Of all the words that might describe Games Workshop's Key Of Hope, successor to their Tower Of Despair, my choice is "weird".

As the game starts, you find yourself standing in the ruins of Castle Argent, the very same Argent from which you set forth on your first quest in Tower. I trust you have played Tower... You have? Good! So you know of the demon Lord Malnor!

Now that Malnor has returned, the essence has fused with that of his ages-old prison to give him horrendous new abilities which are slowly transforming the globe. The castle is now a ruin because the White Goddess has transported you forward in time and placed you in a new body so that you may help her in her age-old battle with Malnor.

This Adventure is like Tower Of Despair inasmuch as it has been written with The Quill and uses the same Gothic-style character set. But, unlike Tower, Key Of Hope has graphics in some of the key locations and, by the look of them, they have been added with The Illustrator program.

Now to the weird part! In one respect it is totally unlike any Adventure I have played before. This is because of the way you move from location to location, or don't, as the case may be. The first time I played the game, it gave me the impression that it was vast. I began to feel like a hiker in a large galaxy! It was not until I tried dropping objects and moving off that I became aware that something very strange was going on! Whatever I decided to drop would follow me about until I hit one of the other main locations in the game!

How this works seems to be that every key location in the game is surrounded by a number of other locations which act as a kind of buffer between the key places. By moving a certain number of times in any of these outer locations, you get deeper into the game.

It was for this reason that I found Key Of Hope a lot more difficult to play. It is available for the Spectrum 48K and comes from Games Workshop.