As Doomed Xycanthus begins, you are in the midst of a forest with no memory as to how you arrived there and little or no idea of what to do next. Following a brief fight with a "nightmare creature", you discover a gem embedded in your left hand and a brief note from a wizard by the name of Malevol. It appears Malevol has cursed you with forgetfulness and dumped you in the middle of nowhere as payback for stealing his daughter's virtue. So starts the game.

I have to confess that after the beginning, I was surprised to find that the aforementioned Malevol the wizard did not make another appearance. I was half expecting Doomed Xycanthus to turn out to be a hunt-the-wizard-and-exact-your-revenge sort of game but instead it turns out to be more a hunt for treasure in the city of the game's title. While this is no bad thing in itself -- the storyline as you wander around the wilderness outside Xycanthus and then subsequently inside the ruined city itself is well written and has impressive depth -- I was anticipating Malevol at every moment. When the game finished and there was no sign of him, I couldn't help feeling a little disappointed. The game reaching a conclusion without any kind of appearance from the evil wizard left me feeling as if matters hadn't been properly resolved.

That isn't to say that Doomed Xycanthus is a bad game -- far from it. It has some intricate puzzles -- the one involving the snake and the pool is an interesting one (if a little on the overly-complicated side), as well as the letters which allow you access to the ruined city -- and the locations are often lengthy and detailed. The style of writing is overall very impressive, lending the game an eerie atmosphere, particularly during the times when you wander around the city of Xycanthus itself.

One aspect of the game I found frustrating -- and something that, thankfully, seems to be getting rarer and rarer in text adventures these days -- is its zeal to kill the player off for making a single bad move. Sometimes there are warnings about what will happen if you go a certain way but more often than not these warnings are subtle to the point that they will most likely be missed, leaving the poor player to have to reload time and time again. Often, after I'd died and started again, I was able to spot the warnings and avoid them subsequent times but it was still frustrating being killed for doing nothing more than moving in the wrong direction. Maybe this isn't such a bad thing as it encourages you to read the location descriptions more carefully than you might normally do and anyone who just rushes through this game without reading where he/she is going is liable to wind up dead more than a few times.

All in all, this is a well above average game that suffers from a little too much guess-the-verb (the puzzle involving the statue is an unusual one that it is doubtful you would manage to guess without the hints) but the standard of writing and the atmospheric location descriptions more then compensate for any shortcomings. From the ending I would have guessed that this was the first part in a series of adventures (hints are given that you're going to set off after Malevol the wizard) but as nothing has come out in the months since then it seems unfortunately not which is a pity because this is the sort of game we see too little of.