Previous Next

After many years of research you have located the sunken ship and are trying to recover the treasure. Fish and ghosts of dead pirates, however, have other ideas. You guide a sort of open topped mini-sub around the ship, but you need to keep topping up your oxygen supply which diminishes on contact with the myriad of fish in the ship. You also have a gun to shoot the fish with, but it only has a life of fifty shots before you have to find another gun. In order to collect the treasure, you have to complete a variety of tasks beginning with replacing three flashing bells with three steady ones.

The whole game is very colourful and somewhat reminiscent of Sorcery. It does, however, have qualities all its own: when you enter some of the rooms, they are dark and all you can see is yourself, the fish and the ghosts. You need to be carrying the shiny lantern to see anything else, although you can feel your way around the room to another exit, if you know where it is.

The ghosts are a nuisance; if you touch one when you enter a room, and it is very difficult not to, they will take the object you are carrying, and swap it for another one and then disappear. This is sometimes useful if they give you a shiny lantern, a gun, or oxygen. This is not so useful, however, if they take a lantern, or a golden bell or if they give you a Jolly Roger flag, which kills you with curse. You have to watch out and not try to shoot a fish when you are near a Jolly Roger, because when you pass over an object, the fire key swaps what you are carrying with what was there.

Although the game play is similar to Sorcery, the graphics are more chunky and colourful rather than detailed and pastel shaded. They do, however, have some nice touches; such as the eyes in the pictures on the wall that move, a parrot that keeps on looking around and the clock that has a minute hand that whizzes around at a rate of knots. You are also treated to a jolly burst of the sailors' hornpipe when you pick up the musical harp. The music before the game begins is baroque, organ-like and uses all three voices.

I really like the game. It is sufficiently different from Sorcery to stand up as an original game in its own right. Recommended.