One of the better releases from Topologika, Crobe is a funny and tough "cave crawl" text adventure in the best tradition of Colossal Cave and Zork. Despite a primitive verb-noun parser, the game's clever puzzles make up for it. Carl Muckenhoupt's brief review says it all: "A band of marauding trolls have destroyed the town of Crobe, providing you with an excuse to go on a treasure hunt in the caves where they live. Two-word parser with a limited command set (in particular, there's no "examine" verb), much magic wordage, some very clever and very tough puzzles - just getting into the cave is a major sticking point, and not only is it possible to lock yourself out of victory without realizing it, but sometimes you can be awarded points for doing so. Does novel things with the familiar maze-of-twisty-little-passages motif. Pretty darned good, as classical treasure hunts go." Originally released for the Phoenix computer only, the game has now been ported to Inform format thanks to the company who released the source code into the public domain. Reviewed by: Underdogs |