Meet Lester, our reluctant hero...
The keyboard controls are simple enabling you to walk, run, crouch, kick, jump, fire Lester's gun and manipulate a few levers etc. Obviously his actions are limited by today's standards: no combining items in your inventory – in fact, no inventory and minimal dialogue and you really do have to be fast at times to get past/kill aliens and monsters and to dodge the falling rocks. Some parts are hard, frustratingly hard; Lester has to be in an exact location at an exact split second. If you don't do it first time, you'll probably get it spot on sometime around the fifth or sixth or seventh time. Failing that let your neighbour's twelve year old have a shot at it.....
Lester only has one life and if you make a fatal error you'll return to a previous checkpoint. You can access the various checkpoints by entering the relevant pass code given at each one. There is space in the user manual to keep note of these as you attain them… either that or risk losing hastily scribbled code which were on the back of an envelope… A nice touch is in the options menu where you can customize the game to enter a time warp back to those heady Amiga days and play the whole game in its original simplicity – both visually and aurally. You can also switch between keyboard, mouse or joystick control.
Click for larger imageThe opening cut scene shows Lester arriving at his laboratory and his experiment with a [article accelerator going disastrously wrong. He gets sucked into some sort of space/time warp, to reappear deep a pool… and your first task is to immediately swim upwards to the surface. This sets the tone of the game in that as you enter each new scene you often have to react straight away or you'll die. Not perhaps for those of a nervous disposition as it can make you kind of jumpy. Lester emerges in to an alien world where everything that moves is intent on killing him – a tentacle monster in the lagoon, dangly fanged leeches that drop down from the craggy roof, huge prehistoric panther crossed with a wolverine type animal and that's just in the first few screens. A shrouded alien saves his bacon.....sort of.
Lester finds himself caged by the alien beings in a penitentiary. These burly guards look a bit like Lord of The Rings' Uruk-hai (although they are dressed in leather-look hot pants and boots bringing the only gay in the village, Daffyd of Llanddewi Brefi, to mind). Lester has to escape using his speed, quick witted reactions, laser gun and a surprising friend. His gun can form a sort of protective force field shield but has to be recharged at various points. Lester and his new found pal escape the jail and pass through a crawl space type maze with deathly steam jets. It just ain't his day, is it? But on the bright side, for the more morbid of you, when you zap the guards they turn rather satisfyingly in to skeletons before collapsing in a heap.