by Kevin Plunkett
One of those games that could have won you a lot of money, if you were able to solve it - and that's why they apparently made it unsolvable, I suppose.
I doubt anybody ever won those 25,000£. The game intrigues me but I couldn't go anywhere with it. I like the blue screen, with lines separating the description from the command lines, and each command and relative answer separated by another line, and the absence of a cursor too, which seems to have unsettleld more than a reviewer. You're in this mysterious place, where lights continously go out, and come back after a while, rooms don't seem to be always where you met them last time, and the description of the locations seem to be putting you on, and secret agents continously check your pass, while other just shoot, while you costantly inadvertently activate some ticking bomb which you must defuse choosing one of the usual coloured cables. This last thing finally made me abandon the game. I found a gun, a low level pass, a torch and a drill. Maybe I should drill every single room and see if something happens, but I won't.
2/5
note: the loading screen is a good Humphrey Bogart portrait, or maybe a digitalization, or something.
note 2: I asked Kevin Plunkett, the author, if I was missing some vital command in trying to do something with the various features described in the rooms - in particular, the shelves and the boxes. "Oh no!" he exclaimed. "the instructions tell you that nothing is what it seems. We wateched adventurers play this at the computer fair, and they all did the same as you, tried to examine everything everywhere! We had a good laugh. There's nothing there!" Ha! Ha! How very droll.
from the C+VG review, issue 37, page 122.
