GAME: ESPER: The Secret Of Drom Bennacht
AUTHOR: Ian McDermott
PLATFORM: Quest http://www.axeuk.com/index.htm
SOUND: no
GRAPHICS: no
REVIEWED: 9th January 2006
WALKTHROUGH: n/a
DOWNLOAD: http://www.shadowvault.net/games/drom.zip


Considering this was the third Quest game I'd played in a row (and the previous two had been the worst games I'd played this year), I wasn't expecting much from ESPER: The Secret Of Drom Bennacht. But I was pleasantly surprised.

You're a psychic investigator called to the castle of Laird Jonathan Winters, a man who claims to have heard the cries of the Bean Sidhe, the mythological banshee. Only when you arrive at the castle, the Drom Bennacht of the game's title, it's to find Laird Winters brutally murdered and his father raving that the banshee is coming for him. No one else seems willing to try and solve the murder so that leaves just you...

For a Quest game, this is surprisingly well implemented. Most of the items mentioned in the room descriptions can be examined, NPCs can be spoken to (the dialogue is repeated each time you speak to them unfortunately) and the puzzles, while hardly inspiring, at least show promise. And the standard of the writing is well above average for a Quest game.

But just when I was thinking that this might actually be a decent game after all, it went and crashed on me. There's a record player in the music room that, when you try to examine it, produces an error message and crashes the game. Up to that point, I was quite enjoying ESPER. Oh well...

Another go at the game revealed a few things I'd missed the first time, but I also noticed that the further into the game I progressed, the less attention to detail there seemed to be. Whereas most of the items mentioned in the early room descriptions can be examined, a good number later in the game can't be, including one particularly one bad point where I was trapped underground in a three room corridor littered with items that couldn't be examined, taken or interacted with in any way, shape or form.

Conversation is handled via the "talk to [name]" format which produces a little dialogue box in the middle of the screen to choose your conversation options from. While this beats the guess the verb nightmare that is "ask [name] about [subject]", it needs updating whenever the player discovers new information about something. I discovered the secret behind the banshee yet was unable to tell anyone about it. I was also unable to question people about things. Frustrating.

Overall, ESPER is one of the better Quest games that I've played but unfortunately that's not really saying much. It's far better written than your average Quest game, has better puzzles and an actual storyline, but there are a good number of things about it that need fixing before it could ever be called a decent game.

4 out of 10