ESCAPE FROM MAYA'S KINGDOM

         A Text Adventure for the PC on Disk PD 298
                 Author: Wayne Boyd (1985)

                    Review by Bev Truter

I had dim memories of struggling to finish this game about 2 years
ago, without success. So when Tom Lorimer's solution appeared in
SynTax (Issue 35), I delved around in the mothballs, hauled Maya
out, and had another go. As far as I can see it's still fatally
bugged (WHERE did you find the first number to open the safe,
Tom????), and just as annoying to play as it was the first time
around. But I gritted my teeth, printed out Tom's solution, and
relentlessly plodded through it all over again, shamelessly using
Tom's walkthrough to finish the !@#$% game so I could stuff it
into my "Games - Completed" diskbox.

The first dismaying thing (in a longish list of dismaying things)
is when you realize the only file in Maya is just a teeny bit
under 65k long.....I mean short. Next is the opening screen which
informs you that in this version (2.0) you can actually escape! -
suggesting that you couldn't in the previous version(s). Next was
the author's name - a self-styled guru called Vipramukhya Swami
(Oh dear) whose real name turns out to be Wayne Boyd; and who
obviously sees himself as the purveyor of a rather quaint
mish-mash of various Indian philosophies. Swami/Boyd requests
$9.50 if you enjoy playing this game - overly optimistic,
methinks.

With no Save or Restore/Load options, getting killed means having
to reload and start all over from square one. A rather amusing bug
emerges when playing the game from a floppy instead of hard drive
- you receive the Congratulatory end message if you enter "Quit",
as though you've successfully completed the game. A nifty short
cut for the thoroughly disgruntled player, perhaps? Instructions
for playing are short and simple - input must either be all upper
case or all lower case, but not mixed. There is no score and no
Introduction to relate the story so far, but you get the drift as
you go along. Your main aim is to reach the Ocean of Material
Existence (yes, really!), and use the boat of Transcendental
Knowledge <Ooooohhh!> from the Bhagavad Gita book to cross the
ocean and successfully enter the Kingdom of Vaikuntha. Anyhow, on
with the plot. You begin the adventure in Maya's Kingdom standing
outside her castle - a simple graphic in startling yellow. You
must find the book and the means to get it, then escape the Castle
and cross the ocean; all very straightforward.

The parser is extremely limited, and understands only a few simple
commands. Look, Examine, Open, and even Drop are apparently beyond
its capabilities, and if the parser doesn't understand your input,
it responds with an increasingly annoying sequence of stock
phrases, e.g. "Dimbat! You can't "look" here." Responses in a
similar vein are "What now, loser?" and "What now, smarty?" Swami
he may be, but Wayne is obviously not too hot in the spelling
department. The sting of one typically insulting response is
totally lost when you read "What now, cleaver detective?". Other
sloppy spelling mistakes were "your self", "out doors the air is
fresh to breath", "a safron-clad monk", and the one I liked most -
"the coble stone city street".

Location descriptions are shortish but adequate, with plenty of
glib concepts and garbled cliches from Hinduism thrown about for
good measure. It appears your character is a bit of a
goody-twoshoes, trying to escape the lure of the gorgeous but evil
Maya. Turning your nose up at all the revelry and partying that
appears to be going on in the Castle, you must drop your
moralistic attitude just long enough to open a safe and steal the
contents, then obtain the "Gita book" from a monk. That done,
you're fully equipped to cross the ocean - if you can find it.

This is a horribly simple and simplistic game, almost totally
devoid of puzzles or problems. There are two mazes though, to
relieve the boredom (Sue, are you paying attention?) One of the
mazes would normally be a doddle to map with the drop-an-item
method, but in this case you have no items to drop, and the parser
adamantly refuses to understand the word "drop". The other maze is
inescapable, so apart from having a peek at the scenery, there's
little point in entering it. I'm still half-convinced there's a
bug in my copy which prevents me from finding one of three numbers
necessary to open a safe, but assuming I'm wrong, this game
should take you only 1 or 2 hours to complete. With a total of
about 35? 40? locations, at a rough estimate, this game is not
long or difficult. The trouble is, it's not amusing, entertaining,
interesting or enjoyable either.

    ENJOYMENT:   2/10

    ATMOSPHERE:  3/10

    DIFFICULTY:  4/10

    FINAL COMMENT:  If you bought this disk from SynTax then
                    there are 2 other games on it - try Thief's
                    Adventure.




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