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.
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.
Fairly short but adequate descriptions.
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.
Nothing new here.
Not bad and very much of its time. Medium length, medium difficulty, medium fun.