Game Review: Demon’s Tomb – The Awakening (Amiga, Melbourne House)

While this is classed as a Melbourne House release, Demon’s Tomb: The Awakening is actually from the second incarnation of the company after its purchase by Mastertronic. While much of the range focused on action and arcade games, this one is an illustrated text adventure aimed at those who love tales of the supernatural…

The Story Begins…

The plot to Demon’s Tomb starts off with you taking on the role of archaeologist Edward Lynton. He’s investigating reports surrounding a local legend of forbidden gods, priestesses, and demons and information given to him from one of his colleagues has lead him to a mysterious tomb (as if you couldn’t tell from the game’s title) hidden away in a remote part of Devon.

Things take a dramatic turn when he is quickly trapped inside with nothing more than his notebook, his wits and more clues to his discover around him. With no escape in sight, he has to find a way of saving as much as he can knowing that someone will come and look for him after his death…

I Have A Bad Feeling About This…

One thing I positively loathe about text adventures – and I’ve said this before – are scenarios where the player is subjected to instances of unavoidable death. However, in Demon’s Tomb this is an essential element of the Prologue to the game. No matter what you do, your fate is sealed during the first part of the game so all you can do is focus on surviving long enough to protect all of your belongings and anything you find in the tomb.

Knowing that eventually someone will come looking for you and find your body (specifically Lynton’s son who you take control of in the main part of the game), you have to do everything possible to make sure that everything is discovered safely so your work can be continued. It’s an interesting and extremely original concept, but not without its flaws.

Tick Tock…

The biggest problem I found here is that you’re in a race against time, or certainly in the Prologue. Trapped in the tomb with no escape, there’s a fire near the entrance that is rapidly spreading. Every move you make sees the fire growing and before too long it expands, filling the tomb with smoke, engulfing you. A clock in the top right corner of the screen progresses as you play and you only have a short amount of time before you meet your grisly end.

There’s a lot of trial and error to find as many items as possible and preserve as many of your belongings as you can before the fire reaches you but if you want to save everything the only way this can be done is to follow an exact set of moves in a specific order. Timing is critical and you can potentially only make one or two mistakes along with way. On reading a solution for this section, the timing is so tight that it’s easy to see why so many would be put off from progressing further just from the Prologue alone.

The Main Game

On to the main part of the game and you’re now in the role of Richard Lynton, searching for his missing father and looking for notes left for him and continuing his work. There’s more freedom in terms of where you can explore in the village and local surroundings where his father met his fate, with each location having incredibly detailed descriptions each progressing the story superbly.

I’ve long been a fan of the interactive fiction released by Infocom but I have to be honest and say that when it comes to the text itself, those are basic in comparison to Demon’s Tomb. Each location is lavishly written and even though many are illustrated, these images really aren’t needed as the text is more than enough for what the game needs.

Read The Manual!

We’re all guilty of it, but one thing that is essential when playing Demon’s Tomb is that you read the manual either before or while you play it as it contains essential information relevant to the storyline that you’ll need later on. There’s also a local village newsletter that you pick up during the game and when you try to read it, again you’re referred to the game’s packaging and told to read it there. Frustrating for those of you who have downloaded a copy of it to play, so if you do track down a copy to buy online you need to make sure it is complete with all the paperwork so you can play it properly. Especially as some of the information might just save your life!

Options Galore

One thing that I was pleasantly surprised about playing Demon’s Tomb were the number of options open to the player. Right from the start you have the choice between text or a menu-driven control system, redefining keys for command shortcuts, a flexible parser to speed up entry of multiple commands and so much more. There’s even a “work mode” where pressing a key will display a blank screen with Amiga DOS prompt hiding the game from view completely for those of you playing the game when you shouldn’t be.

If that wasn’t enough you can save to disk or the Amig’s RAM disk, repeating previous commands and an undo option – something I’ve never seen in an adventure before. It offers a level of flexibility far beyond anything I’ve seen prior to this and is certainly something that should be commended.

Playability

I’ve talked about the plot and technical aspects of the game but how does it play? Once you get past the Prologue, it’s a fun if challenging adventure and you’ll soon be drawn into the engaging storyline. There are some frustrating puzzles that may take some time to figure out, and unfortunately a few instances where you can die without any chance of escaping to safety but if you can forgive those you’ll find an enjoyable game that’s worth sticking with. There do seem to be instances – as with the prologue – where it’s easy to use items incorrectly though, so you do need to think things through before doing anything.

The only things I really found to be frustrating were times when the parser couldn’t understand what I thought to be fairly basic commands (especially when trying to communicate with your dog, Sam) and using the menu-based controls which seemed to have a mind of its own when using the mouse.

Graphics And Sound

As with the majority of text adventures I’ve encountered, Demon’s Tomb is played in complete silence although this doesn’t really impact on the gameplay in any way. In terms of the visuals, many of the locations are illustrated, but rather than having the artwork at the top of the screen and splitting it into two separate areas for graphics and text, you are given the option to press F1 to display each image full screen and then any key to return to the game.

The images themselves – while helping to give a sense of the locations and who/what you may encounter, they’re not the best visuals you’ll see on the Amiga. If anything, I’d say these have been created with either the PC or Atari ST in mind first and then transferred over to the Amiga going by the limited amount of colour used in each.

Overall

As a fan of text adventures, I was looking forward to playing Demon’s Tomb: The Awakening, but this just left me either feeling frustrated, disappointed or a combination of the two. The Prologue was just far too difficult to be enjoyable and even though the main game was a much more entertaining experience, it was let down by the usual problems of fighting with the parser to find the right words to use to get the game to respond how I wanted it to.

My real reservation is how many people would be willing to stick with it past the Prologue to find the rest of the game lurking beyond.

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