C&VG


Sepulcri
By Ariolasoft
Amstrad CPC464

 
Published in Computer & Video Games #63

Sepulcri

88 years after the famous abortive Clapham Common summit of 1987, between President Reagan and Mr. Gorbachov, the United States had almost finished their Strategic Defence Initiative Satellite. Only a mere 60 years late and 42 trilliant mega-bucks over budget the system still needed to be tested. But how to test SDI without starting the war it was designed to stop? Well, those awfully clever NASA chaps have come up with a tiny robot, so tiny it can wander around the satellite's circuit boards examining all the components of the main computer, reporting back if it finds any problems.

As you control the robot inside the computer you will encounter many 'bugs' and miniature sheep (inserted into the system instead of the usual RAM-geddit?!!) that will bring on a sudden case of death if touched. Your robot has also inconveniently, got sensors under his feet which cause it to self-destruct when it comes into contact with anything sharp. Unfortunately the place is riddled with all things sharp!

Sepulcri is definitely in the mould of Knight Lore and Alien Eight.

Sepulcri

Unfortunately there are a few too many of the latter and not enough really meaty logic problems in this game. That said there are some neat ideas like trap doors through which you fall onto raised platforms containing flip switches that seemed impossible to reach.

The feeling of height has also been exploited more in Sepulcri than in many similar games giving the impression of an environment with many levels. This also helps to give a refreshingly wide variation of room shapes and sizes. Graphics are crisp and well designed with a number of different wall textures and colour combinations (in four colour mode) which further help to make every room look different.

The robots movement is well animated especially when jumping when it does a kind of hitch kick. Its eyes open and close continually while walking and jumping giving it an endearing quality sadly lacking in the central characters of some games.

Especially useful for map freaks is the screen dump feature which lets you make a hard copy of any location at the press of a button. The one real niggle with this game though is the number of times you have to be standing in a pixel perfect position before being able to successfully make a jump.