Shockingly, this game’s name does not clash with one I’ve already played yet; we had Pharaoh’s Curse and King Tut’s Tomb but never put the two together. CASA has one other game with the same name but lacking a year. It was published by Leon Young Software Company (LYSCo), an Australian company that didn’t exist until 1984. Hence, we’ve got a ways to go before the two games do battle.
This is the second game on the ZX81 tape that contained Greedy Gulch. The original tape was later ported (with graphics) to ZX Spectrum. Greedy Gulch was obnoxious to play due partly to some misleading text in the ZX Spectrum version, and I thought about going back to ZX81 for this game, but then I started playing and it went to that update-screen-every-keystroke type screen we saw with Planet of Death. Again, I’m going to be polite and not give a video, but let’s just say it pretty quickly drove my back over to the ZX Spectrum game, even given my previous experience. I’ll give the opening room as it looks on ZX81, at least:
To be fair, I did use the word “partly”; the worst thing about Greedy Gulch was a desert with slow screen draw which required trekking across many times. A Egypt-themed game could have the same problem but it fortunately starts the player right next to the Tomb in question; the rough equivalent turns out to be a maze which requires multiple treks but it turns out to still not be quite as irritating.
Before starting the raid (gather all the golden treasures, bring them to the oasis at the start) I wanted to refer to some comments by the author in Sinclair User, December 1982. He calls the first three Artic games (Planet of Death, Inca Curse, Ship of Doom) the best he had ever bought, and Inca Curse in particular has a little influence on this game I’ll bring up later.
You start just south of the tomb next to a box of matches, and need to go north and PUSH ROCK to open up the tomb. Afterwards the command IN gets used here to go inside, and this is the only place in the game this is used. (Ominous forewarning.)
Walking in with the book of matches turns out to be a mistake, because there’s a “fire room” immediately upon entering that burns them up.
The most annoying of the game’s softlocks, but at least this is early.
From this point things open up, so here’s a map:
Lying out in the open are a “magic cloak” and a “magic ring”. The magic cloak, when worn, says it turns you invisible; the magic ring does nothing (yet).
This invisibility is important because there’s a “large wooden door” with a warning sign that ALL PEOPLE WILL BE KILLED ON SIGHT. The trick is to not be in sight; entering leads back to the start of the tomb, right before the fire room.
This puzzled me at first but I realized another item susceptible to the fire room is a block of ice (in an appropriately named “ice room”).
You can use the death-passage to take the ice back to the book of matches; then, while holding both the ice and matches at the same time, the fire room will melt the ice but not set the matches on fire. I assume the idea is you are holding them “together” so the ice serves as protection, even though the player doesn’t actively provide a verb.
The ice has melted – I had better leave NOW!
The opening rooms also have a fan in addition to a “storage room” with candles, a master key, and a ladder; the candles light by typing USE MATCH while holding both the candle and book of matches at the same time. There’s a weird room where you get trapped in a magic lamp (??) and the rub the lamp from the inside in order to get out, leading to a room with a heavy slab.
Finally, there’s a “Guards Room” with a lever and chain. Pulling the lever causes rumbling in the distance; this opens a door on a timer, and you need to get down to where the door is quickly in order to beat the timer, so let’s check that part of the map next:
Red exits lead to the red-marked Maze room.
You can get in here by going down from the Ice Room. There’s a gate that locks behind you; just a bit in there’s a “scale room” where you can drop that heavy slab from the lamp room in order to weigh it down and push the gate back up. (The scale room also contains an axe which seems to be a complete red herring, which is not in this author’s usual style, I’m not sure if the author had a puzzle in mind and ran out of space.)
Past the scales is the maze.
This is a “sinkhole” style maze where there is one central room that gets dumped in as a trap of sorts, but there’s also forced loops through. The first loop leads to a Death Dungeon; down from there (entirely a secret exit, no description) there’s a room with a gold brick, and getting back to the Death Dungeon requires taking a second loop.
