Now this looks like a toughie. Any game that invokes a hunger daemon after one move augurs a tense struggle.

This game has a welter of annoyingly contrived daemons. You become soaked at the beginning and die of pneumonia after a few moves; solve that and you are almost immediately told you are hungry and die of starvation quite quickly; find some food and you are thirsty straight away. The puzzle around drying yourself is non-intuitive and works in one specific location only for no other reason than to ramp up the difficulty quotient illogically. It is well coded and interesting however.

If you have some money and enter a shop where they sell a torch, what would you logically do? Yes, but don't; it appears that you make the game unwinnable by taking an action that would work in just about any other adventure game made. This is one of those where you can make the thing unwinnable in multiple unclued ways by choosing logical solutions. I have been at it for two days and made almost no progress. If anyone can work out what to do in the shrine well done indeed as I can't.

To those who may come later - I don't think the shrine is a puzzle and the priest, as far as I can see, should be left alone. I have finally made some progress although the annoying hunger and thirst daemons keep reappearing. At least there is plenty of water but not a lot of tuck thus far.

Resuming after a week's hiatus I have managed to transport myself to a new game area but I have a nagging feeling one boggy area past a scarecrow needs traversing but I can't manage it yet. I have realised that the method that I employed to elude the yob carrying the knife was, although apparently satisfactory and gleaned me a sharp knife as some kind of reward, in fact a faux pas as the object I used to circumvent him is needed in a later section of the game. That makes two ostensibly correct actions that later turn out to be soft locks. These tromp l'oeils are as disastrous as in an Andy Phillips game, where one way linearity gives you no option to try and revise your original actions.

I was about to throw in the towel on this one (very reluctantly as it has developed into a long and interesting quest.) When I had managed to ride the dragon, the game went haywire; the screen filled with the word "them" in various colours and although I had a parser prompt every command received the message "you don't have to pay." I was playing via the B-em V 2.2 using the BBC B w/8271+SWRAM option at this point. I tried other models but they either crashed the emulator or they reproduced the same bug (?) Reading the author's notes on the game page I suspect this may be the hinge between the two parts of the game as the command "score" at the point where you interact with the dragon parses, "you are about 1/2 way through." "End Of Side One" for those of you old enough to remember vinyl.

However, for no apparent reason I tried the original settings from my last saved game again and this allowed me to continue post dragon as it were. I have no idea why it worked this time and not on the numerous attempts hitherto.

A massive maze with no facility to drop objects as unique identifiers has given me a headache. This game is enormous; the title "Little Kingdom" may well be ironic. It has held my interest enough to make me persevere however.