Attic of the Underdogs

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Review by Frosty840:

The land of Valhalla is wracked by civil war. The good king Garamond was slain by his younger brother, the twisted and evil self-proclaimed Lord of Infinity, fourteen years ago. Now, as the sole heir to the throne, you must make your way into Infinity's fortress and reclaim your lost birthright.

Okay, so it's not the most original plotline, but it works, and the story manages to hang itself around it rather nicely.

When this game was originally released on the Commodore Amiga, it sent shockwaves through the platform's followers. Here was a game that came on a mere six floppy disks, and yet contained not one word of written dialogue. As the box proudly proclaimed, it was "the first ever Amiga speech adventure".

The game itself is an enjoyable, logical puzzle game, which contained no illogical or mindlessly obscure puzzles and which could be solved without dying at any point. If you were very, very careful…

The gameplay wasn't much, it basically boiled down to hearing a clue, looking for an item and then bringing it to the right location, but there was a lot of fun to be had from trying to work out how everything fitted together. During the first level, you were asked to bring wine to one of the characters. Unfortunately, there's no wine on the level, just a water tap and a single cup… until you found the "miracle" stone and remembered the actions of a certain Nazarene carpenter during a crisis at a friend's wedding…

In all, Valhalla is very engrossing and has now been re-released by the creators Vulcan Software as part of the interface of their new, er… thingy… with the first level coming free with the download and each subsequent level of the epic three-game series being available to download separately for a small fee.

NOTE: At present, only the first free level is available, due to the project still being in the beta stages. For the moment, the "thingy" through which this game runs remains the most system-hogging, downright nasty piece of software I've seen since Windows 95 OSR-A. By the looks of things, though, this is certainly one to look out for in the coming months, once they've got it working for slower machines.

Reviews and game data © Home of the Underdogs
Screenshots © The Good Old Days