Level 9's Return to Eden

This is the follow-up to Snowball, and has a very irritating style. It's amazing that people in the 1980's managed to get through this game without throwing their television/monitor out of the window in frustration. See irritations for more details.

It's also quite irritating that (in the Spectrum version I use, at least) you can't combine commands with full stops like you could with Snowball - you have to do every command on a new line.

A vision screen shows the strange plants on Eden. There’s an opening behind you.

You can wander around for about 12 moves before you find out that “Kim Kimberley, you are guilty of murder. Your sentence will now be carried out. Prepare to die.”

You then have a very limited time before, indeed, you die.

So, the major part of the start of this game consists of wandering around mapping your surroundings, getting killed, starting again, mapping somewhere else, getting killed, starting again, mapping some more, and hoping that sooner or later you can find out how to stop dying.

Pretty close to the start you can find a location containing six items, of which it appears you can pick up any four. One of them is a compass, and until you get this, the game tells you nothing about which direction any of the location exits are in…

There is a highly specific combination of things you have to get, and where you need to be, to even get going in this game.

Go to the cupboard. Wear the radsuit and collect at least the compass and the Geiger counter (you can manage one more item; I don't yet know which is most useful). Then make your way to the comfortable cave, sink into deep sleep, and wait for the blast to "pass harmlessly" so that you wake refreshed.

How anyone is expected to work this out based on reason, logic or normal behaviour is beyond me.

Once you have, though, you can properly start exploring (although note that anything you left behind in the stratoglider is now history / toast).

Once you wake up and can start exploring, if the Geiger counter shrieks, wait until it starts ticking slowly again before moving on. It'll get stolen from you soon anyway. If you forgot to bring it with you, you'll die. Tough.

Head to the grove and get the stem. Visit the bend in the path and eat the bean so you can carry more things, then go to the riverbank and get the tubers. I hope this is making sense so far…?

Navigate your way to the island, picking up the log on the way, squeeze some water onto the bulb and hold the shoot. This gets you into the forest. No, I have no idea what the game designers were thinking here.

Find the cling vine, go to the woodpile and throw the vine; then you can climb up into the greenwood tree. Of course…

Place at least six more objects than you are left holding after placing them, on the south platform, then go to the north platform and pull the lever. Glue the branch with the berry (drop the berry afterwards), fetch the stalk and then the cherry, return to the south platform and collect everything you left there. Makes perfect sense, don't you think?

Return to Eden is a far more irritating game than Snowball.

The biggest reason for this is how easy it is to die, often through no fault of your own (some creature comes out of the woods, bites you, and you're dead, that's it).

There's no way you would be able to play this game without an interpreter which supports save/restore.

Until, that is, that you find out (how???) that the animals are attacking you only because you're still wearing the radsuit, which apparently makes you look like a robot. On the other hand, it does offer you protection from radiation sickness, which you will die of if you don't wear the suit…

Maybe you should try wearing the fig leaf ("weighs little and covers a lot") over the radsuit so that you have the radiation protection but don't look like a robot… Hm, no, apparently not :(

Well, it turns out that there's a pill you can take, provided you can find it soon enough, to protect you from the radiation (and without being attacked by animals) - see obscurity for more details.

The other reason is that Return to Eden initially describes several things in a highly misleading (or at least, uninformative) way - the worst example I've found so far is a "stem" which, when you examine it, turns out to be a "stem ship", in other words, a boat.

It's well worthwhile examining everything you come across, because the longer description may be helpful in deciding what the thing actually is, or what it's for, whereas the short description is not.

This game is both irritating and obscure. You have to use things in totally non-obvious ways, find things you don't know about before time runs out, and somehow avoid dying, because otherwise you get killed for no discernible reason.

Case in point 1: you arrive at the well-trodden path wearing the radsuit, and you start getting attacked and randomly killed (with resurrection, at least) by various animals you encounter. When you get attacked and do not die, you're told that the radsuit has protected you. It turns out (and I believe there is no way of working this out) that you are being attacked because you are wearing the radsuit. So, remove the radsuit, stop being attacked, and sooner or later you die of radiation poisoning instead…

Well, there's an alternative (although I have no idea at all how you're supposed to work this out without help).

Starting from the well-trodden path, drop the radsuit, go east and south, eat the bean for strength, and then go south-east to the green sward. Pick up the pea and immediately drop it (what!?). A bird will eat it and shit a brick (or at least, lay a brick egg). Bury the egg (using the spade), and it'll turn into a house plant (oh, hahaha!). Go into the house, and find some fish fungus (some what?) on a log table (oh, hahaha again!). Take the fungus, make your way to the riverbank, collecting the stem and the tubers along the way, then give the fungus to the leviathan. Go north to find a pill and eat it.

Then you can wander around without getting randomly attacked or dying of radiation poisoning.

Simple? Or not??

Case in point 2: There is a maze of maize (oh, hahaha, my word, how jolly!) but it only has two locations (it seems). Starting from the river bank at the north side of the river, you go north to get into the maze (location 1). Drop something there so you can tell when you return. Go north, and you're back at the same place. Go west, and you're back at the same place. Go south, and you're back at the river bank. Go east, and you're in location 2 of the maze. Drop something else there so you can recognise the place. Go west, and you're back in location 1 (good). Go north (from location 2) and you're back in location 2. Go east and you're back in location 1 (hm, okay). Go south, and you're back at the river bank again.

So, two maze rooms, reachable from (and returnable to) one place on the river bank. Boring.

Er, no… Start from the river bank and go north, then east, then west (back the way you came), and then south (so, back to the river bank, you might think) and in fact you're still in the maze, but you've found the squirrel's nest with the stuff s/he stole from you…

Argh! (Oh, and good luck representing that on a map.)

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