C&VG
1st January 1986Lucifer's Realm
If ever there was a lost opportunity to gain a C&VG personal rating of 10 for an adventure, this was it! Here is a highly original scenario with some stunning possibilities, and it has all been wasted with a clumsy input/output format and a diabolical vocabulary.
Perhaps 'diabolical' is an apt word, for the devil himself features in this game! Here, the game starts with you on the verge of death in a hospital bed. Should you be successful in accomplishing the task of dying, things take a turn very much for the worse - you go down rather than up! That is, if you can manage the commands to go anywhere at all.
Now the problems begin, and you can either spend an eternity in nastily tiled room half-full of stagnant water, or solve the problem and arrive at an altogether warner place at an even lower altitude.
When you hit bottom, you find yourself in a circular room with doors to the left and right, and a notice announcing that Satan suspects one of his inmates, a certain A. Hitlet, of plotting to overthrow him. He who succeeds in proving this will be released to ascend into heaven.
On with the plot. Take the left hand door - well, why not? Through an underground cavern, the player reaches his old friend, Nazi war-criminal Adolf Eichmann. Wearing the uniform of the Third Reich, he will not let you pass him to see A.H. until you answer the question: "Why do you want to see him?"
I'm not usually lost for words, but try to sum that up in two! But there are no clues.
The other alternative has to be better, so off we go through the right hand door. After passing through a few caverns, another dead end is met in the form of John Wilkes, Abraham Lincoln's assassin.
He is guarding further progress on the direct orders of Satan himself. Not so lethal as Eichmann, he will only stop you by slapping your face - quite a gentle character really!
So back we go, and the observant sinners amongst us will no doubt find a skull amongst the foul-smelling remains of decaying human flesh.
The more astute will find that it rattles. Here the world difficulty comes in, for there is no way I could find of making use of this fact.
My logic went as follows: It rattles either because there is a useful object inside, or because the noise of the rattle itself is useful.
Following the latter train of thought, I tried RATTLE SHAKE, and as many other words as I could think of, to no avail.
Following the other track, I tried EMPTYING the skull, tipping it, inserting hand, breaking it, you name it, but no detail could I see, no object could I obtain.
The graphics, superb as they are, take an age to load.
What a shame, the potential is there, but it hasn't been exploited - it has been spoiled.