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The master of horror is back! In case you have got over the shock of playing Dracula, Rod Pike is about to strike again with his own authentic version of Frankenstein. Keith Campbell previews the game...

I had played at being God, and created a being from a jigsaw of limbs, the best, selected from the bodies at charnel houses. And then I breathed life into them, and was suddenly facing the most hideous and deformed creature imaginable. I fled in terror, leaving the door open behind me.

Four years later, my sister was brutally strangled by a "monstrous giant" who then hurled her body from the top of a ravine. Now I, Dr. Frankenstein, presently in my bedroom at my father's house, must find and destroy him.

That is the background to the story, and where you come into the picture. Starting from your father's house, by the bank of a lake in Switzerland, you set off in search of the monster, still at large.

An encounter with a grizzly bear slows your progress down, but eventually you make your way to a nearby village across the ravine, where a boat aids your somewhat perilous journey across the lake.

The second part opens with a tragic meeting with a young widow and her blind father, who have suffered a bereavement which they describe in horrific detail.

Their story, and subsequent events, leave you shaken, guilt-ridden and more determined than ever to track down and destroy your monstrous creation. The culmination is the first encounter with the being.

As this is a preview rather than a full review, I cannot yet comment on part three, which was still in development at the time of writing. But Rod promises that it will convey the full horror and mixed drama of the character.

Certainly the text is extraordinarily atmospheric, and the game structure combines to make it come over well in a horror-adventure setting.

To add to the drama, there will be digitised graphics. These won't be produced using the GAC graphics facility, but developed separately by the team at CRL, and integrated with the GAC program.

In particular, a gripping animated sequence is planned for part three, which will heighten the climax to the game.

Multiple commands are supported if separated by a comma or an AND, and complex sentences such as GET THE KNIFE THEN THROW IT are also valid.

Part two recognises speech, albeit in a fairly limited way, by prefacing a command with SAY followed by a comma.

If you enjoyed Dracula, then you are going to like Frankenstein. The same formula of going back to the original story, and not holding any punches with the suspense and horror, has worked again to make what I think is an even better adventure.

I think it's going to be another sure-fire hit for Rod Pike and CRL. I can't recommend it highly enough.

For most people, the name Frankenstein conjures up a mental picture of a rather moronic, lumbering giant with bolts through his neck. But not for Rod Pike, creator of Frankenstein Adventure.

As with Dracula, his highly successful first venture into Gothic Horror, Rod has gone back to the original book written in the last century by Mary Shelley.

"Frankenstein was not at all like the clod-hopping image popularised by Hammer's horror movies," says Rod. "He was a big creature, certainly, but he was also very agile, and sensitive. Far from being moronic, he was an intellectual."

So Rod has spent a lot of his effort and used a major part of the adventure to build up the "real" character, all leading to what Rod hopes will be seen as a really horrific finale, involving the player emotionally.

Although making the game as faithful to the story as possible, it was necessary to deviate from the plot in some places, or it simply wouldn't have worked as a game.

So while much of it is driven by the narrative, there are puzzles built in to provide the gameplay.

But the puzzles take second place to the text, because Rod's aim is for people to enjoy Frankenstein as they would a gripping thriller.

Dracula was written using The Quill, and Frankenstein has exactly the same texty look about it. Yet there was something different about it on my pre-production disk.

On the C64, the response time - Quill's strong point - was little short of abysmal. I took this up with Rod, who was also puzzled. He wrote it using Incentive's GAC, at the suggestion of CRL, who preferred him to move away from Quill "...to please the reviewers".

With part three of Frankenstein still to be written Rod intended to pursue the matter with Incentive, and hopefully come up with a cure.

Of the adventure authors who use proprietary Adventure Utilities, there are few who have made the change from Quill to GAC.

But one who has is in a far better position to compare the merits of the two, than reviewers who only have time to play with them, as opposed to using for real to write a full-scale adventure.

At first, Rod had great difficulty in getting the condition statements to work. He was setting them up in a way that was perfectly OK according to the manual.

It wasn't until he read Incentive's Guide To The GAC that it all became clear. "It's like gold dust, that book, for anyone using the GAC!" he exclaimed.

Once mastered, he found the multi-word command feature was a lot less limiting than The Quill, and overcame the 255 character location description limit by stringing three or four together to create his lengthy narrative passages.

Impressed with GAC, on the whole, though, he still likes Quill, apart from its limitation on the number of characters of a word it checks.

Now it's here, Frankenstein was an obvious choice with which to follow the chart-topping Dracula. But it wasn't Rod's choice. "Don't tell the readers, for I still might do it," he explained. "And I wouldn't want anyone else to get in before me. I wanted to write xxxxxx, but CRL preferred Frankenstein."

Hmmmm. come to think of it, xxxxxx would make a rather good gothic adventure...