Fine text adventure
This neat little text adventure from the dawn of time (well, the early 1980s anyway) offers a bit of a spin on the usual interactive fiction style of fantasy or sci-fi tales and instead offers players an intriguing detective mystery to get their teeth into. The story here revolves around the character receiving an unusual bequest left to you by a long forgotten uncle: a picture a beautiful woman. If you keep the painting, then good fortune and riches will come your way but if you part with it, then you will most definitely regret it. However, when the painting is stolen, you find yourself embarking on a strange and mysterious journey around the world in order to recover it. To say more of the plot would be to spoil much of the game's appeal, but suffice to say, it is full of twists, turns and shady characters galore. In terms of gameplay, this is similar to most other text adventures like Zork or Eamon, with commands entered via a parser system which allow you to move around, collect objects and interact with the various shady characters you will encounter. Given that there are no graphics, any text adventure lives and dies on the quality of its writing but fortunately Earthly Delights scores pretty highly in this respect. The descriptions are vivid, and while the story itself is fairly linear, it provides for plenty of entertainment along the way, with some curious characters and some interesting situations. The puzzles too are pretty good, reasonably challenging and generally logical, so on the whole, this makes for a simple but enjoyable adventure.
