Everest Challenge

Break Space

Dave

Mpk

EVEREST CHALLENGE Mustard Tiger Free Dave's Review In 1953, Sir Edmund Percival Hilary planted both boots firmly at the top of Mount Everest. He surveyed the landscape, then got out his selfie-stick and ordered Sherpa Tenzing to hide. Little did he know, that seventy-odd years later, anyone would be able 'to summit' from the comfort of their own home on a ZX Spectrum. Everest Challenge is a resource management game with the goal, unsurprisingly, to scale all 8849m of Mount Everest. In the real world, a summit attempt starts around 5000m at base camp, but this game sneers at a poxy 4km ascent and starts you at ZERO. Best not to dwell on the details because finding the nearest place at sea level would mean leaving Nepal entirely! The graphics are simple, but atmospheric – they may look like UDGs but this is done entirely in assembler and the sprites, well-sprite, moves as smooth-as. Apart from the occasional glowing fire, the game is all white, but it's far from monochrome: the bright vs non-bright PAPER 7 has a huge contrast which is redolent of glistening snow against a brooding slate-grey sky. It's enhanced by the simple beeper pit-pat of your feet. There are not that many things to keep track of, but you will need to read the instructions or you'll be dead before you scale the equivalent of Primrose Hill-a sobering thought for any London-dwelling flaneur. The most important is Health: if this goes then it's literally game over. The most immediate is Stamina: it plummets as you climb and restores while you rest (presumably while ostentatiously blowing into cupped hands as people do). Lose your stamina and you slow to a crawl and your health deteriorates. Balanced against that is Warmth: it slowly drops when not in a tent or by a fire, but quickly drops when standing. If warmth bottoms out then your health suffers. Scattered along the route (possibly by lowly paid and highly expendable Sherpas) are tents, campfires, health & energy supplements, and nourishing hot soup; each of which can be carried up to 3 at a time, and metered out well enough to hopefully see you to the top. You get a choice of 5 routes, each randomly generated by a different seed, and this exposes the game's biggest flaw – there is no difficulty gradient. It doesn't take long to work out a good strategy, and once you've done that then the main challenge is enduring the 3 hour slog to the summit. I completed route 4 over several snapshots and yes it was absorbing & zen, but some jeopardy would have been welcome. I enjoyed Everest Challenge, and would even say it's better than the real thing-you get to tick a box without risking a cerebral haemorrhage. However, there's a lot of potential for Mustard Tiger to develop it into something shorter, deeper and more thrilling. It could even include a Yeti this time...

I could really use a soup about now.

Wait, did I remember to pack the camera?