Adventure 200 - Review

If ever there was a text adventure prize for cramming a quart into a pint pot it would surely go to C.J. Coombs for his / her 16k magnum opus Adventure 200.

This masterpiece in construction and text compression technique can hold its head high amongst its peers; most of them will have had much more memory to utilise and develop a coherent story even if all that underpins them is "explore a strange land and collect the king's missing treasures."

The 220 odd locations in here seem well connected and believable, and the author manages to wring a fair amount of atmosphere out of the necessarily short room descriptions.

The game is very easy to soft lock as certain objects, once picked up can not be put down again. As there is a fair amount of sneaking past guards involved it is often necessary to leave a tempting item where it is until you stumble upon a scenario where you might need it.

There are some beautiful set piece puzzles contained herein; one involving entering a firedamp filled mine and having to both find a way to start a machine that clears the gas then later turning it on again to thwart a pursuer is worthy of the Phoenix mainframe boys at Cambridge.

Choreographing the correct order in which to tackle the rather difficult puzzles is half the fun here.

The game is stuffed with mazes both great and small. You could argue there are eight although only one is very large. Dropping objects to map them works very well.

Mercifully there is no lamp timer or inventory limit which is refreshing to see in a game from 1982.

Oddly DESCRIBE works to glean more information about an item rather than EXAMINE.

All in all I would thoroughly recommend this tricky but fun treasure hunt. I also came across zero misspellings and grammatical mistakes.

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Parser/Vocabulary (Rating: 7/10)

Very few verbs / nouns are included but oddly it doesn't feel like it in game play. A standard two word parser with almost no spelling or grammatical gremlins. The descriptions are short but encompassing.

Atmosphere (Rating: 8/10)

Nicely evocative given the terseness of the descriptions.

Cruelty (Rating: Cruel)

Very very cruel. Umpteen ways to make the game unwinnable and many set piece puzzles requiring exact timing. Drawing a map is absolutely essential here. Too many mazes but they are all the standard "drop items to reconnoitre" variety.

Three items are unnecessary apart from the need to have enough of them to map the largest maze.

Puzzles (Rating: 9/10)

The game's strong suit. Several of them are very clever and one ( really two halves of a puzzle) in a coal mine is beautiful.

Overall (Rating: 8/10)

A superb game constructed on a small canvas with clever coding and imgainative scenarios. Puts many of its peers to shame.