Quest, The - Review

As previously observed this is a frustrating, slapdash game with hunger and thirst daemons coupled with endless looping exits and tedious paths worthy of an Epic release. The premise is that you must bring the Symbol Of Life to Endorr the Ancient One, although I would be surprised if anyone has got any life left in them after playing this for half an hour.

The game is tiresomely and game-breaking buggy. If you drop something it doesn't appear in the room you are in; you have to leave and then come back to see it. You can die of thirst next to a lake or river even while holding an empty bottle. This is of course just to make the game unrealistically harder by forcing you to traipse back to the one location where you can take some water. Likewise you can build a raft next to a lake or river and softlock the game yet again if it just happens to be the wrong part of the lake shore (again this is non-intuitive). There are a lot of pseudo puzzles which appear to need solving but in reality are just map boundaries. These are indiscernible from actual puzzles, for example there is a giant otter-like creature blocking your way which is not a puzzle but a vulture blocking your way up a tree which is. You find a flute which is meant to placate savage beasts. Playing it in most places appears to lock the game up but in realitY just causes a flashing cursor for about thirty seconds before doing nothing. Play it next to a spitting wild cat and the game crashes/hangs terminally. Add a frugal inventory limit to the mix and you have a perfect cocktail of ingredients not to include when writing a large quest-like text adventure game.

Parser/Vocabulary (Rating: 5/10)

A reasonable number of verbs and nouns are included but this does nothing to allay the game's basic indigestibility. The two-word parser sometimes fails to understand a legitimate entry. e.g. sometimes "build raft" can elicit "Can't you take this seriously?" but typing it again allows you to complete the action. This happened on many occasions.

Atmosphere (Rating: 4/10)

A reasonable attempt has been made to create an impression of immersion. However, there are far too many "you are on a grassy path" type messages which just become boring. The forest and marshlands in particular encompass vast swathes of monochrome territory.

Cruelty (Rating: Cruel)

Cruel to the player on every level. Exits nearly always loop unexpectedly to an unrealistic degree. There are sudden death rooms and unavoidable softlocks. You travel from thirsty to dying of thirst and from hungry to dying of starvation laughably quickly. Because of the low inventory limit there is interminable peregrination backwards and forwards to fetch items.

Puzzles (Rating: 3/10)

Few and far between if you can work them out from the apparent-but-not-really puzzles. I gave up when the game crashed at the problem with the wild cat.

Overall (Rating: 4/10)

Large, annoyingly unfriendly to the player, full of bugs, boringly repetitive descriptions and logistically scattergun. If you fancy playing a long fantasy journey/puzzlefest on your Beeb emulator have a punt on The Mirror Of Khoronz or Village Of Lost Souls.