Previous Next

Following hot on the heels of Bored Of The Rings and Robin Of Sherlock, The Boggit is the third of Fergus McNeill's spoof adventure series. Based on the book and, more especially, the computer game of nearly the same name, it tells the story of how a young boggit gets persuaded by an old wizard to go on an adventure with a load of dwarves. Very soon, they come across a clearing complete with some trolls who are more than keen to see what boggit tastes like. Sound familiar? There can't be many adventurers who haven't played the original at some stage or other.

The game starts in a familiar hobbit sorry boggit hole with a round green door although this one is protected with a combination lock. Grandalf does a quick Tarzan act through the window and soon invites Bimbo Faggins to come on down, the Price is Right. After correctly assessing the value of a fourteenth part of Thorny's treasure, Bimbo finds that he has won a camping holiday exploring Wilberland and especially the Wiffy mountains and Berkwood.

The game is "Quilled" and it shows to some extent with a fairly limited vocabulary. Trying to take all gets a message about how much extra memory it would take to include this facility. Talking to other characters proved to be a problem until I realised that it had to be done in two stages. First, you type "talk Thorny" and then when that has been entered, you can give Thorny your message, e.g. "follow me". There were also, somewhat uncharacteristically, three spelling mistakes in the first few locations.

I didn't enjoy this game nearly as much as Fergus' earlier efforts and I think that there are two reasons for this. The first is that the humour seems forced. Whereas before, the jokes used to be snappy one liners, here you get pages of the stuff at once and it doesn't work nearly so well. Secondly, the earlier games were accused in some quarters of being too easy and this has been tightened up although again, I preferred the earlier style where you could wander round lots of locations early on in the game. Here you get stuck in the same few for all the early part of the game and I fell that this to detracts from the atmosphere.