The opening smacks of an episode of The Twilight Zone - two boys are sucked through a time warp in a closet and find themselves trapped in the past. Scattered around the past, we are informed, are 21 items that you - as the eponymous Timmy Reid - must collect in order to be returned to your own time. So the adventure begins…

What makes The Timmy Reid Adventure stand out from so many other games is the amount of detail packed into it. Notes from the writer (accessed by typing "show notes" at any time during the game) indicate that the places referred to in the game are real places and the writer has certainly done a commendable job of bringing them to life. It almost feels like you're really there at times.

A large amount of hidden extras add to the appeal of the game: the best being the save game feature being disabled if you're mean to your brother. Also amusing is trying to urinate in an outdoors location which leads to you being arrested for juvenile indecent exposure. Hidden extras don't add anything to a game if you fail to find them but it's something worth typing a few strange commands just to see what happens. Finding a hidden extra is often as rewarding in itself as finding something you need to finish the game.

It's easy enough to make progress in The Timmy Reid Adventure but by no means is this an easy game. In part this is due to the considerable amount of tasks that need to be completed to actually get anywhere in the game. Yes, this is a large game. The largest (KB-wise and location-wise) of any of the early ADRIFT games. But persevere and it doesn't take long before your score is shooting up, although don't be surprised if you seem to finish the game with your score being a lot less than the maximum 100%; score points are given for a wide variety of strange tasks: singing in the band shell, picking grapes and several dozen others.

One strange thing - the only real bad thing about the game - involves moving from one location to another. Usually this is simplicity itself yet for some reason in The Timmy Reid Adventure commands like "north", "south", "east" etc don't work. Instead you need to prefix them with "go" or you get hit with a strange message telling you "I think you need to do something else first!" I'm not sure if this is a bug in the system, a side effect of updating the game from Version 3.8 to Version 4 or just a strange way the writer had of making games but it adds an unnecessary amount of frustration to matters.

The Timmy Reid Adventure has a kind of charm that is sadly lacking in so many adventures. It never takes itself too seriously and the welcome addition of the hidden extras make it the sort of game that even after finishing you'll probably want to play a few more times just to see if you can find something you missed. As the writer is never likely to write any more games (as I said before, over two years have gone by since The Timmy Reid Adventure came out), you might as well make the most of this one.

Logic: 9 out of 10
Nicely logical throughout although the problems with directional commands didn't make much sense.

Problems: 7 out of 10 (10 = no problems)
The game crashed with an error message when I tried to open a drawer but aside from that I didn't come across any bugs.

Story: 8 out of 10
Quite an interesting one and more than capable of holding your attention throughout the game.

Characters: 7 out of 10
A whole horde of them. Some can be questioned about a variety of subjects, others don't seem to even have a basic response written for them.

Writing: 8 out of 10
Always above average.

Game: 8 out of 10
Definitely the best of the earlier ADRIFT games.

Overall: 47 out of 60