Adventuring for insomniacs

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A year ago I was given copies of Heyley's first two releases, The Ultimate Prize and Pirate's Peril. Although both adventures had much to commend them as first offerings, they lacked real thought in their puzzle construction and the programs were slow to respond to commands. They also took about 80 seconds to load from disc.

Dreamtime still takes an eon to load, but after ten minutes play I was hooked for a further four hours and my criticisms were negated. Despite constant disc access, this adventure is fast, well-constructed and, above all, addictive.

You are presented with an ingeniously-designed loading screen which helps reduce some of the tedium while waiting for the game to load. You are also given atmospheric background notes which put you in a role akin to a cross between Adrian Mole and Alice In Wonderland.

You awake to find yourself in the entrance hall of a large hotel. A reconnaissance of your immediate surroundings will present you with direct problems which need to be overcome. How do you book a room at reception when you have no money? What is the purpose of the salt cellar in the dining room? What do you do about the demon alcohol? These problems must be tackled methodically if your dream is to unfold.

What I loved about this adventure is that, although the scenario is that of dreamland, there are no hackneyed fire-breathing dragons and wizards. The puzzles are all totally rational in retrospect, if a little far-fetched at times. Furthermore, this whole adventure can be mapped logically, which makes adventuring more tolerable, though no less frustrating.

This large scale text adventure was composed and written using a modified form of Jonathan Evans' Adventurescape program. As with all programs written using such a utility, design and parser limitations apply. However, Dreamtime succeeds remarkably well and leaves you to wonder what Heyley would be capable of producing if it used pure machine code.

The atmosphere created is comforting and often humorous but not quite in the league of Robico and Level 9 - a fault of the utility used to write it, rather than the adventure design.

If you're a seasoned campaigner, here's a game that should keep your drive whirring for many hours and give you a few sleepless nights to boot.

Pendragon