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Graphic adventures have been around for a couple of years now. The CPC464 is well suited to this kind of game; it has plenty of memory and very good graphics.

The major criticism of graphic adventures is that they add nothing to the game. Hardened adventure players would rather have more text and faster responses.

With Forest At World's End, there is a flaw in the argument. The graphics add atmosphere to the game. It is not surprising that it takes ages for the program to load. Not all the locations have an associated picture, but those that do are great. The graphics are the work of Terry Greer. He has really got to grips with the Amstrad and has produced the best graphics seen on the machine. The routines to draw the pictures are impressively fast and the scenes depicted are very apt.

Most modern adventures will accept long sentences, the routine which does this is known as a parser. How good the parser is affects the playability of the game.

However 'Forest' is quite limited in both its parser and vocabulary. The command to get into the boat is 'climb into boat'. 'Enter boat', 'go boat' and jump into boat' won't work. This means that a lot of time is spent guessing what commands the program knows. A large vocablary takes up a lot of memory and, to be fair there is a lot packed into this game. As with all good adventures there is a save game feature but the lack of a score option leaves you puzzled as to how well you are going.

Forest At World's End is not a particularly difficult adventure with none of the nasty traits which put the novice off the genre. An ideal first adventure.