Previous Next

Drakon, the wizard of Valonia, came by a Falcon staff, and because he did not destroy it (so the story goes) was turned to the dark side of magic. He sent an army of demons to conquer Valonia. Disguising himself with a golden mask, Drakon now began to walk among humans, taking their souls at the dead of night to feed the Skull of Evil.

Ashmeard, the wizard of Dral, seized the mask, whereupon Drakon entered the cave of Illindel, and was not seen again. But that was ten years ago, and once again, a demon army is marching on Valonia. As Ashmeard's apprentice, your task is to kill Drakon, and retrieve the Falcon staff, before the army crosses the lake.

This is a Quilled Illustrated adventure from Compass Software, whose games have, until now, been available solely for the Spectrum. Compass has produced a number of budget-priced adventures over the last couple of years, and their standard ranks high amongst mail-order adventures.

The bodies of the demon army lay all around as you start the game, and before long you find yourself trapped in a cave by a mysterious force. The problems are quite nicely pitched - enough to make you think a bit, but not enough to cause you to grind to a halt, as you battle your way through the caves, and seek ways to overcome the demons that lurk within.

Sudden death tends to strike from time to time, but not altogether without warning. However, one of the avoid-death puzzles involves USE (object), an occasionally used adventure command that I find very unsatisfactory, as I believe one of the essential ingredients of adventure problems is to discover exactly how to use the objects. USE tends to be a cop-out by the author.

The graphics, less than one per location, are quite pleasing and detailed. The display time of these is more tolerable than the built-in delay every time something dramatic happens in the gameplay. Quite the more tiresome feature of the game, this delay forces you to wait about ten seconds before being able to continue - a quite unnecessary impediment, I would have thought, since one of the arts of adventure writing is surely to reduce response times to as short as possible!

Packaged in a normal size cassette box, Demon From The Darkside has a professional produced inlay. The only fault in its presentation I could find, was the omission of the machine type on which the program would run. Provided that different versions do not get mixed up at the supply end, this should not cause any bother except to reviewers, who are usually surrounded by piles of software, and have a number of different computers at their disposal.

Demon From The Darkside can be recommended to anyone seeking a budget-priced cassette adventure that is enjoyable, holds the interest, and is not mind-bendingly difficult. It is certainly infinitely better than a few recent commercial budget releases, like Football Frenzy, for example.