GAME: Tower Of The Elephant
AUTHOR:Tor Andersson
PLATFORM: Inform http://www.inform-fiction.org/
SOUND: no
GRAPHICS: no
REVIEWED: 6th October 2006
WALKTHROUGH: n/a

I was always a fan of Conan, Robert E. Howard's barbarian hero so this was one of the first games I tackled during the IFComp. It's a pretty good one, too.

You, as Conan, have taken it upon yourself to break into the Tower of the Elephant of the game's title. Therein, you're planning to steal a jewel known as the Elephant's Heart, the source of power for a priest known as Yara.

Making progress to begin with is fairly easy, with my rugged barbarian hero massacring everyone he came across (whether they needed massacring or not is another question…) but I ran into a few problems with dealing with the giant spider and came completely unstuck when it came to Yara himself. A conversation with an idol also threw me and had me peeking at the accompanying walkthrough for a hint as to what I needed to do next. The necessary conversation topic wasn't really an obvious one (at least not in my humble opinion) so it's not really surprising I didn't figure it out myself.

The ending was kind of unusual in that a message flashed on screen telling me I'd won, yet I hadn't achieved the one thing I had set out to do: get the Elephant's Heart. I had had it at one point, yet been forced to get rid of it in order to kill Yara. Several times I went back to a previous saved game and tried things differently, yet every time the end result was the same: if I kept hold of the jewel, I died if I sacrificed it, I could defeat Yara and win the game. So maybe I misunderstood the intro and the aim of the game was actually a spot of priest-butchering instead. (As it happens, Yara is a black-hearted scoundrel so butchering him is all for the good.)

All in all, a pretty decent game. Nicely paced, nicely written.

6 out of 10