THE LAND BEYOND THE PICKET FENCE
     A text adventure by Martin Oehm, part of disk 1171

                   Reviewed by Bev Truter

PICKET is yet another short 9-location game written for the 1996
I-F competition run on the Internet. I have no idea if either TADS
or Inform was used to program the game, as it runs from an .EXE
file that doesn't appear to be either of the above game-writing
utilities. It is a competently written and programmed adventure,
which was placed 14th (out of 26 games) in the competition results.
In the INFO section, the author apologizes for the lack of
beta-testing, especially by English-speaking players. From this I
infer that his first language is not English, but I doubt you'd
spot that from playing the game. His command of English is good,
and there are no glaring spelling horrors or clumsy grammar to
spoil PICKET. In fact, this game is a darn sight better than quite
a few games I've played recently written by English-speaking
Americans; but then there are those who would argue that Americans
don't speak English anyway, but an odd language called Americanese.

The very simple plot of PICKET can be summed up in a few
sentences:  You are walking home one day when the sight of a young
girl crying prompts you to ask what's wrong. She claims her yo-yo
was stolen by an ugly creature who came through the gate in the
picket fence behind you. You see only an old villa behind the
fence, but decide to check it out and have a look for the missing
yo-yo. Entering through the gate you find yourself in a small
clearing. There's no sign of the villa, and you seem to have
arrived in a very strange place.

Your quest boils down to a hunt for the missing yo-yo in this land
of toadstool forests, where you can explore a mad scientist's
house, a gnome's cave and a lake with a swan. Although the scenery
and items in PICKET fluctuate wildly between the mundane and the
magical (a scientist and gnome apparently co- exist quite happily
as neighbours), the writing is quite descriptive, and the author
successfully maintains this rather odd atmosphere throughout the
game. You can fiddle about with several items, question the two

game characters, and look for hints in a HINT file if you become
stuck.

This is a fairly interesting little game, with a few simple puzzles
to solve and some odd locations to visit. Although not a long or
memorable game, I would place it somewhere slightly above the
mediocre category. A pleasant enough adventure to pass the time for
an hour or so.











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