sys 64738

During the 8-bit era (1871-1914), my bestie BP and I were quite the text adventure enthusiasts. We painstakingly mapped them on graph paper, we catalogued the commands they could parse and, occasionally, we even solved them. If the peaks of the genre were the Infocom and Magnetic Scrolls titles, then one of the deepest, darkest troughs was Anirog's Commodore 64 release "Catacombs", which drained our patience like a highly specialised form of wight.

Remembering this game out of the blue, I searched for a walkthrough, to discover what, if anything, we'd missed. Sho'nuff - http://bit.ly/a6V84y. That introduction is spot-on. "Catacombs" was illogical and incredibly, stupidly fussy about the wording it'd accept. You'll note that the first command in the solution is "break seal". From memory, "remove blockage" had the same effect, but NOTHING else we ever tried let us progress to the second location!

The brief instructions (printed on the back of the cassette inlay, IIRC) and room descriptions didn't help. Resetting the beige box and loading something else did. That said, I urge you to persevere with the walkthrough, which reveals the game for what it is: a textbook example of poor t/a design. Finicky interface, cliches, drudgery, repetition, nasty instadeaths, nonsense ("get puddle", "drop puddle")...and how about that amazing finale?