The Grimoire - R. W. Lee.

                   Reviewed by Neil Shipman

You're a student of Information Technology at South Yorks 
Polytechnic - or rather you were until you failed your exams. If 
you wanted to stay there then the only thing to do was to transfer 
to the new Parapsychology course. When the adventure begins, you 
find yourself in a lecture room on the 11th floor of the college 
building with your assignment on the desk in front of you.

"With reference to any respected contempory (sic) grimoire, 
discuss 14th Century lycanthropy techniques. Sources to be 
appended," it reads. Your evil-looking lecturer makes it quite 
clear that you've got to find a grimoire (a collection of magic 
spells) for your essay and, indeed, the aim of the game is to do 
just this and return to the classroom.

Leaving your fellow students, you make your way out of the room 
and immediately come across Furry Julie. She's a cat who'll prove 
useful before too long, so be kind to her. Outside, the Student 
Union looks inviting and a beer would go down really well. The 
greengrocer's stall outside the bus station has got some goodies 
on it too. But you're a bit strapped for cash at the moment, so 
perhaps a quick trip to the library to flip through some reference 
books would at least show willing. You never know, someone might 
have left some money lying about.

Don't be too quick to go down the open manhole in the library 
basement because it will crash shut behind you - and you won't be 
able to get back up! Underground passages lead to a satanists' 
chapel and a lake, and success in solving this part of the 
adventure will bring you out above ground onto rolling downland in 
a paranormal world inhabited by vampires, werewolves and a dragon. 

You will have to work out how to deal with each of these creatures 
in order to get your hands on the grimoire you're looking for. 
Then it's a matter of getting back to the real world and returning 
to the lecture room. This is the largest section of the adventure 
with about 30 locations to explore and many items of interest to 
be found and used. You don't need everything, though, and there 
are quite a few red herrings to confuse you.

The problems in The Grimoire are, on the whole, not too difficult 
and most adventurers should make fairly rapid progress. Make sure 
you examine everything because there are many clues to what you 
ought to be doing. There is one particular series of puzzles 
leading up to getting everything necessary to defeat the vampire 
which is cleverly thought out and which, for me, was the best part 
of the adventure.

You will undoubtedly make quite a few trips to hell, where you'll 
find that your lecturer really is the devil incarnate, and from 
which there is no return. Well there is, but that means the end of 
both your life and your afterlife - and you really are dead then 
and have to start again. However, if you are worthy enough then 
heaven is your reward instead of hell and you'll find yourself 
floating with the angels in a clear blue sky. If you were upset by 
The Last Temptation Of Christ, though, just wait till you see what 
you need for entry into heaven!

Written with STAC, The Grimoire boasts all the usual commands 
you'd expect, like ramsave, oops, again, get/drop all, a choice of 
40 or 80 column text etc. The program has been placed in an auto 
folder so that it boots up automatically, but this is a mistake 
because doing so disables the desktop and means that only one 
ordinary saved position is possible. To get round this simply boot 
up using another disk then run the program from desktop.

There's a well drawn loading screen showing the grimoire that 
you're looking for and there's a picture in every one of the 50 
locations. Some of these are really quite good although they are, 
inevitably, interspersed with rather more simple and uninteresting 
ones. In some cases, they don't tie in very well with the text. 
For example, in the first location the door is to the west and the 
window to the east in the picture - but it's the other way round 
in the description.

Presentation is mostly white text on a black background but - a 
nice touch this - the author has incorporated some colour. Yellow 
is used when people are saying something to you and, later on, 
there is some green writing too. This looks good although the 
effect is spoilt on a few occasions where lines of text are 
truncated and where words are split awkwardly across the ends of 
lines.

This lack of attention to detail also shows up with the spelling 
which is, quite frankly, appalling! Some of it (e.g. "arn't", 
"arround" and "avalance") is just the result of the author's 
carelessness, whereas other mistakes (e.g. "disolute" and "poor 
dammed souls lamment") could easily have been corrected with the 
help of a dictionary. But most glaring of all are "psycology" and 
"phsycic". If you're writing about parapsychology and psychic 
phenomena then it really is crucial that you should be able to 
spell these words correctly! And any author who knows that 
spelling is not his strong point should make absolutely certain 
that his playtesters aren't just as bad.

All in all, The Grimoire is a simple little adventure with nothing 
too taxing in it and it should help you while away a couple of 
hours. I didn't feel that it had very much "atmosphere" and the 
humour wasn't to my taste - but, as the French say, "Chacun a son 
gout." And to the author I'd say, "Put your shareware fees towards 
a good dictionary rather than spend the money on a few (more?) 
beers at the Student Union!"

@~The Grimoire is available on SynTax Shareware Disk 1, priced at
@~œ3.50 of which œ1.00 goes to the author, Richard Lee.