When an “UNDO” is implemented in a Spectrum game, it often the command OOPS.
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I’ll be interested to see if you manage to complete it without hints. It’s one of the more important of my life’s ambitions to finish a spectrum adventure game without using a walkthrough.
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I completed it back in the day, without hints, when I was reviewing it. But then, back then we expected to restart games many times and also not expect to solve everything instantly… Solutions and new ideas to try would often come days or weeks later.
Games like Celtic Carnage were written for a specific small, community of players; many of whom knew each other and played each others games. Being familiar with games of the time, and being able to get in the right mindset, helps.
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To be honest, I already peaked at a walkthrough. The expected input and output is slightly different from what I’m used to in Inform/TADS games. I was worried I was simply missing the right command to open the doors in the game! But it turns out they indeed start out locked. 
It’s not really my ambition to do it without a walkthrough anyway; I’m more interested in experiencing the game, solving hopefully most of it myself, but without spending too much time in a stuck state.
By the way, the historical setting feels well-researched and a lot more interesting than just some random fantasy clichés thrown together. So far the puzzles are also pretty fair!
Yes, given that it was written before the Internet was widely available as a research tool, Ian did a good job with the historical settings. All four of the games in the series are good, although I was less fond of the first; Phoenix. The Aztec setting of the third game, as well as the Celtic setting of this fourth instalment, were particularly interesting.
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I daresay your life’s ambitions are loftier than mine - but glad you’re enjoying it all the same.
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Okay, no doubt a really stupid question, but what do I do when my keyboard suddenly starts typing arrows and arithmetical symbols instead of the letters I’m trying to type?
Okay. Randomly pressing some thing solved it… not sure why though!
You will have put the emulated Spectrum into one of its extended or shifted keyboard modes. Keys on a 48K Spectrum had multiple functions, depending which mode the cursor was in. Different emulators use different PC keyboard combinations to access these modes, usually a combination of left/right controls and shifts. It’s not normally an issue in a Quilled or PAWed game.
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The Keyboard section here explains the five different keyboard modes of the ZX Spectrum:
World of Spectrum - Documentation - ZX Spectrum manual - Chapter 1 .
Of course you will also have to work out how the Spectrum keys are mapped to keys on your modern keyboard in the particular emulator you are using.
This may all seem crazy now, but back in the day it was amazing and we loved it.
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I don’t know about crazy. I started out a little later than you guys, on an 8086 IBM compatible with MS-DOS, but I certainly messed around with autoexec.bat files and typed in BASIC computer games from books I borrowed in the library and stuff like that. I know there was life before plug-and-play. 
At least it had a real keyboard! For maximum authenticity, you should try playing it on the bouncy rubber calculator keypad thing that the original spectrum had.
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You know what the computer on the photo is lacking? A big sticker above the F1-F12 keys showing all the WordPerfect 5.0 shortcuts! That’s my youth. 
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Who puts a desktop computer on a bed?!
Someone with too many computers maybe?
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That was quite a nice game! I used the walkthrough mainly to find out where I could go – you need to keep track of place names during the game and find methods for travelling to those places – but this was mostly a very fair game. The ending would have probably made more sense if I had played the earlier instalments of the saga too.
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Trying Time Quest at the moment, and I’m having trouble getting the game to repeat the room description. L and LOOK don’t work. Any idea what might? (As a workaround, it seems I can use SAVE.)
R for REDESCRIBE LOCATION is standard in Quill games.
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