LAND BEYOND THE PICKET FENCE
             This game was supplied with Issue 69

                  Reviewed by Peter Clark

Land Beyond the Picket Fence was one of the entries in the 1996
Interactive Fiction Competition and is available for free download
from the net. I don't really know what attracted me to the game.
Perhaps it was the strange name. However, I downloaded it and got
stuck in!

It is a very small game with only nine locations. The story goes
that a small girl has had her yo-yo stolen by a gnome who
subsequently disappeared through a gate in the picket fence.  You,
being the brave adventurer that you are, decide to go through the
fence and try to retrieve it for her. You have to make friends
with a mad scientist and chase a swan around a pond among other
things before standing any chance of defeating the gnome in his
cave and getting the yo-yo. Even after getting it, there is still
the problem of getting past the gnome on the way out of the cave.

The game has only a few puzzles and none of them are extremely
difficult. Only one of them near the end had me worried for any
length of time. The game has been translated I think from Swedish,
but I found no spelling mistakes and only one bug involving the
swan. This did not detract from the game or make it impossible to
finish.

If you are looking for an hour's light fun one winter evening
without taxing the old brain box too much then you could do worse
than give it a try.








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