THE MAGIC TOYSHOP - by Gareth Rees A text adventure on 1075(PC) / 1090(ST) / 953(Amiga) Review by Bev Truter While looking for a birthday present for your niece you wander into a dim Victorian arcade where you notice an old-fashioned toyshop displaying a peeling rocking-horse in the grimy window. Aha! This looks more like the kind of shop you were searching for. Wandering inside, you discover that (a) you seem unable to leave the shop, and (b) the young woman behind the counter is dressed in a white crinoline dress with a hooped skirt. Hmmm, very strange. Everything seems to be from a bygone era. There's a closed and locked oak chest in one of the corners, and after a few pleasantries she opens it, hands you a small cardboard box, then closes the chest again. The entire `adventure' takes place in this one location, and Toyshop is really just a collection of puzzles that you have to solve, some fairly easy and others more obscure. Initially you don't seem able to prise much information from Catharine, the shopowner's young daughter, but as you solve each puzzle she chattily drops a hint or two and produces further puzzles for you to tackle. The first puzzle was relatively simple - what to do with the contents of the small box; but the subsequent two puzzles had me stumped. HOW can you win at noughts and crosses if you can never start first? Toyshop was written using Inform, and was an entry in the 1995 IF Games Competition. The author certainly took the rules seriously - one of the rules states that each entry has to be short (well, you can't get shorter than one location), and finishable in 2 hours. The maximum score in Toyshop is 20 points, and the first 5 points are easily obtainable in about 5 minutes. However, it doesn't follow that you'll score the full 20 points in 20 minutes - if only life and puzzles were that simple! I recall reading a criticism of Toyshop somewhere, which was fairly scathing about the illogicality and silliness of some of the puzzles, but having only solved two and a half puzzles, I can't comment on that. One thing that did bother me though was the sudden appearance of certain obvious objects in the room, which somehow you failed to notice when you first entered the shop. Each time you solve a puzzle, you miraculously notice something else in the shop, which of course is part of the next puzzle. This makes the game very linear, as you only have one puzzle available to solve at any given time - solving it then produces another puzzle which either pops out of nowhere, or is given to you by Catharine. Altogether quite an interesting puzzle-solving exercise, but Toyshop can't really be classified as a `game'. It might keep you guessing and trying various things for an hour or two, but there isn't enough substance to it to occupy you for much longer. The novelty of playing a game with only a single location has long since worn thin, as I'm sure anyone who's tried "Mop and Murder" and "The Hospital" will agree. In fact, Gareth's lead-in to the game sums it all up very well: "...it isn't a serious story, but you might have fun playing with the gadgets." ENJOYMENT 4/10 ATMOSPHERE 4/10 DIFFICULTY 5/10 FINAL COMMENT "You might have fun playing with the gadgets." - o -