The Lost World

Being the Account of E. D. Malone, Daily Gazette — Tutorial

This is a parser adventure. You type what Malone does and the game tells you what happens. Everything below can also be done with the buttons under the command line, so you never have to guess a word you have not been shown.

How to Begin

Open the game from your Tronsoft Games library. A cover screen appears with two optional switches — narration, which reads the story aloud, and ambience, which plays the synthesised background sound. Both are optional and neither affects a single puzzle. Press GO AND FIND SOMETHING WORTH DOING to start.

You begin in a parlour in Streatham, in the middle of a proposal that is going badly. Type TALK GLADYS and keep talking until she has finished. Then read the room description again — it tells you Fleet Street is north — and go NORTH.

If you are ever unsure, type HINT. There is a three-level hint ladder for every room in the game: the first rung nudges, the second explains, and the third simply tells you the command. Hints are free and cost you nothing at all.

Controls

Type a command and press Enter, or use the buttons. The buttons under ACTIONS include eight verbs written specially for this story; they are marked in a different colour. DIRECTIONS shows the ways out of the room you are in, and CONTEXT offers whatever is to hand.

Kind	Commands
Looking	`LOOK`, `EXAMINE <thing>`, `READ <thing>`, `SEARCH <thing>`
Handling	`TAKE <thing>`, `DROP <thing>`, `USE <thing>`, `OPEN`, `CLOSE`
People	`TALK <person>` — and talk again; conversations advance
This story	`BRIDGE`, `CLIMB`, `LIGHT`, `NET`, `RECORD`, `RELEASE`, `SHOOT`, `SIGNAL`
Information	`INVENTORY`, `JOURNAL`, `QUESTS`, `ACHIEVEMENTS`, `STATS`, `SCORE`, `MAP`
System	`HINT`, `SAVE`, `RESTORE`, `UNDO`, `RESTART`, `TRANSCRIPT`, `HELP`, `ABOUT`

RECORD is the important one. Malone is a reporter, and his notebook is the only instrument on this expedition that never fails.

RECORD
<thing>

writes down something remarkable that is in front of you. There are eight things in the game worth recording. You will need at least 5 of them written up before you can get home, and the reason why is one of the better moments in the story, so it is not spoiled here.

Turn Order

The game waits for you; nothing happens until you type. One command is one turn, and each turn resolves in a fixed order:

your command is echoed;
the action happens, and its immediate result is printed;
anything it caused — objectives, points, achievements, notebook entries — is printed next;
and if you moved, the new room is described last.

Looking around, checking your inventory, reading the notebook, consulting the map and asking for a hint are all free: they do not advance the turn counter. Restarting is free too. Anything that changes the world costs one move, including the move that kills you and the move that wins.

Movement

Go in a compass direction, or up, down, in or out:

Full	Short
`NORTH SOUTH EAST WEST`	`N S E W`
`UP DOWN IN OUT`	`U D`
`NORTHEAST NORTHWEST SOUTHEAST SOUTHWEST`	`NE NW SE SW`

The EXITS panel always lists the ways out of the room you are standing in, and the MAP panel draws the places you have been, grouped into the five regions of the story. A locked way out will tell you what is stopping you rather than simply refusing.

Two boundaries in this story are one-way, and both are announced before you cross them. Sailing from London ends London, and the plateau closes behind the party when the bridge goes into the chasm. Neither can strand you: they cost points you might have collected, never your ability to finish.

Scoring

150 points in all.

Source	Each	Total
8 required objectives	15	120
1 optional objective	10	10
4 keepsakes carried home	5	20

SCORE shows where you stand, QUESTS lists what is outstanding, and ACHIEVEMENTS tracks the 14 of them. A lean run finishes at 120; collecting everything makes 150.

Winning

You win by producing evidence in Queen's Hall that a hostile audience cannot laugh at. Getting there means crossing to the plateau, surviving it, finding the one cave in eighty that goes through the hill, and — this is the part the whole story is built around — not arriving with only a notebook. Professor Challenger has already tried drawings, a photograph and his word of honour, in front of the same people, and it did not work. The final scene will show you exactly why, and then hand you the one thing that does. The measured winning route is 87 moves for full marks.

Losing

Four commands in this game will kill Malone. Three are on the plateau and one is in the tunnel out, and every one of them is described in plain language in the room text before you can reach it — if a room tells you not to do something, that is the game being honest with you rather than daring you.

Death is never permanent and never a dead end. Every ending offers you UNDO, which takes back the last move, RESTORE, which returns to a saved game, and RESTART. There is no way to make the game unwinnable without dying, no puzzle can be locked out by using up an item, and no path leaves you stranded.

Saving and Restarting

Every save slot lives in this browser on this device, under one storage key (tronsoft_tife_the_lost_world_save). Your accessibility and display preferences are kept separately by the engine under tife.accessibility.v1, so they persist across games and are not lost when you restart. Nothing is uploaded anywhere.

SAVE writes the quick slot; SAVE fieldcamp writes a named one.
RESTORE and RESTORE fieldcamp read them back.
The SAVE MANAGER button lists every slot with its room, score and move count.
UNDO steps back one move, and works after a death.
RESTART begins again in Streatham. It does not cost a move and it does not touch your saves.
TRANSCRIPT downloads everything printed so far as a text file.

Restoring a save made before a death puts you back in the game properly, alive and able to carry on to the end.