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This is the latest in a series of text-only adventures for the Electron from Epic. The plot concerns the wicked witch of the mountain who has stolen the Klein bottle from its pedestal in the king's palace. She has sworn to lay a hideous curse on anyone foolish enough to try and recover it. And the hapless citizens of Klein have elected you to be that fool!

Your task is to find and kill the witch and return the bottle to the pedestal. You start at the scene of the crime and after collecting some useful items in the palace, set out on your quest. You have a limited amount of movement before encountering the first puzzle - how to cross the river. But having solved this, off you go to the main body of the adventure.

I won't reveal anything else about the game itself. Suffice it to say you will meet a belligerent giant, learn to fly and end up in an endless maze.

I consider this a fairly hard adventure, and I must confess I decided to cheat. Imagine my surprise, however, when I found a message in the memory to the effect that "peeking won't help, you'll have to do it the hard way!" Thus chastened, I returned to the adventure, got a little further and got stuck...again.

This time I wouldn't be beaten. A slight alteration to the ASCII values in my disassembler produced a keywords listing. Thus armed, I hastened back to the game and promptly got stuck yet again.

As I write this, I am finally near the end - the adventure's and mine. The effort has been worthwhile, even though I now have a few grey hairs.

Overall a definite must for the experienced adventurer, though the beginner would probably do better with the first of the Epic adventures, Castle Frankenstein. The save-game facility and response to keyboard input are both very fast. A lot of mapping is required and although the solutions to the problems are reasonably easy, finding what you need to solve the problem with can be a headache.

An extremely good adventure and excellent value for money. Recommended.

Merlin