GAME: The Lost Mines
AUTHOR: Mel S
PLATFORM: ADRIFT 3.9 http://www.adrift.org.uk/cgi/new/adrift.cgi
SOUND: no
GRAPHICS: no
REVIEWED: 19th August 2002
WALKTHROUGH: http://www.shadowvault.net/wt%20lm.htm
DOWNLOAD: http://www.shadowvault.net/games/lostmines.taf


I have to confess I was never a particularly big fan of Mel S' games in the past. While some of them were quite well written, and others had interesting storylines, they all seemed to fall down at some point - mainly through guess-the-verb - but, with The Lost Mines (an adventure about hunting for hidden treasure), he seems to have hit gold (pun intended).

The best thing about The Lost Mines is its ease of use: it's one of those games whereby you can figure out some of the puzzles right at the start and you don't start in one location and have to struggle to reach the second only to find yourself stuck with an even worse problem. The puzzles were all (fairly) logical (although a couple did require a bit of use of the old grey matter) and quite well thought out. Guess-the-verb surfaced in a few places and was the only real downside to the game; aside from that there is little to actually find fault with here.

I encountered a few bugs but these tended to be fairly minor ones that didn't affect the game too much; indeed, there are a couple (one with the axe, the other with the playing cards) which makes the game considerably easier - the axe doesn't need to be carried to be used, and the task involving the cards can be executed whether or not you've actually found the second pack of cards. So while bugs are always a bad thing in a game, this time they were easy to forgive.

The Lost Mines was unusual in that I don't think there's a single way of die during the game - is this a first? I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not. Dying is generally a pain - it happens at the worst possible times and if you haven't saved your game previously then a lot of hard work has gone down the drain - but it also serves a purpose in making the game more challenging. A game where the player cannot die is a game that rapidly becomes monotonous. That said, I'd 90% finished the game before I realised you can't die and it didn't affect the gameplay much (if at all) so I'm probably just nit-picking here.

All in all, this was a pretty good game, if a little on the small side for someone who prefers vast epics, and if Mel S can produce more games of this quality I'll be looking forward to playing them.


Logic: 6 out of 10
Overall the puzzles were reasonably straightforward but there were a few (the one involving the boulder being a good example) that I had real pains with.

Problems: 6 out of 10 (10 = no problems)
One with the axe, another with the playing cards, maybe a few other minor ones, but nothing that really affected the gameplay.

Story: 6 out of 10
Interesting enough although the idea - a hunt for treasure - has been used a lot of times before.

Characters: 5 out of 10
Only two characters in the game that you can interact with which is a pity as the game could have used a little fleshing out.

Writing: 7 out of 10
Certainly the best in any of Mel's games so far. The location descriptions were all well written and the style of writing interesting.

Game: 7 out of 10
One of the better of the recent ADRIFT games although a little more work could have made this a great game.

Overall: 37 out of 60