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Village Of Lost Souls was originally available for the BBC Micro by mail order only from Magus Software. It has now been reworked and converted to run on Amstrad CPC computers, and released by Robico Software.

The text adventure is set in the medieval world of Albion, where magic still exists, but used only by those gifted with "The Talent".

You play Nathan, transported by Father-Magister Alain to the village of Dinham, to investigate the resident Lord Talent who is believed to be attempting to open a portal to the thirteenth realm - the Realm of Chaos.

Wandering through the countryside, everywhere is deserted save for a pack of curs barking and snarling around you. But there are some shocks on the way. The burnt corpse of the miller in the chicken coop is just one of a number of grisly discoveries you must make as you travel the village and fields.

But, apart from wandering around and examining everything, I found it difficult to know quite what I was actually supposed to do next.

Nothing obvious presented itself, demanding an answer or action. After a few hours' play, I had only come across one real problem: the retrieval of a key too deep in a crack in a stone floor to reach.

Of course I knew I wanted it (you always want a key when you see one, don't you?) yet I had no purpose in mind for it at that stage. And there was a beehive that I believed I knew how to open - although I hadn't actually tried to open it, since I hadn't recognised a problem that required me to!

The adventure performs in a similar way to the early Level 9 text adventures, with slightly jerky text, each location description containing a list of possible exits and their respective destinations. For example:

"There are visible exists north to a farmhouse, south to the Rectory, northwest to a muddy road and southwest to a riverbank."

One rather peculiar feature of the way in which this is implemented, is that when you take the route to, say, the Rectory, you find yourself just outside it, not actually in it. And once inside the Rectory, one of the exits will "out to a Rectory".

Strange!

Whilst there are many locations and plenty of text, some replies are very abrupt, and give the impression that they have been trimmed down to fit everything in. The vocabulary, or rather its omissions, leaves quite a bit to be desired. At a number of locations by a wall, for example, CLIMB WALL may get "That only flummoxed me", or "I don't understand you". True, CLIMB is not in the verb list that is displpayed by the HELP command - but why?

The parser recognises ALL and EVERYTHING and in conjunction with BUT, EXCEPT and APART. Multiple statements are accepted, and there are features like OOPS, and BUFFSAVE (save position to memory) - but the latter is not supported on BBC and Electron tape versions.

On the whole, the adventure is competently put together, and held hope of opening up into quite a long, interesting, and difficult game, reminiscent of the early, and highly popular Level 9 titles. Indeed, the plot seems to be just as open as many of Level 9's.

I must confess to leaving it at a point where I had scored zilch out of a possible 1200 points!