Pete Davison25 Feb 2019
An early game from Al "Leisure Suit Larry" Lowe, using a refinement of a typing-free adventure game engine he developed for an earlier game. You are tasked with tracking down 10 lost items and returning them to either their rightful owners in the Hundred Acre Wood, or dropping them where they are "supposed" to be. Controls consist of cardinal directions, take and drop, plus sometimes some location-specific actions.
All actions can be triggered either using keyboard shortcuts (first letter for directions, take and drop, numbers for location-specific actions) or mouse control and the game can be saved -- though only one in-progress game can be saved at a time.
This is one of those kids' games that teaches you things without you realising it, whether it's how to navigate around an area either by making a map or recognising landmarks, or using logical thinking to determine who the various lost items belong to. There's probably a touch of anger management in there, too, as Tigger's occasional randomly triggered interventions, which bounce you to a random location and cause you to drop any item you are carrying, are extremely irritating!
Graphics are early-era low-resolution Sierra and don't really show the ST's capabilities to their fullest, but they're clearly recognisable as the characters they are supposed to be, helping to capture that authentic "Pooh" atmosphere and maintaining the player's attention with bright, cheerful colours.
It's hard to overemphasise how utterly charming the writing in this game is -- it feels wonderfully true to the Pooh books, and makes reference to various Pooh stories and animations from over the years. It's simple and rather easy (especially for an adult!) but it's well worth playing, and an element of randomisation in terms of the objects you have to find and their starting positions makes it quite replayable, too.
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