KB: 110, Rooms: 36, Objects: 176, Tasks: 735, Events: 6, Characters: 36

Introduction

It was a day pretty much like any other day. The sun was out, the sky was blue, a couple of nuns were mud-wrestling outside your house - the usual.

But things were rapidly to go sour. All the rumour-mongers said as much. Even the papers (never the most reliable source of info) were in on the story. Their banner headlines "We're doomed! We're all gonna die! Aaaaarrgrgrhrrhrg!!!!" indicated that everything was not well in the town of Stonetomb.

But you, naturally, knew nothing of this, forever having your head buried in the sand (not in the literal sense, of course, because that would be just plain silly not to mention more than a little on the dangerous side) you were ever and always oblivious to the ways of the outside world.

Then again, even you were unlikely to make it through today completely unscathed...

Your name is Fingle Bodge and you are Stonetomb's best (and only) cowboy. Best because there is no one else who really gives a damn enough to try. Only because the rest of the world gave up with cowboys a long time ago and moved onto far more interesting things. But today you - Fingle Bodge - have the opportunity to prove yourself a hero, to become the saviour of Stonetomb, and most importantly to do what you have always wanted to do: have an excuse to shoot someone.

There. Does that tell you everything you need to play the game? What, it doesn't? You were expecting a detailed background, hints on how to play the game, maybe even some hints as to how to make progress? Think again, Fingle Bodge.

Only kidding. As soon as you start the game, you'll be presented with a list of options so you can change the game settings to your preference. There are three main difficulty settings: easy, medium and hard. Selecting easy will give you $15 and two items that you'll otherwise have to find. Selecting medium will give you $10 and one of the items. Select hard and you'll get $5 and have to find all the items for yourself

The game plays differently depending on the difficulty setting. Characters will react more favourably towards you on the easy setting than they will on the hard setting. Also, selecting 'easy' will quite often give you a warning if you're about to do something that will lead to you getting killed. Selecting 'medium' will sometimes give you a warning. Selecting 'hard' will give you no warning whatsoever - you'll very often find yourself dead through no fault of your own. Unfair? Perhaps. But then that's life for you.

Another thing to bear in mind when selecting the difficulty of the game is the score: you can only achieve the maximum score (which happens to be ) in the hard game. This is because quite a lot of the tasks you have to do to gain the best score are already completed in the easy and medium games. So if you want that 100%, you're just going to have to play things the hard way.

A bit of advice: play the easy game the first few times to familiarise yourself with things. Then, when you feel you're up to it, move onto one of the harder settings.

Interaction with the various characters of Stonetomb is essential to completing the game. Start a conversation with "talk to [character name]" and then progress from there, asking them about whatever subject takes your fancy. From time to time, you'll see a word in their dialogue is surrounded by brackets. This means you can ask the character about this specific word if you like.

If you're stuck, typing either "help" or "hint" may - or may not - give you a clue.