Arkane
         (Arcade adventure, part of Disks 1309a/b)

                  Reviewed by Graham Raven

To start on a good point, this is not a text game! Knowing my
'love' of text games, normally this fact alone would score the
game healthily somewhere above zero. However today I'm feeling
particularly fair and even handed, and therefore I'm prepared to
hand out lesser scores than this.

Hands up who likes dying? What? Nearly all of you? Oh well if
that's the case you love this game!

There are a number of options you can choose from. You can die as
an Elf; you can die as a Knight or you can die as a Mage.
Furthermore, if you dodge from screen to screen avoiding bad guys
as if they had the plague, you may even last for a few minutes
before dying!

I freely admit that I may be unique amongst games players, in that
I have this talent of being able to get absolutely nowhere with
various games, usually text based games, and I have to say,
regrettably, that my complete inability to make barely any
progress at all in this game tended to make me view it badly. As
with many games, it's very easy to die when you're starting out,
and this game is no exception. In fact, I've found it virtually
impossible to stay alive. The 'fire demons' seem to be completely
immune to swords, arrows and magic alike, and if you can't get
past them, there's no way you can reach the next level. Twenty
attempts, twenty failures! That sort of thing doesn't encourage
you to keep trying.

Rating: U Bend!





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