Computer Gamer
1st April 1987Olli And Lissa
Olli and Lissa has been tremendously successful as a Spectrum budget game and has now been released on the Commodore 64.
Shilmore Castle is in the barren, rocky highlands of Scotland. A peaceful place, this peace is about to be shattered - the building is to be removed stone by stone and shipped to America. This castle ghost, Sir Humphrey, is, not surprisingly, peturbed by this and Olli and Lissa are recruited to stop our friendly spook being forcibly emigrated.
When I say that Olli and Lissa will help, I really mean that Olli will do the dirty work. Lissa plays no real part at all, except as moral support for her boyfriend.
Shilmore can be saved if Olli can retrieve all the ingredients for Sir Humphrey's invisibility position. When the potion takes effect, the ghostly knight can then, hopefully, cause sufficient havoc to thwart the export deal.
Each ingredient is hidden on a different screen of this platform game and each screen can only be tackled when the previous ingredient has been found and placed in the cauldron. To reach a new screen, Olli must pass through all the screens he has solved before, recover the next item on the recipe and return to the castle. This means that the game gets progressively more difficult and by the time I reached the eighth and final screen it was a daunting task even to return home.
In the tried and tested platform tradition, everything depends on timing. Solve the problem of when and where to jump and you should have no problems. If this was a full-price game I would say that the entertainment value was limited because the game only took a couple of hours to complete. But £1.99 - for two hours or more of fun - is relatively cheap these days.
If you want a cheap challenge you will find it difficult to find something better.