Reviews

Following hot on the heels of Adventure A: Planet of Death (well, on the ZX81 at least, as the Spectrum versions appear to have all been released at around the same time) this was the second of the Artic adventures.

It's a rather larger and more sophisticated game than its predecessor but still retains many of the flaws of the earlier games; the parser is a simple verb/noun one with limited vocabulary, the location descriptions are terse, and the puzzles frequently illogical. A couple of nods to its ZX81 ancestry are a hidden advert and the ALL CAPS text.

On to the plot. You've discovered an Inca Temple in the Peruvian jungle and have to gain entry, loot it of its valuables and get back to the outside world. It's your standard adventure treasure hunt, basically.

The game is fairly easy to play; there aren't too many instant death traps, and you only need to find, and escape with, a single treasure to finish the game. However, you can still go back and try to improve your score; interestingly there doesn't seem to be any way to escape with all the treasures as you're limited in what you can carry.

Whilst not a true classic of the genre, this was a reasonably good game for its time. Like most of the Artic adventures it rather pales next to the games that arrived in subsequent years.