Sunrise Over Bethselamine is the lowest ranked Speccy text adventure after Secret Mission Radio, along with other two, and that's how I'm choosing the games these days. Once it's been loaded, a blue screen with silly cartoon balloons explain the context of the story, which essentially is that Bethselamine is a minining planet, whose land is exposed to the sun every twenty-years, and in this occasion a big festival is staged, and people from all over the galaxy come to attend the spetacle of the sun rising over Bethselamine. This time apparently something wrong happened, and you just landed there to discover what, and the first thing you should do is find your friend Steve something, which is also the organizer of the festival.
So, this is a basic effort, with a nice modified font, with a small drawing of your character at the top of the screen, and eventually of other characters present in the location you're in. One is the demented Dave the Droid, who just follows you everywhere spitting out nonsenses. Anyway, in spite of being in basic, it's sufficiently quick
in reacting to your commands, although there's not much to examine [you can examine only items you've already collected], and the vocabulary seems pretty limited. Also, while correcting a command, you should pay attention and not deleting the quotation marks that must frame your sentence, or it won't be accepted, which is rather clumsy. Besides that, I was beginning to enjoy the little puzzles and shooting bastards, when some bugs popped out spoiling the fun. For example, I had picked up, among other items, a laser glass cutter and an alien identification card. When the time has come for me to use my wonderful laser cutting device, the game insisted that I was not carrying it. I checked the inventory, and, in fact, it wasn't there, but, to make up for it, there were TWO identification cards. I restarted. This time I was able to use the laser glass cutter where I wanted, and I even left the alien identification card somewhere else, just to be sure, then I found a new object, a "comlink", picked it up and brought it somewhere else. When I tried to use it, pressing its black button, the game told me I didn't have it, just like with the glass cutter before. But, even more paradoxically, this time the item was actually still present in the inventory.
So I've given up. There's a nice little adventure, though, somewhere under those bugs.
2/5
