FIRE WITCH - John T Baker
         TADS Text Adventure for PC (On SynTax Disk 816)

                     Review by Neil Shipman

Fire Witch is a small text adventure written with TADS which
recently found its way to me via Internet and the Grue! Users of
TADS, writers and players alike, will find that this utility and
anything associated with it has (like any other special interest
group) its own spot on the Net - but it's over to Grue to tell you
what the address is. (Come to think of it, how about a section in
SynTax giving addresses of useful and interesting adventure
related sites on the Internet? I'm sure there must be a number of
readers who are surfing the Net by now.)

@~Funny you should mention that, Neil ... see this issue's
@~editorial! ... Sue

Anyway, back to the adventure and the plot. You've driven to
Columbus for the weekend to see your old pal John who's an
undergrad at Ohio State University. The intention was to get blind
drunk and have a good time on a tour of all the local bars but,
for some reason, John hasn't shown up where you had arranged to
meet. So you make your way over to his apartment, only to find
he's not there either. You settle down to wait for him, quickly
fall asleep, then wake to find a blizzard has snowed you in.

Well, there's nothing for it but to carry out a search through the
apartment. Just like John (and many other students!) to leave
clothes, papers, and all sorts of junk strewn around the place, no
food in the kitchen and so on. But you do turn up one very
interesting item - John's diary. Reading through this you see he
has become obsessed with someone he calls the 'Fire Witch' who has
been trapped and kept a prisoner by a wicked 'Ice Wizard'.  John
writes that this Fire Witch has given him a magic crystal card and
told him a magic word which will make the card work. You naturally
fear that John is suffering from some sort of mental illness and
has been seeing visions and hearing voices from beyond. But when
you actually turn up just such a card in your rummaging through
the apartment you begin to have second thoughts.

Down below ground level you find that damp in the basement has
been so bad that the ground has collapsed and a hole has opened
up. Now, with John's welfare uppermost in your mind, you must
explore these regions below. When you take a turning off the main
passage into what appears to be a jail cell complex of some kind
and see John held frozen in a block of ice, you quickly change any
ideas you might still have harboured regarding John's sanity.
This is real after all!

The puzzles so far have been simple ones which shouldn't tax any
adventurer unduly. But very soon the author introduces one of the
main problems around which the adventure is structured. At the end
of one of the passages there stands a devil. Can you get past him?
Not without completing a little task he has for you. And what does
that involve? Why, simply the collection of the seven deadly sins
in a little leather bag he drops at your feet. Now this set me
thinking. How many of these sins could I reel off?  Well I
reckoned I knew four or five but there were some which I quite
definitely didn't know (clean-living lad I hear you say!).

Now you can check them out in an encyclopaedia or something but
you don't need to. The information you require is all there in the
adventure itself, some fairly obvious and some cleverly disguised.
The annoying thing was that, try as I might, I couldn't find all
seven and, as the devil had sworn to take my soul if I gave him
too few or put something that wasn't a sin in the bag, I thought
I'd not get much further. However, after a little thought and some
experimentation, that was a problem solved and I was on my way.

There are a number of other well thought out puzzles in this game
and you certainly have to think a little about how to solve some
of the trickier ones. By the time you get to the Ice Wizard and
free the Fire Witch from his evil clutches you will have travelled
through about 30 locations. This is, as I said, a fairly small
adventure, but it seems larger than this because you are required
to travel over previously seen ground. This does not make it
boring, rather it gives the player a good sense of familiarity
with his/her surroundings.

It is apparent that the author has spent sufficient time in fixing
any bugs and inconsistencies because I found not one. In fact, I
can't even remember seeing a spelling mistake. The adventure is
the first that John Baker has released and he uses TADS well to
program his creation. This bodes well for a further, longer
adventure and I hope we shall see something of his writing in the
future.












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