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This package contains Mountains of Ket, Temple Of Vran and The Final Mission - which form the classic and colossal Ket Trilogy. Often when a piece of software is given enough sales hype to sell sand to the Saudis you becomes a bit sceptical about the quality of the game.

The adventure is hardly colossal. The Mountains of Ket only has about 66 locations, and the complete trilogy has no more rooms than an average Epic or Robico release. But to its credit, it covers three tightly linked Sphinx/Ring of Time type adventures which contain some excellent chaining puzzles and devious passwords. Unfortunately things begin to break down in the dungeons and dragons style combats which seem to occur at every sixth location.

These combats are supposedly based on the prowess, energy and luck factors of you and your foes, yet are nothing more than a rather tedious series of random number generations.

Conflict can be avoided in some cases by trading wares or, in the case of the Ogre, by a spot of illicit gambling. However, your whole progress can be ruined by unaccounted probability.

The room descriptions are sparse and little atmosphere is created. When any does exist, it is destroyed by silly interjections such as when the password to a secret door in mint condition is Polo. That type of humour might be at home in Terrormolinos but is out of place here.

The whole approach seems rather dated, with the parser and text compression being extremely limited.

It is a shame that the memory taken up by the combats and fancy screen display couldn't be better utilised by creating more locations.

I'm not too keen on this adventure, as there are better examples.

Pendragon