Are you cunning enough to discover and seize the treasure in the Katakombs AND return alive? What and where are your enemies? Can you outwit them? Yes? Then your adventure will take you through unending forests, beside tumbling streams, over lonely plains to desolate ruins and finally underground to the tortuous Katakombs Be prepared for anything!
This is a traditional adventure with the familiar environment and treasures. The game contains puzzles but maybe not to everyone's sophistication.
You need to collect all nine treasures, there are other objects help you accomplish this and can then be discarded. Some objects, like the rope, are used several times.
There are no interactive characters in the game.
You can carry 6 items. Some items can be worn ( Sword, Axe, Rope, Necklace ) and will then not count as being carried.
There are 250 points available. The game can be completed in less than 200 moves.
There is a bug involving the heavy metal barrel; if you take it you cannot then drop it again as, although it appears in your inventory, the game thinks you aren't in possession. Whether this prevents the game being solved I am not sure yet.
As I progreess further into the game the bugs are on the march. Opening the vial of potion opens the chest instead.
This game is rather good, albeit with a bare bones parser and some bugs, none of which I think affect progress too much. The barrel and the chest can be dropped but only at certain locations and the chest ceases to be an object once you have worked out how to open it and divested it of the contents; it is still there but effectively hors de combat.
There are some none too easy puzzles here and some clever object manipulation and choreographing of the order of puzzles is necessary to avoid locking yourself out of victory. The biggest headache is that exits are rarely indicated so that all eight directions of the compass plus up and down need to be essayed to make sure you haven't missed anything. There are two conventional style mazes but neither are that big so the standard format of dropping objects to map your way around will suffice.
This game is bugged to the eyeballs. One puzzle revolves around tying something to a lever and pull it when in the adjacent room. The item is not in your inventory when you leave the room (correctly so as it is tied to something and you can't take it when it is tied) yet you can still PULL it from a different room when it is not in your possession and its entire length is next door as it were.
Likewise a piece of string is a fuse for a stick of dynamite. If you light the string and subsequently drop it the game interprets the string as your lamp and all becomes dark. You are still carrying the lit and fuelled lamp around with you but you can never see again.
There is much strange behaviour beyond this; you can drink the potion and you are told that suddenly you can SEE again. This happens everywhere, in light and dark rooms but does not change
them in any way or toggle the darkness and lightness. I suspect it is used in one particular room somewhere but there is no conditional flag set.
Nearly every puzzle is a fight with the parser and the fact that actions appear to be hard coded to rooms. Attack something and you are told "you have no weapons!" Obviously a sharp sword and a silver axe don't count. And on we go...