung off at Huddersfield, and from there you should be able to get to Oldham, Stockport and Manchester. The game comes across as a pale imitation of Urban Upstart, and even a British Rail train journey's got more excitement than this adventure.