Halls of the Things

At last I've gotten around to extracting my old Spectrum and its games from storage. I'll post about the Spectrum itself later, but for now I thought I'd post about one of the games, with more posts about other games to follow.

The game I've chosen is Halls of the Things, from 1983. My memory of this game was that it was bloody hard (for me, at least), but also bloody compulsive, constantly dragging you back for another attempt to beat the level. I recall spending hours taking turns with a friend to get that little bit further. The gameplay involved blasting your way through seven levels, each containing a different style of randomly-generated maze, collecting (surprise, surprise) seven rings, and eventually finding your way out. The graphics were pretty basic (see below), but the hyperbole on the inlay card wasn't: "Combining a fantasy world scenario with the finest quality arcade style action yet seen on the ZX Spectrum, Halls of the Things brings you a new dimension in computer games - the animated adventure." Hmm.

Some intrepid soul has actually posted a video of the game on YouTube:

As you will see, he ends up getting killed, which I remember happening to me all too often. In fact, I don't think I ever completed the game, although I'm not sure whether this was due to the game's difficulty, or just my incompetence.