Twisted! Deluxe is an updated, full-color version of Twisted!, an excellent shareware adventure game for the Macintosh by Ray Dunakin.The original Twisted! was a fun text-adventure-with-graphics game coded with World Builder, a now-discontinued adventure game application for the Mac. This Deluxe version features all-new color graphics and a streamlined point-and-click interface in place of a text parser. Twisted! Deluxe starts out similar to the movie of the same name: you are a meteorologist, a ?storm chaser? sent to investigate a tornado. Before long, you end up in Land of Ooz, a bizarre fantasy world filled with talking dragons and other strange creatures, and numerous fascinating puzzles that range from math logic, to riddles and traditional inventory-based puzzles.

The game?s strong point is the many colorful NPCs and excellent puzzles, all of which are logical. None of them is so difficult as to be frustrating, but a few are quite challenging (including some that require you to combine two inventory items together). There is enough challenge here to stump even the most seasoned adventurer from time to time. There are hundreds of locations, dozens of NPCs, and numerous puzzles ? all presented with good graphics and even some great sound effects.

Although billed as a shareware game, the shareware version is the full game that?s not disabled in any way ? paying $15 registration gets you complete solutions and maps. The game is longer than average, and the clean graphics and accessible interface make it much more polished and offers more play value than many commercial titles. The game also works flawlessly in Basilisk II Mac emulator for PC which you can download from here. All in all, if you are looking for a challenging, puzzle-intensive adventure game that is also imaginative to book, Twisted! Deluxe will keep you entertained for hours on end. Purists who prefer old-style parser-based adventure can download the original version of Twisted! from the author's website, as well as check out his other classics. Two thumbs up, way up!