Frankenstein Adventure - Review

Frankenstein Adventure is available as part of a DOS trilogy downloadable from various sites (!) and is a bog standard game of its era. It encapsulates barely more than twenty locations and is of medium difficulty. I would say easy if it wasn't for a flagrant piece of guess the author's mind relating to the combination of the wall safe. This non sequitur aside it is reasonably entertaining and lets the player play the evisceration game and construct the timeless monster from Mary Shelley's excellent novel, then like the original Victor Frankenstein realise the error of your ways too late.

It is one of those games where around half of the total inventory is hidden under, in or on top of other objects. If you like Scott Adams games then you'll probably like this.

Parser/Vocabulary (Rating: 5/10)

The parser is adequate but never inspired. It fails to recognise many non-takeable objects in a room and there are few if any synonyms for the verbs/nouns that it does understand.

It is pretty much without any misspellings or dodgy grammar, but as the descriptions are so terse this is scarcely surprising. UNDO, WAIT, TAKE ALL, OOPS and SCORE are all non players.

Atmosphere (Rating: 5/10)

Any game this short and with such humble aspirations is unlikely to be cloyingly atmospheric but Mr. Olsen probably wrings as much as he can out of such descriptions as: "You are at the edge of a bog. There is a sign." There are hardly any living NPCs (with the exception of the principal star) and a couple of cantankerous canines. The kitchen must be the most minimal in history.

Cruelty (Rating: Polite)

Unless you wander around like Wee Willie Winkie with your candle lit (it will eventually burn down) you shouldn't be able to make the game unwinnable. All deaths are avoidable and softlocks are very few (leaving your map in a certain part of the game will screw you though).

The inventory limit is five regardless of weight and size although this never became a problem for me.

Reheating the Scott Adams analogy (and using the generally regarded observation that his games became chronologically harder as they were released) I would place this at Pirate Cove or Voodoo Castle levels of difficulty.

Puzzles (Rating: 5/10)

There are only a handful of posers and more than half of them centre around examining things to find hidden objects. None of them are used in an unusual or imaginative way. As previously mentioned the safe puzzle is by far the hardest.

Overall (Rating: 6/10)

I think 5 and a half would be fair in all honesty but the game is robust, there are no deadly bugs and it looks nice played via DOSBox-X.