Review scoopings 3/5 · Apr 21, 2024
Exciting Start To The New Graphics Capabilities For Graphic Text Adventures
Preliminary: Seems a bit wordy but wow, surprised there's so little info available about this. Twilight Zone is a big name and this is a text adventure with great Amiga graphics and music throughout? We shall see if a text adventure can hold my interest, even with music and the nice new Amiga era graphics. I love this starting graphic …
Preliminary: Seems a bit wordy but wow, surprised there's so little info available about this. Twilight Zone is a big name and this is a text adventure with great Amiga graphics and music throughout? We shall see if a text adventure can hold my interest, even with music and the nice new Amiga era graphics. I love this starting graphic 
1988 has been off to a rocky start. The Look of games had definitely approved with the advent of the PC Engine and Amiga and Atari ST, but it's felt stagnant in terms of gameplay. No big improvements yet compared to 1987. But this game has a classic text adventure gameplay, timeless indeed, (and the text is not as wordy as I had thought, and it's actually quite funny and to-the-point, the way I like it) and with that urge I used to get in early graphic text adventures to screenshot every screen! I will try my best not to! But cmon look at this 
This next image reminded me of a Nancy Drew game (set on a train) my friend made me play back in the day, plus this is leagues ahead of the 1987 graphics. 
Play: 7/10 Okay, yea, actually it is very wordy at parts. But still quite enjoyable. I missed this simple, to-the-point gameplay: enter commands, reference a guide when you get frustrated by the parser (tho this was very advanced and nice), and just enjoy the ride. Text adventures are surely a genre I knew so little about before this chronology project and now can officially say I love.
Feel: 8/10 Silly, chaotic, almost feels like a series of short puzzles more than an outright adventure game. Cute that it's based on a TV show I like, and lots of great graphics.
Sound: 6/10 Okay I was wrong, there is very little sound in this. Can't really give it a rating. (In fact, over time, the random Twilight Zone jingle got just outright annoying, and since I now have an understanding of retro games and their sound, I do think I should regularly include Sound as long as the game includes any at all)
Look: 8/10 I think this one's a given ha. This was the main draw. I planned to play the Amiga version, but this DOS version is just as impressive looks-wise and seemingly released at the same time (seems to be late 1988 so it's a bit wrong of me to play it already but it's fine).
Attachment: 8/10 Welp, here's the real test: I died, and surprisingly decided to restore my last Save instead of calling it quits. It'd been a while since a text adventure got me to do that! Tacky how I died tho (just mistyped "gas" during the driving segment ha), but so it goes. Better than RNG-based deaths. And now I know to save more often.
Booo my version got stuck at this point:
So close to the end too! Well, I can't claim I'm willing to start over from scratch, which says something, but the fact I already started back from a save after a death, and wish I could have finished it, says more!
Overall: 7.4/10