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I haven't really got far enough with this adventure to judge its full range of descriptions and puzzles. This might be due to my lack of skill in adventuring, but having solved a couple of the well known full size commerical games, I would rather put the blame on the programmer!

Sadim Castle is a "real time" adventure, and one of its most annoying features is a tendency to kill you after a random amount of real time. Since this even bears no apparent relation to your location or activity, there seems no way of reasoning out a solution - hence my limited progress, despite much frustrating trial and error.

The instructions for Sadim Castle duplicated on the inlay card and loading program, provide a ghoulish and bloodthirsty description of the castle's history. Your task, in fact, is to find and put to rest the remains of a woman walled up and starved to death by her jealous husband. Nothing I have encountered in play has been especially nasty, though the early discovery of a bible, crucifix and clove of garlic provides a none too subtle clue to hazards of a supernatural nature.

The screen is split into two windows. Instructions are entered at the bottom and messages displayed above, which can make it hard to match up the two. Inconsistent and messy use of coloured messages made me long for the orthodox scrolling screen of white text. Although no indication of size is given in the documentation, several things make me suspect that this game is not as large as others on the market: (i) the program does not use all available memory on loading, (ii) the save is extremely short and (iii) text messages appear so rapidly that it is hard to believe that any extensive compression of text has been used.

On what I have seen, I can't really recommend Sadim Castle as anything special. Judged by the incredible standards set by Level 9, it doesn't really rate in terms of construction, and it lacks any unusual originality of content to compensate.

Jonathan Evans