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If you wandered into a lonely cottage and found a wizard, what would you do if he asked you to stay behind and guard his spellbook whilst he went in search of a missing page, recently stolen by a goblin?

Would you hang around, trusting him to return within a reasonable time, or would you desert your post? I hung around a bit, examined his mouldy carrot, and let his pet fwooble out of its cage, tried reading the book with little success, and after a while, began to seriously wonder whether he would bother to come back. Carefully guarding the book, I thought I would take a stroll outside for a breath of fresh air, and see if I could find him. Ooops! The book was definitely magic, for I was picked up and whisked back inside the cottage again!

The Realm is set in a strange wood, and has monochrome graphics that are mostly passable, in some cases quite detailed. They may be turned on and off with a PIX command.

The parser accepts only two words, and whilst I have always thought of myself as basically a two-word adventurer, having been playing Fish extensively, I found it rather limiting. I wanted to put the fwooble back in its cage, to put the carrot inside the kettle. I began to feel a mite frustrated, not the least due to a not over-endowed vocabulary, until I stopped to think: "If I can't enter a command because it is too complex, then the game does not require it!"

An interesting little adventure that puts the player in quite an original dilemma at the start, and is pleasant to play.