Previous Next

This month's second adventure was also written by Ms. Millard, a lady who certainly comes up with some unusual plots! This time, you play law student Frederick Davies. Exams are over so Fred and his mates decide to celebrate. After a rather long boozing session in The Swan public house (my kind of place, that!), Fred is dared to get himself locked in a large department store after closing in order to escape without being discovered.

As Fred, you get talked into accepting and before you know it, your 'friends' have taken your clothes and locked you in the loo at the store. If that wasn't bad enough, you slipped as they pushed you in and now support a very nasty head wound - with the room spinning around you, you black out...

When you come round it's pitch dark. Your head's bleeding profusely and the door's locked - how on earth can you escape without triggering the alarm systems, alerting the security guard or the police? If you're caught, your promising career at the bar (and I don't mean the one at The Swan) will be over before it's even begun!

So there you are with a bleeding head wrapped in a temporary bandage, clutching a towel you find in the linen department and a kitchen knife, and you're fast bleeding to death - so what do you do? The first thing I tried was to cut the towel into bandages to wrap round my poor aching head! It wouldn't accept that as a solution, so I had to keep starting over whilst frantically searching for the required first aid, all the time wrestling with the most awkward objects that were lying around.

Thank goodness, Dorothy included a RAMSAVE feature, as you've only got a few short moves before death raises its ugly head! Typing HELP at the start provides an urgently needed clue, but I did find this adventure quite hard, and the occasionally obtrusive parser didn't help.

The Dare is definitely a toughie, but it should keep even the most hardened adventurers happily tearing their hair out by the fistful. It's certainly original and a good one to keep 'mappers' happily scribbling away too.