Dungeon of Traps

created and published by EAG in 1997-12, running on Apple II E

type: adventure
perspective: other
player options: single player

game engine: Eamon Engine
languages: eng

Personal review

[The following text is copyrighted by Eamon Adventurer's Guild Online and presented here word-for-word thanks to their generous terms]
#242 - The Dungeon of Traps by Boris Guenter (aka "MARVIN")

Reviewed by Tom Zuchowski

MAIN PGM Version: 4 Extra Commands: OPEN, READ, DRINK, DESTROY, ASK, UNLOCK, KILL Deleted Commands: None, no SAVE Special Features: Hi-Res intro screen Playing Time: 30-60 min. Reviewer Rating: 7.0

Description: "Only a fearless Adventurer may survive my dungeon of traps!" says the mighty Lord Barrington to you. "The most warriors which have entered this Domain of Death have never been seen again, but if you really want to die, go in and try to bring me the Diamond of the Necromancer as an evidence of your stay in the dungeon.

"With this mission you ride to the mountains of the Lord. After a short search you find a small wooden chute that seems to be the only visible entrance in the vicinity."

Comment: The above is the intro in its entirety. I must point out that the text reads awkwardly in spots because Marvin is German, and English is not his native language. I thought he did an incredible job, working in a foreign language!

This is an unusual Hack'n'Slash offering. It only has 24 rooms and 16 monsters, but it has at least 8 traps! Normally I hate traps, and there is no SAVE to boot, but for some reason I had a good time with these. Most of the traps offer a random chance of survival, and even when I died it was usually something original and entertaining. I had to restart six times, but when all is said and done it doesn't take long to race back through a dozen or so rooms to regain your previous spot.

Although it was extensively modified and extended, this is based on a primitive version of Eamon, and the commands must be fully typed in. Marvin did what he could to make command typing easier without a full-scale rewrite of the parser.

A couple of hints: ASK can get you out of at least one sure-death trap, and you might find it worthwhile to skip using the Main Hall and put FRESH SAM right on this disk for quick restarts.

When done, you'll want to run the RESET LAST ADVENTURE program to clean up after yourself.

I don't know if you will enjoy this simple, trap-laden Eamon as much as I did, but I do think you will find it an uncommonly enjoyable example of its genre.