Gritty and enjoyable text adventure
For a bold, glitzy, thrilling slice of text adventuring, you could do worse than check out this gloriously 80s offering. Although it lacks the elegance, wit and intelligence of the best of the genre, such as the Zork series, the Doom games or Guild of Thieves, it remains a fun and enjoyable adventure. The player gets thrown into a classic setup of mystery and thrills, when their girlfriend is kidnapped, their apartment ransacked and an anonymous call threatening to kill their beloved if they don't show up with hefty ransom. However, to make matters worse, the ransom itself is unknown to you as its actual location. Thus begins a daring race against time to track down the goods and save the girl. For a bit of off-beat and wonderfully gritty interactive fiction, this is surprisingly decent stuff. The plot is nonsense but thanks to the generally good writing on display here, it's easy to get sucked in to the gameworld, while the time constraints add a nice degree of pressure to proceedings and there are some interesting and complex characters to meet. There are plenty of twists and turns to keep you guessing right to the end so if like a good spy story, then there is much t enjoy here. Puzzles too are up to a high standard, with some particularly stimulating ones requiring clever use of gadgets and which help elevate things even further. The interface might not be quite so sophisticated as Infocom's best efforts but it is serviceable enough and is certainly intuitive and easy to pick up. If you're looking for something different in interactive fiction, then this is well worth checking out.
