Dead or Alive...? - Review

The extra memory of the Atari ST and the late lamented Sean Ellis's STAC system afforded would-be adventure programmers of the late eighties and early nineties new latitude in terms of the size and sophistication of their games. One such was Kev Davis of Chaos software who created this very large (250 locations) and somewhat surreal offering.

The game starts outside a boarded up pub in the rainy town of Malton, after you collapse having failed to make it home after touching a red gem in an antiques shop. Early urban grime soon gives way to your good self being murdered and returning to terra firma as a disguised skeleton intent on avenging your sudden demise. The route to revenge is a long and twisting one and will take you to a nuclear plant, a museum, a fish and chip shop with the greenest chips known to mankind and a passenger ferry to Iceland named the S.S. Titanic. Gosh, I wonder what the fate of that ferry will be? This revenge trail gives the author ample scope to lace his game with much cultural and counter cultural humour, often atypical to the English sensibilities of the day.

Parser/Vocabulary (Rating: 8/10)

For such a sprawling and ambitious game Mr. Davis has utilised STAC well; multiple word sentences are understood and plenty of synonyms. Many meta objects are examinable too. I did occasionally find myself wrestling with the parser, for example "give noun x object y" is understood but "give object y to noun x" isn't and it took me a while to fathom this out. Also an i.d. card tries to parse the directions "in" and "down" which is confusing, especially as there are two other similar cards in the game. Nothing game breaking here though, just annoying. "Oops" produces a sarcastic response and there are a series of forty footnotes throughout the game which range from the useful to the humorous to the deliberately pointless. A couple of howlers are the fact that the "extinguish" verb is given in the verb list if you type "verbs" or "help" but the parser doesn't recognise it. Similarly "knock" is a prerequisite in one place but isn't listed. Bad admin is worse than no admin.

The descriptions are rather long and mostly evocative/amusing. One hilarious location has your skeletal self floating on a door in the middle of the ocean after clambering on to it and removing several fish from your rib cage. The colours are customisable using the "colour" command which is a nice touch. All the standard abbreviations are there.

Atmosphere (Rating: 7/10)

The author has painted a rather vivid background to his story although the grimness of the tale and the constant offbeat humour do clash sometimes. There are a few annoyances, for instance being told you can't go in a certain direction; if you retry it the parser apologises and you can go in that direction. That's one example of the goofiness being overdone and there are others that you'll find. The urban grime of Malton (or Milton as it accidentally becomes in certain places) gives the author scope to make a general critique about urban life in general and he makes some salient social points underneath the ostensible jokiness; Thomas Cook becomes Thomas Crook for instance and there is the ubiquitous and pointless travel cone in a hole left deserted by the local council.

The predictable obsessions with Monty Python, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy and eighties video games and computers pop up all over the place with varying degrees of hilarity.

Cruelty (Rating: Cruel)

The cruelty level can only be described as sadistic. There are umpteen ways of making the game unwinnable right from the get go. It also features a number of one-way areas where it is impossible to know which objects to take with you into the next phase and which to jettison. There are 85 takeable objects in toto and an inventory limit of about ten items which is predicated upon weight. Time and again I had to reload a saved game as an object I had left behind became obviously necessary to solve a problem.

One cruel red herring involving a squeaky garden gate and a can of oil almost made me quit with indignation. You can throw several sudden death locations into the mix as well. More pleasingly you get to kill one character and duff up another one.

Puzzles (Rating: 7/10)

There are lot of these and some are rather difficult, including a couple of time critical action sequences, some revolving around repairing items, electrical machinery conundrums and a few read the author's mind posers. One inside a cave is unfair I think and could lead you to despair. A clue: the verb you need appears in the title of a Mary Hopkin song and in a Tony Orlando and Dawn song title. Oh what a giveaway. Two NPCs in the game are vital to your progress, and will help you to solve a few of the puzzles.

Overall (Rating: 7/10)

Overall this is a pretty good, very large and often genuinely funny marathon puzzlefest with a rather dark back story and I think on the whole the author juggles all these balls with some aplomb. The flaws (over ladled geekiness, a few opaque puzzlers and two guess the verb situations) are surmountable for the most part.