Acheton - Topologika
                (Text adventure for the PC)

                  Reviewed by Neil Shipman

Fifteen years ago I was the proud owner of a BBC Micro. Its huge
32K of RAM enabled me to play much larger, more involved,
interesting and enjoyable adventures than I'd previously done on
my Sinclair ZX81. To begin with I continued to load programs and
record data from and to cassette tape.  It took ages to transfer
data which meant that programs couldn't read and write the tape
while they were running. This fact, coupled with the limited
memory, meant that even with clever text compression techniques,
adventures were quite limited in size and complexity.

But playing what have since become classics like Colossal Cave,
and other memorable adventures from software houses Acornsoft,
Level 9 and many smaller but innovative independent publishers,
whetted my appetite for bigger and better games. So when Acornsoft
produced an adventure on disk I just had to get a disk drive so
that I could play it. This was Acheton.

I remember being staggered by the size of the adventure. Three
weeks into it and I felt I'd hardly scratched the surface.
Certainly, according to my score, it looked like taking me six
months to complete. It did take ages (although not quite that
long!) but it maintained my interest because time and time again,
just as I was about to give up on a particular puzzle, I found the
solution to it. The game had that "I'll just spend another 10
minutes and try a few more things" factor to it - one of the
essential criteria for any good adventure.

I still have fond memories of Acheton and, when Topologika
published a version for the PC a few years back, I bought it.
Well, I've finally got around to playing it and, fifteen years on,
it's still as huge, intricate and enjoyable as I remembered it.
Thank goodness I still had my old maps and notes because I should
have really been struggling without them. That's perhaps a
reflection of the fact that I'm now not as well practised at text
adventures as I used to be, only playing a couple a year. I
suspect we're all in the same boat, spending most of our computer
play time on the latest releases which assault and, indeed,
pleasure, the eyes and ears with full motion 3D video graphics and
stereo sound. But it's been good to go back to my roots and see
what really attracted me to adventuring in the first place.

So why is Acheton one of the best non-Infocom text adventures I've
ever played? Well, it has at its core the most basic ingredient of
those great early adventures - exploring underground caverns never
knowing what's round the next turning, armed, at first, with only
a brass lamp, an axe and a bottle.  It has magic, lots and lots of
tricky puzzles with that "one more try" factor. It has
well-written location descriptions and responses. It has over 50
treasures to find and dozens of items to use, many of them in
unfamiliar, not at all obvious ways. And, when you think you've
got to the end, there's a final section battling a seemingly
endless succession of different monsters. So near and yet so far,
this last bit will have you tearing your hair out to complete the
game with the maximum possible score!

At its most basic, Acheton is simply a "find the treasures and put
them in the safe" adventure and, described like that, it might not
seem very inspiring.  But it rises above other games from the same
mould because of its sheer size and complexity. It breaks down
into a number of recognisable sections - sailing to the island;
staggering through the desert; avoiding the moving snakes in a
maze; swimming through dangerous seas; the roc's nest; the
wizard's cottage and garden; charting the maze of the mines;
shivering in the ice caverns; wandering through Hades; and on and
on.

Some of these sections are quite easy. Some have problems that
will keep your mind active all night. The real difficulty comes in
deciding in what order to complete the separate parts. There are
lots of one-way routes and cleverly chained puzzles. The number of
times I found myself needing something that I'd had to leave
behind somewhere else where it was now impossible to get it again
were legion. And, to complicate matters still further, your lamp
will only last just long enough to finish the whole thing. When
the whole adventure finally nears its conclusion and you close the
safe to find that you have managed to obtain every treasure, there
is a real sense of achievement.

Acheton should provide weeks of frustration and enjoyment for
die-hard text adventure fans who like a traditional game in which
exploration and intricate puzzle-solving are the key elements.
Fifteen years on from the first time I played it, I still got a
real buzz out of my underground wander through this piece of
adventuring nostalgia.

Solution in next issue.
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In Frobs We Trust!
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