The neverending story is a text adventure game based on the movie of the same name which in turn is based on a book. The story revolves around fantasia, a world full of magic and wonderfull creatures. Fantasia is being threatened by the nothing, an unknown evil that is destroying the entire world bit by bit. In an attempt to save the world the empress has called for the bravest warrior called Atreyu and asks if he would quest to find a way to defeat the nothing. Without knowing where to begin or how to succeed Atreyu sets off on his horse Artax beginning his great quest. All this is told from the eyes of a child who is reading a book in which all of this is written and unknowningly he becomes part of the story because of this. The game follows the plot of the movie in a nonlinear way and it’s a bit of a shame because some events should succeed each other but in the game you can skip them altogether. This combined with the fact that little of the actual story is told in the game means that unless you have read the book or seen the movie you have no clue what is going on. There are three chapters in the game, the first area near the tower, the forgotten city and finally the destruction of fantasia.
The intro has the tune from the movie and on each of the three systems it’s pretty close to the original but the c64 one is definately the best but the rest of the game is silent. The main screen is build up by two parts, the upper part shows a picture of the ivory tower and to the left of that it shows a small picture of a person or thing that is in the location you are in. You can see the written explanations on the bottom of the screen where you can also type in any commands. The command structure is very simple and the parser does not contain difficult commands which perhaps was intended to make the game easier for a younger audience. The game actually isn’t really that hard because each chapter is quite short and there are very few items to find and things to do but unfortunately this makes the game a bit short.
I like the movie quite a lot actually so it’s a shame that this game doesn’t live up to it, it’s too easy for most people and it’s a bit too hard for the younger ones. This combined with the fact that the chapters are not very detailed make this only a below average game so unless you really like the movie/book or if you want to try a reasonably easy text adventure than you probably won’t have much fun with this game.
Overal rating: 6/10
This game was released for three different systems here are some notes:
| Amstrad CPC | Released in 1985. Game has been tested but not completed with winAPE v2.0 A6. Each of the three versions has a different title screen, this one featuring Falkor the dragon. |
| C64 | Released in 1985. Game has been tested but not completed with CCS64 v2.0 win. The title screen features the auryn, the pendant from the empress. |
| ZX Spectrum | Released in 1985. Game has been tested but not completed with emuZwin v2.5. This title screen contains images from a number of characters in the movie. Unlike the others the music plays throughout the entire game. |
| Date added | Dec-27-2004 19:39 |
| Name | Neverending story, the |
| Developer | Ocean |
| Publisher | Ocean |
| First released | 1985 |
| Genre | Interactive Fiction |
