Username: Password:
RegisterForgotten Password

Village of Secrets - Review

Review by Canalboy

Ratings

Parser/Vocabulary
7
Atmosphere
7
Cruelty
Cruel
Puzzles
9
Overall
8
Written:
25-09-2025
Last edited:
Platform:
BBC/Electron

I had a blast with this game as it ticks all the boxes for me: large game; fantasy genre; treasure hunt; difficult puzzles; bug free. It was written in BASIC and once I bumped the B-em emulator up to 200% it ran very fast but in a manner that didn't affect typing.

The aim is to collect seven treasures and store them somewhere (plus a last lousy point) and the author Jonathan Temple is clearly a big fan of the old Phoenix mainframe games as there are many deferential references to that venerable but estimable suite of games. It is considerably more polished than many commercial games of this genre and is a nice mix of magic and reality, with some nice humour woven through it too.

It all takes place in a fairly large village (and its environs) and is as far as I can see the author's only venture into the world of text adventure authorship. This is a shame as I would have liked to see what else he could produce.




Parser/Vocabulary (Rating: 7/10)

The game parses the first four letters of your commands and although the vocabulary is not large it doesn't need to be. The standard BASIC two word parser never left me fishing for synonyms and, for example the local "gazette" could also be described as "paper." Such touches are appreciated by players of course.

I never came across a single typographical or grammatical slip which is rare indeed.

Atmosphere (Rating: 7/10)

Although most of the descriptions and the story are somewhat hackneyed they are done very well. The spookiness of the church worked well for me and the layout of the village is credible.

Cruelty (Rating: Cruel)

I would have to say that this is a very very hard game. As a guestimate I would say there are twenty odd ways of soft locking the game and more ways to die and hard lock the thing. There are a few non-intuitive paths to destruction but this game was very much created in the spirit of "die and learn."

There is a battery lamp with a parsimonious amount of power but it is still more than enough to cover the dark areas. There is one maze in the game but it is a standard one and not too large.

Several of the puzzles are very intricate and one false move will screw the whole thing up. The whole chaining puzzle involving the bungalow is very fiddly and I messed up at least a dozen times.

Some of the items in the game have uses far removed from their descriptions.

At least the inventory is set at a cuddly eight items.

Puzzles (Rating: 9/10)

These are on the whole very good, and a couple of them might well have qualified for an XYZZY award if the game had ever been entered. There is one puzzle I think unfair and underclued, eh Maud?

The puzzles involving the archaeologist and the dog are very very clever and ratchet the lateral thinking knob up to eleven.

Overall (Rating: 8/10)

I think eight is very fair. I haven't enjoyed a fantasy treasure hunt so much for quite a while.