GAME: Doomed Xycanthus
AUTHOR: Eric Mayer
PLATFORM: ADRIFT 4 http://www.adrift.org.uk/cgi/new/adrift.cgi
SOUND: no
GRAPHICS: no
REVIEWED: 1st October 2002
WALKTHROUGH: http://www.shadowvault.net/wt%20dx.htm
DOWNLOAD: http://www.shadowvault.net/games/xycanthus.taf


Eric Mayer's first ADRIFT game - Lost - was a strange one with little or no plot. His second - Doomed Xycanthus - was a far different sort of game. Larger, more detailed and plotted - and overall a far better game.

As Doomed Xycanthus starts, you are in the midst of a forest with no knowledge as to how you arrived there and no idea 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-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 - but I was expecting at every moment for Malevol to show up and when the game finished and there was no sign of him, I couldn't help feeling a little disappointed.

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 being an interesting one, 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 liking for killing 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. Maybe this isn't such a bad thing as it encourages you to read the location descriptions more carefully than you normally would and anyone who just rushes through a game without reading where he 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. From the ending I would have guessed that this was the first part in a series of adventures but as nothing has come out in the months since then it seems unfortunately not which is a pity because this is a standard of game we see too little of.

Logic: 8 out of 10
 Aside from the strange puzzle involving the statue, the puzzles were straightforward enough to be guessed (for the most part anyway) without resorting to the hints system.

Problems: 10 out of 10 (10 = no problems)
 None that I encountered.

Story: 7 out of 10
 Had this been a story of you seeking to gain revenge on the wizard who stole your memories, I would have given it more than 7 out of the 10 but the storyline as it is just didn't strike me as quite so interesting.

Characters: 7 out of 10
 Only one, but he has an impressive amount of subjects you can question him about.

Writing: 8 out of 10
 Atmospheric locations and an overall impressive style.

Game: 8 out of 10
 A decent well written game that might not have been what it seemed to be from the beginning but very good nevertheless.

Overall: 48 out of 60