CRISIS AT DERSENIA by Tech-12 Software
             A text adventure on disk PCPD 840

                    Review by Bev Truter

First off the tecchie bits: Dersenia has a single .EXE file, it
runs smoothly, SAVE and RESTORE work quickly, the text is grey on
black, and it has no bugs or glaring grammatical faults. The
author claims that it's been programmed with TOADS (I'm not making
this up) which I've never heard of before - has anyone? Dersenia
is shareware, and if you liked it you are requested to send US$15
to Tech-12 Software.

Well, at first glance this looked quite promising; another of
those quest adventures where you have to retrieve several
thingummy- bobs, thereby earning Brownie points for glory and
heroism while saving your kingdom from disaster. In this case
strange things have been happening of late in the kingdom of
Dersenia. Natural disasters abound and even magic isn't

behaving properly; it's as though the world has somehow gone out
of balance.

You are the court philosopher of Dersenia where you serve as
advisor to King Queepus III, but now you're struggling along with
everyone else to survive as earthquakes and famine spread over the
land. The king summons you to his throne room and asks you to
figure out what has gone wrong with the world, and to try and fix
it. [Rather a big ask for a court advisor, surely?]. You accept
the king's request and set off, anxious to restore normality to
life in Dersenia once more.

You have no idea how to begin your quest, but picking up several
goodies lying about the palace seems a good way to start. A flask,
a bottle, some bread, a lantern etc. Then when you've left the
village and heard the gates clang ominously shut behind you
there's the first maze (disguised as a forest) to find your way
through; and it's here you start feeling tired. Typing "sleep"
results in a tediously long dream sequence in which the Goddess of
the Elements appears and explains what you must do. It turns out
that she is the guardian of 5 magical objects that represent each
of the 5 basic elements - Fire, Earth, Water, Wood and Metal.
Unfortunately all five objects were stolen by a demon and
eventually lost, scattered over the land in many an unlikely
location. Your task is to find all 5 objects and return them to
the goddess so that the world can be restored to normal. Not
exactly ground-breaking novelty here, and in case you still can't
fathom what's required of you she gives you explicit clues on
where to find each object.

By now, at a second glance, things are not looking quite so
promising after all, and what began as a mildly interesting
adventure game soon turns into a long saga of frustration and
ultimately boredom. Dersenia is h-u-g-e in terms of number of
locations (I'm up to 191, and there's more!) - and therein lies
its downfall. Bigger in this case doesn't mean better, it means
more irritating; and Dersenia just hasn't got the plot, puzzles or
characters to fill such a vast geographical area. Most of the
scenery can only be trudged through grumpily and dutifully mapped;
and although the room descriptions aren't too bad there's nothing
about the game that holds your rapidly dwindling attention. Every
item you need (or don't need, which is more often the case) is
just lying around in full view, waiting to be picked up.  Puzzles
are of the What to Throw at the Ogre, or What Can I Attach the
Rope to variety; and there are no less than four mazes <groan> to
be mapped by the usual drop-an-item method, and one maddening maze
that owes more than a passing nod to the famous "baseball diamond"
puzzle / maze in Zork 2.

Most of the objects you find are useless, the vast majority of
locations are unnecessary, the 5 magical items are too easily
found, and the only interesting puzzle in Dersenia looked
suspiciously like the one in KQuest1 (by Kelly Small). And those
mazes! It amazes me (get it, get it??) that authors can *still*
think the done-to-death maze idea is justifiable in a game written
in the nineties (Dersenia is circa 1994). The final straw was
discovering heaps of locations in which you get killed simply by
wandering into them, without any forewarning. The worst offender
was a 14- roomed house that had no purpose whatsoever in the game
- it simply had to be walked through to reach one of the mazes;
and in 8 of the 14 rooms you are unceremoniously bumped off by
various "monsters".

It's a real shame the author hasn't put his elaborate and detailed
fantasy world to better use than concocting a very ordinary text
game. If you examine all the paintings hanging around in the
palace they convey long, detailed descriptions of people and
events in this imaginary kingdom of Dersenia - the whole history
of Dersenia and its wars, royal lineage and heroes. Possibly the
author/s of Crisis at Dersenia would have been better off writing
a book, rather than programming a game?

In spite of all its obvious shortcomings Dersenia managed to keep
me plodding away at it for the last week, so perhaps it's not too
bad, or else I'm just naturally a masochist. Now I'm stuck near
the end having found 4 of the 5 objects; I've just discovered some
locations containing 5 levers and a button <even bigger groan>;
and if I never finish it then to misquote Rhett Butler - frankly,
my dears, I don't give a damn.
                              - o -