Little Kingdom, The - Review

This non-commercial offering from David L Harper puts most commercial BBC text adventures to shame with its engagingly surreal plot and bug-free handling (with one possible exception.) The assembler code is very well compiled.

The author has created a PDF which can be accessed from this page should you become becalmed.

The long journey to claim the throne (and crown) of Zamania is split into three discrete parts and I found the journey just difficult and just easy enough to keep ploughing on. It took me at least ten hours of game play (plus several more mapping the labyrinth!) spread out over a week to finally nail it but a good time was had in the process. The presence of a dragon in an aircraft hangar (where's Spiny Norman when you need him?) is somewhat jarring given the otherwise contemporary setting.

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Parser/Vocabulary (Rating: 7/10)

No "oops" or "take all" but given its age this in not surprising. Some meta objects are not examinable and the first three letters of a noun are needed. I occasionally had some logic problems with the "tie" command. "Score" unusually tells you how much of the game you have completed as an approximate fraction.

Atmosphere (Rating: 8/10)

The location descriptions are amongst the longest I have ever come across in a BBC text adventure from any era and in any format. I suspect that we are looking at Level 9, Robico and Peter Killworth type text compression skills here. Across almost 300 locations the writing remains vibrant and interesting. The vivid depiction of a seedy circus reminded me of Infocom's Ballyhoo for example:

"a clown with a fierce expression bars your way..."

"the circus vehicles have killed most of the grass here and dust blows about. Some of it gets in your eyes."

"lots of litter blowing around and the smell of decaying candy-floss does not improve your opinion of the place."

Other area descriptions are handled in a similar vein and the general impression of an empire gone to seed is well maintained.

Cruelty (Rating: Nasty)

It has to be said that the hunger and thirst daemons are a pain as they pop up with annoying regularity. The first of these is more of a problem than the latter as water is scattered quite liberally throughout the game. It is also easy to soft lock the thing when taking a logical course of action and I did on several occasions. The presence of a cooker, a saucepan, food and hunger pangs suggested only one course of action to me. The wrong one, as it turned out. The inventory limit is rather low which, given the large number of objects scattered throughout the game, led to some tiresome dropping and reclaiming of objects. On the plus side there are a couple of bottlenecks which purge you of unnecessary impedementa moving forward. There are also a few instances where apparent puzzles aren't; this consumed unnecessary time. Some of the locations in the game can be tackled out of their intended sequence; as a result I laboured over a massive maze when I needn't have (see above.)

I had some trouble with the game crashing at the start of a new section but after changing the BBC model to sideways RAM in B-em V 2.2 and loading my last saved game state (the move before landing in Zamania) things settled down. I don't know if this was saved state corruption or not.

Puzzles (Rating: 8/10)

Most of these are of medium difficulty. There are several "give x to y" style posers and some more quite subtle ones like assembling the items to build a contraption and one dreadful but amusing pun. Two puzzles have visual clues and at least two have more than one solution, but only one is the correct one. Be careful here. I didn't realise I had screwed up a puzzle in the first section until I reached the second part and lacked a necessary item. There are quite a few NPCs, both human and animal that you will encounter and more than one of them will need to be helped before they will aid you in your quest; a few of them are more than just living locked doors and will travel about and provide assistance; these do help to give the game a less predictable and less monotonous beat.

Overall (Rating: 8/10)

Well-coded, well-written and well-paced with just the right levels of humour and social comment mixed into the fantasy. It is a shame that the author didn't create more games but this one is well worth your time.