Fresh from your success in the first game, where you had to find a place to play adventures uninterrupted, you awake one fine morning to find that the electricity has been cut off. You recall receiving the bill a couple of weeks ago which you promptly filed in the nearest bin. Exactly how your all but inaccessible lair has been hooked into the mains or how the Electricity Board managed to take readings is a little unclear, but your quest Is simple: to have the supply reconnected. However, this is (not surprisingly) more difficult than it sounds. There are many devious problems to overcome before you once again emerge victorious.   
The game begins In your adventuring retreat. On your desk sits the now useless CPC 6128, and some clothes (to big to wear). Not far off from this is a teleportation device with three coloured buttons. Each, when pressed before entering the device, will preset the area of the map where you will appear after entering it. There is a beach mainly populated by nudists, a town where it is still Christmas and a frozen arctic region which may be too cold for you to explore - without precautions. You will meet characters in the course of the game, the majority of whom can help, or who at least have an object which you might need. However, that is not the extent of the game. Remember to look under, behind and in things; you might find objects that had previously been invisible. And examine everything, you never know where objects might have been hidden.
All the problems which Simon Avery has put into this game are solvable with a little thought. Each turns out to be quite logical, but think before you act. Saving the game every so often might not be a bad Idea either. DAAW2 was written with the Amstrad version of The Quill, which means that It has a basic verb/noun parser and no ramsave/ramload options. However the game doesn't suffer as a result. Moving on to playability, I have to confess that the repeated returns to the teleportation device to select another place wherein lies an object which you need irritated me a little. It is probably nothing more than a personal preference, but having to move backwards and forwards from one scene to another often made me feel as though I was getting nowhere, even although that wasn't the case. That one niggle apart, the game plays very smoothly and is a great deal of fun. Simon's humour is in full flow and there are giggles at almost every turn. Some of the situations which he engineers, and the solutions to the problems set, are typical examples of Simon Avery at his best. There Is an over-familiar parrot, a slug which falls in love with you, a horse which will not let you ride it, a car for which there are no ignition keys and not to mention trips to between Heaven and Hell... DAAW2 contains more than enough to keep you interested and occupied and will stimulate your interest and sense of humour in equal measure. Reviewed by Phill Ramsay, played on the Amstrad CPC
| 
