Producer: MC Lothlorien
Retail Price: £7.95
Author: Peter & George Carmpouloni

To put it bluntly this game is like a cut down version of Lords of Midnight without all the interesting bits. The graphical style could be described as 'art de la primary school' with blocky trees and characters depicted as small blobs. What with the large trees and small houses the whole thing looks out of proportion. What you do with the game is hardly awe-inspiring either, and its playability is limited and becomes boring.

Professor Mathius Calculus has been murdered and you, his closest assistant, are under suspicion as you alone possessed the security pass to the laboratory's security door. The prof's latest invention was a time machine and rather than stick around to face the inquisition you decide to take your chances on a trip through time. Perhaps you might be able to go back in time and prevent the murder from happening.

The time machine malfunctions before you can reach the Time Sanctuary. You end up in a strange land populated by tribes and the wizards which oversee them. There are villages, temples, forests, lakes and other places that you must explore before you can seriously hope to find the time machine and the fuel to propel it. The local people are a very important factor in the game and a good relationship with them will see you progress smoothly. The natives and the monsters of the land each follow their own way of life but you are able to communicate with them. Some of these are friendly, others unhelpful. Their personalities are summed up between the attributes of stamina, health, intelligence, greediness, honesty, bravery and attitude.

An over-riding factor is the limited amount of time available for your quest. Should you take too long your flesh decomposes and you will have had your chips. For example, to search a house takes 15 minutes while scaring a person takes 5 minutes. This concept is a touch implausible but having the time count down on the main screen may have added something.

To move about you press 1 to turn left, 3 to turn right and 2 to move forward in the chosen direction. E enters a house, M has you talking to someone while I brings up your inventory displays the time remaining. Sub options allow you to search a house (which all look much the same) and scrolling windows give you the chance to bring two words together to say something meaningful to any character you might meet. The one thing wrong with the system is its apparent arbitrariness whereby a character alternatively looks scared or does not look scared and so on.

Time Sanctuary is a game let down by its looks and its playability. The characters all look the same and the game soon lapses into the familiar territory of all games which haven't quite been thought out properly - boredom. Just as a book must hook a reader less he become disinterested, so a computer game must involve the player to an extent that he wishes to more than just see the game through.

COMMENTS

Difficulty: takes a long time to discover what you have to do
Graphics: simple
Input facility: scrolling windows
Response: average

Publisher: Lothlorien
Programmers: Peter and George Carmpouloni
Price: £7.95
Memory: 48K

Lothlorien is mainly renowned for its strategy and war games, so it was with some surprise that I looked over Time Sanctuary in its Adventuremaster series.

The packaging calls it an all graphic, non-violent adventure game with landscaping - the last, a description which brings to mind games like Lords of Midnight. In reality it strongly resembles trading games and relies on the same skills.

The plot is relatively simple. You have become stranded in a time warp after your time machine has malfunctioned, and need to explore the countryside around to find the chosen number of fuel units to get your machine working again. Your time in the Sanctuary is limited to 5,000 game 'minutes' - if you fail to locate your machine or find enough fuel you die.

The landscape contains three villages, each populated. There are lakes, forests, a maze, temples and houses. The graphics are cheerful, blocky and rather abstract but don't have the same naturalistic strength as in games like Midnight. They do advance and recede though, and you can take views of the compass points before deciding in which direction to move.

To enter houses you need to point yourself directly at them and move in. When the picture of the house vanishes you are there. Press a key and you are presented with a shot of the interior - all of which are pretty much the same except for the furniture.

Once inside you get the same choice - searching, resting or leaving. If you're lucky the place may contain some useful trade items like hides, papyrus, wine and the like. With goods like this you can attempt to deal with some of the characters in the game.

You locate those characters in much the same way as the houses, and then press a key to get a status screen which tells you how much they will buy and sell things for, whether they're friendly, hostile or whatever. There's also a small text window where you can run through a preset menu of questions about a preset range of options - buying, selling, scaring or asking where other characters are.

Scaring folk may make them give you goods or information, so may befriending, bribing or trading - you have to work out the best approach. Every action costs game time and you must not squander your valuable minutes - it costs 15 game minutes to act friendly, 30 to rest.

There is no text input from the player and every action is by single keypress. I don't find this dull in a game like Midnight, where there is plenty of action and a solid storyline, but Time Sanctuary is essentially a seek-and-find game.

Though the graphics allow fast movement the game format becomes quickly repetitive. Identification with the scenario is difficult and, however much you buy, sell and scare, you are still going through similar motions all the time.

I began to feel I was playing an illustrated land management program. Fair enough if you're into that sort of thing but I'm not sure I'd call it adventure.