You need to also do a third loop because of the timed lever I mentioned earlier; you can handle the brick and the timer at the same time. So on a third loop you can head west from the Death Dungeon to a Guards Room.
This is the absolute worst part of the game. Not the timing: entering the door after it is open. I spent ages on this part.
GO DOOR
GO DOORWAY
ENTER DOOR
ENTER DOORWAY
W
N
S
U
D
OUT
IN
LEAVE
ENTER
EXIT
LEAVE
IN DOOR
ENTER ROCK
GO ROCK
WALK OUT
USE DOOR
USE DOORWAY
Maybe something hidden was making it impossible to enter? I tried different inventory combinations in addition to throwing every parser combination I could think of, and eventually (after spending two days stuck on this one part) I had to just check a walkthrough and find that the game was wanting GO THROUGH DOOR. This game only mostly has a two-word parser.
The other annoying thing to point out is that while the game technically gives you time to nab the two treasures past the door (the statue, seen above, and a golden mask) it gives absolutely no extra moves, and making a typo or even hitting ENTER accidentally counts as a move. I got trapped one time through for an accidental ENTER-press. (One other approach is to only nab one of the treasures, head back to the lever, and then repeat the whole process again.)
With that out of the way, let’s try tackling a different section.
Down from a “Snow Room” near the Ice Room there is a “Sacrificial Chamber”. If you enter without holding the ladder you’ve softlocked the game as you can’t get out.
Going farther in requires a lit candle; there’s a room with wind that will randomly blow the candle out so you need to keep the book of matches handy as well.
There’s a plank out in the open that gets used fairly soon after:
South from the Rock Chamber leads here. To go back north you need to USE PLANK. Weirdly, you can still go south from the Rock Chamber even though the path has now crumbled. I’m guessing the author thought of this part “cinematically” rather than in a simulationist sense.
This then leads to a variety of rooms that serve mostly color…
…along with a golden ram and golden necklace which are treasures that need to go back to the start.
“Serve mostly color” is worth a little more attention; take a look at the section of the map:
The Hall of Mirrors-Sphinx Room-Glass Store system reminds me of Inca Curse having small clumps of rooms that don’t really serve a purpose other than to be described as rooms. In a way, the accumulation of rooms (having only their name in the original ZX81 version) makes for a way of describing a region without having any depth to the room descriptions.
From Inca Curse, which says no more than YOU ARE IN A KITCHEN etc. The intent seems to be to “decorate” the area while maintaining the very low file size forced by technical limitations. The ZX Spectrum version of Pharaoh’s Tomb is able to have longer room descriptions but it’s simply a port from a pack of three ZX81 games stuffed on one tape.
The last section I also needed the walkthrough on: to the south of the Storage Room (which had the key, ladder, and candle) there’s a room with a “sound lock”. I had found no musical instruments.
Way back at the start, I missed that the oasis had a line “THERE IS A MOUNTAIN SLOPE HERE” which needed to be interacted with. You can CLIMB SLOPE and find a horn. This is rather like a left-to-right platformer where you start the game by going left into a secret area.
Blowing the horn opens the lock to the last part (for me) of the game.
It’s fairly straightforward here except for a “magic panel” blocking the way. This requires arbitrary use of magic, and the only thing that made it solvable was I had one item I hadn’t used yet: the magic ring. Rubbing it lets the player pass through.
The last treasure (a golden rod just past the sound lock, and the golden shield) was all I needed for victory.
This did end up being more pleasant to play than Greedy Gulch; while there was some inventory juggling it didn’t take literal hours to fully resolve, and the puzzles in the end were mostly straightforward things that the parser could handle. I just need to remember the author’s tendency to sometimes lapse into a three-word parser, because coming next: Magic Mountain, the last game off Adventure Tape No. 1, followed by Keys of the Wizard, the sequel to ultra-difficult Madness and the Minotaur.
Renga in Blue 