The Time Machine

The Time Machine is the second in the Mysterious Adventure series of text adventures by Brian Howarth. You are a newspaper reporter, come to investigate the eccentric professor who lives all by himself out on the moors. You start the game in a swamp and must find your way to an old manor house. When you get there, you find the place deserted though. Ultimately you must rescue the professor by finding three missing prisms which control his time machine, which are lost in time. Items found in one destination sometimes have to be used in another.

As the other games in the series, the game uses an interpreter similar to the Scott Adams adventure engine, and thus also has the same limitations - a basic two-word parser, limited vocabulary, and brief descriptions. Illustrations are included in Spectrum, Commodore 64, Dragon and Oric ports.