Simon wrote about the game on his, now archived, website:
This was a collaboration between myself as programmer, Ken Gosling - who supplied the story but whom I never met - and two graphic artists at Artic Computing responsible for drawing the pictures and translating them into instructions for a specially written display engine.
I am still proud of the programming in this game; it had full-screen location graphics akin to those of The Hobbit and featured proportionally spaced text - to my knowledge a first for a Spectrum adventure. It took a lot longer than the two weeks that The Golden Apple had taken and squeezed pretty much every last byte of the 48K available. I can still remember the headache that I had trying to devise an efficient - but acceptably fast - flood fill routine.
As you will be able to tell I did the graphics for the loading screen myself. The in-game location graphics were done by professionals.
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A short but OK adventure, basically a sequence of "use the right object" segmented puzzles. This one is a typical example of constrained escape-from-prison beginning which stumps half the players while there is a trivial solution that can be immediately found, but vocabulary gets in the way of finding it. Infuriated a few reviewers back in the day.