CASTLE DROGANYA by Steve Chodes
          A text adventure on SynTax disk PC PD 991

                    Review by Bev Truter

This BASIC version of Castle Droganya was converted from the
original version by Nathan Glasser, and comes with GWBASIC.EXE
which is necessary to run it.  Droganya is `user supported'
shareware - i.e. the author requests $5 (US) for a map, solution
or hints, or simply if you enjoyed playing it. In a brief
introduction you are told that you must free the souls of the
townspeople which have been trapped by the evil Lord Droganya -
that has to be a record for brevity, the entire aim of the game in
a single sentence.

In the Instructions section the author refers to various "action
words" (can he possibly mean verbs?) that the game understands,
such as the usual get, drop, kill, break, examine (must be the
full word, no abbreviation of examine is accepted), and inventory
(or I). The maximum length of input allowed is 4 words - eg.
"unlock door with key". Oh yes, and last but perhaps most
importantly, there is no Save or Restore feature in Droganya
<sigh>, so if death or other natural disasters occur, you have to
restart all over again. (Mumble, mumble, grumble).

As well as being written in BASIC, this small game (43 locations)
is fairly basic, in the sense of simple, primitive parser, no
frills or extravagant flourishes, and short but adequate room
descriptions. About half the objects in the game have
descriptions, and you can gain some extra information by examining
them, and the other half simply come up with the standard...
"examining that does not reveal anything". Text colour is
no-nonsense white on a black background, and the score is
indicated at the bottom right of the screen. The total score seems
a wee bit extravagant - 5000 points, and if you pick up all the
objects lying around in the first location you are off to a flying
start with 400 points. Solve a few puzzles, toddle off through 10
more locations, and you leap to 1600 points - this is excellent
for the old morale!

The quality of writing is mediocre, and some of the problems are
difficult to solve only because of parser limitations - you can
work out what to do easily enough, but how to convince the game to
carry out your intentions in plain English? In a few cases this
degenerates into a "guess-the-right-verb" puzzle, the worst
example being "attach lodestone to cane", given the descriptions
of both the lodestone and the cane. There are only two characters
who might cause a hiccup in your progress through the game, and
one of them, the Ogre, is quite amusingly portrayed - there's an
unexpected way of dealing with him. The other character simply
kills you off if you're not holding the appropriate object - no
chance for a cozy chat or possibility of a bribe with him. Other
than these characters the gameworld seems rather deserted, but
then I guess it would be, what with everyone's soul being trapped
and all.......

You begin the game in a herdsman's hut, with the usual clutter of
unlikely things scattered around. After leaving the hut, there
seems to be no-one about, and your travel is blocked in almost all
directions - forests to the west where you become permanently
lost, desert to the south, where you die if you linger, a stream
to the north that's uncrossable as the bridge is broken, and a
strange castle looms to the east, with the drawbridge firmly up on
the other side of the moat. Hmmm, where to find more scenery? Aha!
Looks like the well might be a good place to explore, if only you
could get rid of the water at the bottom....

Yes, Virginia, you DO find a way into the castle, and there is a
way to conquer evil and free all those poor lost souls - and it
would be a whole heap easier if the stupid parser understood a few
more logical synonyms for `action words'. This short and quite
pleasant game would be more entertaining and less irritating if it
could be saved and restored, but if you're prepared to restart
from scratch on several occasions it could provide some diversion
for a couple of cold winter evenings. You certainly won't come
across anything wildly novel or interesting in Droganya, but
nevertheless it has a certain clunky, creaking kind of charm.
ENJOYMENT 3.5/10         ATMOSPHERE 3/10        DIFFICULTY 4/10
FINAL COMMENT Pleasant enough to pass a few evenings with.
                         - o -