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If you are a lamp carrying, troll-bashing adventurer, then Hampstead is not for you. In this text only game you start life unemployed in an unfashionable London area, with the objective of not just finding but attaining Hampstead. Social climbing, by fair means or foul, is the required strategy. All the action takes place in London (so far as I have discovered) but access to various forms of transport facilitates changes of scenery.

The game has a lot of "scenery" locations and events, many of which are quite wittily constructed. Unfortunately, this means that one can be stuck with no real idea of what the problem is that one is being asked to solve. Being something of an adventure purist, I really don't enjoy too many red herrings. Nor do I admire a game which fails to specify exits in the location descriptions and requires me to search every room for the occasional hidden object. Another irritation is the failure of the program to distinguish clearly between words which are not in its vocabulary and commands which it is unable to interpret.

In short, Hampstead scores well for original and amusing content, but suffers from a number of technical deficiencies in construction which I believe will irritate the seasoned adventurer.

Jonathan Evans