Previous Next

Space. The final frontier. Sometimes a place for exploration, sometimes the scene of grim, stark terror, where no-one can hear you swearing at your cassette player. Bounty: The Search For Frooge is part one of the Space Bounty series, and was written and published by Paul Jenkinson in 2012. It's an old-school spacebound text adventure, in which you are a kind of poor man's Boba Fett, on the trail of a fleeing fugitive. But there's more to it than that.

All seems well to begin with, as your sleek, pulse-engine powered spaceship lands on the desert planet of KayCee 3, and you detect a breathable atmosphere. As you step out of the ship, the twin alien suns beat down mercilessly, and you can see little but lifeless desert. Or is it? First signs of life appear, in the form of a small animal making woop woop noises. Mountains lie to the north, but everywhere else is naught but sand and dust. Your mission is to head for the hills, where you will discover a crashed spaceship. Dare you enter it? Not so fast, hero - you need to go back aways and do a little exploring first.

For a modest adventure, there's plenty to see and do. If you wander about the landscape, structures abound, some complex, as well as a cave. There's an important and well-defended alien building with a puzzling keypad, a mysterious storage bunker, plus useful tools and other, less expected but equally useful things to acquire along the way. Remember, you can't carry everything at once. You'll come under pressure at times, which makes things interesting. Oh, and a propensity for random violence might prove useful.

The odd typo and truncated command word doesn't detract too much from what is a fun and atmospheric text adventure, with good descriptions but no graphics. This is a relatively short game, with not much to do to ensure your getaway right at the end, but it is enjoyable getting there.

Difficulty: Tricky. Some objects or clues need combining with others
Graphics: No graphics. It is what it is, a classical text adventure
Presentation: Standard stuff. Has a loading screen but flashes by in emulators
Input facility: Standard verb/noun text input
Response: Fast
General rating: Fun under alien suns. A longer version with more polish please