Forest Of Doom is a program that has been converted by Orange Software for the Dragon. Unfortunately this is not a conversion of a top selling game on the Amstrad or Commodore but from the Oric, a machine which disappeared long before Dragon's problems started; and what's more the Oric version was written in 1983!

An Oric text adventure from half a decade ago may not sound mindshatteringly exciting but bearing in mind that all the best wines mature with age I took the review copy out of its orange packaging (Appropriate I suppose!) and loaded up while becoming familiar with the storyline...

A prince went out to reclaim four stolen treasures but met a sorry fate resulting in your friend Arthur going out to rescue him, only to fall ill himself. Guess what you have to do? Recover the four treasures, the Prince and Arthur. If only these people were more careful in the first place...!

You are also given a few clues on both the inlay and screen instructions but these tend to spoil the game rather than improve it. For instance, when you are told that girls like chocolate and you find a chocolate machine it's obvious to any one with a brain what to do. A list of appropriate verbs is displayed, this is limited to say the least. Apart from directions they are limited basically to get, drop, examine, look, inventory, rub and kill; hardly an alternative to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The game is played on the standard green text screen with a location description and accessible exits. Starting from home you can wander off through taverns, potting sheds and dustbins initially and then later into darker worlds of dungeons and gloomy tunnels. Various characters are scattered, around all of whom want something from you such as the innkeeper, the pawnbroker and even Bill and Ben who seem to have turned into grabbing scoundrels in their old age.

As the fact that Bill and Ben are in the game suggests, there is a touch of welcome humour in it, there's even a goblin with halitosis which helps breaihe new life into the adventure (if you'll forgive me), but something certainly smells fishy about him (maybe not).

The adventure is well planned and logical without being overtaxing to the old grey matter. One point which irritates my mind at least though, as I briefly touched on earlier, is the shortcomings of the vocabulary. Due to the lack of verbs all you really have to do is GET the required object and DROP it. If you want to grow something, you would PLANT SEED not just DROP it; if you OIL a lock you do just that, not DROP OIL! (Speak for yourself, clever! - Ed). Although I realise this makes no difference to the outcome of the game, it does diminish the atmosphere.

Small points like the vocabulary and the pause after each response due to the limitations of the Basic program (Are Basic adventures coming back? This is the second I've reviewed in a matter of weeks!) detract from the potentially good, if slightly cliched storyline. I warmed more to this game as I went on but the above faults kept me from heating up further. Not too bad for summer nights though, as it won't keep you at the keyboard too many nights and is certainly better than a lot of the abysmal adventures that were around in 1983.