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I'm excited to review Twin Kingdom Valley because there really is a lot to say about this oft-forgotten, much maligned and very peculiar adventure game. It's the story of two Kings, the Forest King and the Desert King, and it's an illustrated text adventure of the type "GO WEST, GET GOLD STAFF" type.

It's a single load, 100% machine code adventure and it has hundreds of locations, all drawn on-screen with very impressive, colourful graphics. Despite pages of copious instructions, and an inlay that instructs you to obtain 1,024 points to complete the game, what direction (literally) you should take remains somewhat elusive. It's not even clear why all the information about the two Kings is even relevant to the game itself, never mind whose "side" you are on.

I was first introduced to it as a child, and it caught my attention in a way that few "traditional" text adventures had before, or have since. That's probably because the artwork is gorgeous and the game felt very immersive to the ten-year-old me. With a bit of imagination, I was actually in the cabin displayed and it was actually me walking down the road to the tavern, watching it grow larger and larger before me with each press of the direction key. (A nice touch, by the way!)

Alas, the sort of aimless wandering feel of the game dismayed most traditional adventurers. They already had many games, without graphics, with better narratives and with specific quests to complete. They were busy playing games like Philosopher's Quest and taxing the old grey matter and they found Twin Kingdom Valley pretty stupid because "progress" was so random.

Hence, you had this very interesting difference of opinion about this particular game. Its author, Trevor Hall, probably just intended to write an illustrated text adventure and was better at programming than actual story-telling. But what emerged appealled to a much wider market. It didn't appeal to those who enjoyed traditional text adventuring. It appealled to schoolchildren and fans of the Tolkien trilogy. And when this very 'inferior' text adventure started selling in much greater numbers than the 'superior' text adventures also available, the traditionals were bewildered.

And, in a way, they were right to be. The Electron Twin Kingdom Valley has a multitude of problems quite apart from the unclear quest. In some locations, directions are completely illogical, so that going WEST then SOUTH brings you back to the same place! Guards and elves wander the valley attacking you completely at random, so that some games are rendered completely impossible simply due to bad luck. I believe I've played the game all the way to the end, yet I only acquired 515 points which is heck of a long way off 1,024.

Saving and loading your position is a complete nightmare - the game sometimes completely crashes if you try, and if it doesn't, it saves out a file that's almost as big as the game itself! And if you get killed, you have to reload, you can't simply try again.

And yet, despite all of these quirks, it still manages to be good. Universally, in fact, because Twin Kingdom Valley had conversions for many other machines, where it's similarly revered. In fact, if you do a bit of research into these other versions you find they are subtly different, and on some machines slightly bigger. It makes you wonder if there could be whole swathes of the game as yet undiscovered by Electron owners because they are somehow accessed differently in the Electron version.

Overall, and thinking long and hard about it, it's almost like you cannot be sure whether Twin Kingdom Valley is just plain buggy, or has been deliberately programmed to keep some of its last secrets back for only the very determined player. I will give away just one of them here though, because it confused me for years. Though you start off with no particular allegiance, you may well be attacked by the Desert King in some locations, so as far as I'm concerned he's the "bad" one...!

This is quite a timeless game and it's well worth adding a physical copy of it to your collection. There are two standalone Bug-Byte versions and it was also included on the compilation Five Star Games. Expect to pay about £2-£3 for each.