Producer: Eric Bean Adventures
Memory Required: 48K
Retail Price: £5.95
Author: C. R. Bozicek

The Lost Gnomes, by Eric Bean Adventures is another in the long line of text-only adventures written with the aid of Gilsoft's Quill.

You take the part of the wily gnome Eric Bean (makes a change from Brawny Barbarian) master adventurer and potential hero. Returning home to the valley of the gnomes, you find the place strangely deserted apart from the curious Snort. But this companion is no animated character - he can neither move or talk. Where have all the gnomes gone? Have they returned gnome or are things much more sinister? I've a sneeking suspicion that those goblins in Murgar Mountains are not totally innocent.

Your first task is to find the elusive ferret who may hold the key to the quest. This in itself is not easy as the valley above ground consists of over 30 locations and the ferret is hidden within a maze. A tricky problem when you are equipped with only a torch.

The normal abbreviations for directions are accepted and the response is instantaneous. Talking about speed, the save facility is the fastest I've seen, taking only a few seconds. This was very convenient as I regularly ended up on the sharp end of a goblin knife. Entry is restricted to verb/noun, not necessarily bad in itself but unfortunately the vocabulary also proved rather limited.

Neither of the verbs EXAMINE or SEARCH are accepted, which is a shame since they help to create atmosphere. DI would have liked to have checked out the waterfall, cave drawings or the shell-like rock but sadly that was not to be. I think it's fair to say that these verbs make or break adventures because without them the game becomes no more than a problem solving exercise.

The Lost Gnomes is not a bad adventure, but it's nothing special. I look forward to seeing further Eric Bean Adventures with much improved vocabulary.

FINDING THE LOST GNOMES

MICRO: Spectrum 48K
PRICE: £5.95
FORMAT: Cassette
SUPPLIER: Eric Bean Adventures, 9 St Luke's Close, Kettering, Northants

This is the first adventure I've seen that was written with the aid of Gilsoft's Quill. It is probably a fair representation of what can be achieved with this program, being well constructed and bug free, but not all that exciting.

You have to discover the whereabouts of the lost gnomes and you do so in the standard way, by typing in two-word commands and wandering through a network of rooms, some underground and some above. The map and the room descriptions show the limitations of the compiling program: they are generally rather short descriptions and you can tell from 95% of them whether there is a clue held there or not.

As this is so easy the non-clue rooms seem a waste of time, as in most adventures where locations are added without even giving a maze to the map. After a while they begin to feel like padding.

So the map also seems reasonably average. The mazes, such as they are, are extremely easy to solve and there is hardly any difficulty at all in wandering around from place to place.

It seems that The Quill enables the construction of competent average adventures but the only originality can come in the plot, the clues and the objects. In these areas I found the adventure more impressive. None of the clues are very tortuous, but some are quite difficult, and care has been taken to provide a reasonable outcome for some of the more likely mistakes. I especially like the ferret that turns out to be a major treasure. (I'm not giving anything away here).

So all in all this is a reasonable but unremarkable game. I've certainly seen worse and this does have the advantage of being completely self contained and error free (apart from the usual misspelling). You should get a pleasant evening's entertainment from this game, or a fair introduction to the nature of adventures if you are new to the field. But anyone seeking the latest thrill or mind-twisting complexity will be sadly disappointed by the Lost Gnomes.