Sinclair ZX Spectrum

Blood Valley

A loose adaptation of the 1986 pair of fantasy gamebooks, this game gives a solo player the opportunity to control the actions of The Quarry (player's pick of barbarian, priest or thief), a slave who is once a year selected to run free temporarily, before being run down in the valley of Gad, hunted by its cruel ruler the Archveult, and tortured to death. Survival is possible only through escaping the valley or slaying the hunter. (A second player has the option of controlling the pursuing Archveult simultaneously in splitscreen mode.) The duel the game sets up is only the last of many threats -- the game imposes countless re-spawning enemies in the players' paths, needing to be endlessly slain with a tap of the attack button (and their random loot gathered with a tap of a different button) while remaining always on the move and attempting to achieve a shopping list of incremental objectives necessary for greater success, "helpfully" listed on the screen at all times in most versions.