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Forestland - Review

Review by Canalboy

Ratings

Parser/Vocabulary
6
Atmosphere
5
Cruelty
Polite
Puzzles
5
Overall
6
Written:
13-09-2022
Last edited:
Platform:
PC

Forestland is a mid era Supersoft release, programmed as were several of their text adventures by Brian Cotton in 1983. I was put off playing any of their games having read about the buggy nature of Cornucopia, Catacombs and Witch Hunt from the same stable; indeed considering solely Forestland it has a high number of spelling mistakes and generally errant grammar for a commercial product. It was released for the PET, Amstrad and C64 although the version I played was via DOSBox-X and it ran very cleanly, green text on a black background by default.

The game is described as of moderate difficulty and I managed to solve it in about 4 man hours; it is a very formulaic game; you wake up after a particularly vivid dream on a forest trail and have to find (as it transpires) nine treasures and secrete them away somewhere nearby.

The puzzles vary from blindingly obvious to a couple which require more lateral thinking but anyone with a basic grounding of use X to get Y shouldn't have too much difficulty here. The main problems I had were the usual parser infelicities as many nouns mentioned aren't recognised by the Examine command, although this is helpful in several locations. One problem with a net is quite clever and another involving a repeated action might stump you for a while.

It consists of approximately 40 locations which are nicely described if you can overlook the spelling errors.

There is a standard two word parser, an annoyingly low inventory limit and no Take All or Back, although Verbose works.

I may have a bash at the larger and purportedly harder games Supersoft released, namely Cornucopia and Catacombs. I see that Alex has uploaded a fixed version of the former to the CASA site. I wonder if a spell checker was utilised on these games.




Parser/Vocabulary (Rating: 6/10)

Fair to middling. Most commands are catered for; however when cut, chop, saw, fell, slice are not recognised when you are wandering around a forest toting an axe you may be stuck for a synonym.

Atmosphere (Rating: 5/10)

Fairly short but adequate descriptions.

Cruelty (Rating: Polite)

I can't think of any ways to make the game unwinnable. Dying is rare, unless you jump off a cliff or walk under a giant spider you should remain alive and kicking.

Puzzles (Rating: 5/10)

Nothing new here.

Overall (Rating: 6/10)

Not bad and very much of its time. Medium length, medium difficulty, medium fun.