Crown of Lithrune, The - Review

In the Crown of Lithrune you must enter the village and liberate the eponymous crown from the evil black wizard. There are plenty of adversaries to deal with but you will find some help along the way.

This is a game which gives the constant feeling that there is more to be discovered. I'm not sure there is. Characters abound but interaction is weak or non-existent. I tried to start fights with warriors and talk to stall holders with minimal success. What it amounts to is mapping a rather large area and then finding and solving the five or six important puzzles.

There are lots of enemies, many of which you can kill, but non that are really menacing or interesting. It has the odd reasonable picture but has a very basic feel to it, right down to having to enter text into speech marks (which you can delete!).

I wouldn't go out of your way to play this unless you're a completist.

Parser/Vocabulary (Rating: 3/10)

Pretty awful, you need to be very accurate in your statements like "Kill **** with sword" often full, accurate, sentences are needed and abbreviations are not accepted. I couldn't find an inventory command, so I had to make a list! Down works d doesn't. One of the worst parsers yet.

Atmosphere (Rating: 4/10)

Weak. Things happen and sometimes you have few moves to try and react, but it just feels stilted.

Cruelty (Rating: Cruel)

Plenty of areas where it looks like there should be a way out but nothing obvious works.

Puzzles (Rating: 5/10)

They are possible but the demanding parser makes it hard. There a very few puzzles in a pretty big map.

Overall (Rating: 5/10)

A average to poor game. Playable enough but not likely to grip you. I still have no idea how the scoring works.