A NIGHT IN THE MUSEUM FOREVER - by Chris Angelini
    A text adventure on SynTax disk 969(PC) and 1123(ST)

                   Review by Bev Truter

`A Night etc.' is a short game which was written with TADS and
entered in the 1995 Games Competition run by XYZZY magazine on the
Internet. All entries for these competitions are by necessity very
short, as one of the rules is that they must be finishable within
2 hours of gameplay. `Night' is a good example of how a shortish
text adventure can build up a decent feeling of involvement and
anticipation, even though you know beforehand that there will only
be a minimal amount of scenery to explore (a whole 9 locations in
this case), and a limited number of puzzles to solve. The longish
introduction to `Night' is well-written, and you start the game
knowing exactly who you are and why you are at the Museum; and
more importantly you know exactly what object you have been sent
to retrieve from the museum.

The museum referred to in the title is an abandoned relic from a
long-gone civilization, which once housed many valuable artefacts
collected from other civilizations and time zones, and you have
been employed to find the one remaining artefact rumoured to be
somewhere in the museum. This isn't quite as simple as it sounds,
because although the museum is completely deserted so there are no
enemies to overcome or traps for the unwary, there is still the
problem of figuring out what to do in 3 separate time zones, and
avoiding becoming temporally displaced - i.e. killed by doing
something silly in the wrong time.

There is a simple but effective way (well, not so simple for
me...but that's another story) to travel back in time to when the
museum was built, or forwards in time to when the museum is on the
verge of collapse. What you do (or fail to do) in each time zone
affects events in the other zones; but by examining objects around
you and taking note of what you're carrying, you are soon able to
work out what you have to do to get the valuable artefact and
leave the museum with it. There is a minor bug in this game, where
you can actually `win' the game with 30/50 points if you do things
in the wrong order - the valuable item somehow magically appears
when it shouldn't after you perform a certain action, which means
it's then impossible to get the missing 20 points.

Once you've discovered how to operate the time platform you can
have fun zipping to and fro through time, observing what effect
your actions in one time zone have on events in another. If you
attempt to leave the Museum in the past you will die, but it's
worth trying for the interesting explanation it gives on why the
museum was built.

Chris Angelini has written an entertaining mini-game, perfect for
beginners or for any adventurer who wants something short but
absorbing to while away a couple of hours. The detail in the
introduction ensures that your game character has a strong sense
of identity and purpose, and this background knowledge always
makes for a far more satisfying game than the type of game where
you're simply dumped in at the deep end, and have to figure out
who-am-I and what-am-I-doing-here. I don't know if he's written
any other games, but I hope he does - I'd like to see a
larger/longer game from this author, giving more scope for him to
exercise his talents as a writer of text adventures.

















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