Oil’s Well is one of my favorite games on the Commodore 64. And now there’s a new game for the Amiga that’s inspired by Oil’s Well, and also by Pac-Man. That’s a cool combination, right? And it certainly is. The game is Gemdalus and it plays great and has a couple of nice touches to potentially keep the gameplay fresh. Things like slow-downs, full stops, invincibility, etc. I found the game fun, but a little bit on the easy side. On my first try, I reached level 10 easily. I was not looking forward to playing those levels all over again in a second session. And to my surprise I don’t have to. The game remembered where I’d left off! What a great touch!

And there’s also procedurally-generated mazes. The music is great (especially through “loud speakers” which are a requirement for the game :), but starts to bore after a while. I didn’t notice a lot of variety in the color schemes of the levels, but maybe I need to pay more attention. Different color schemes were always a nice thing about Oil’s Well.

Beacuse my Amiga 500 can’t handle the required AGA graphics, I’m playing the game on the Turbo Chameleon V2 with the MiniMig core (a version from 2021). The weird thing is that there’s a Guru Meditation ta first, but after that the game starts just fine. Maybe the Guru’s a joke from the developer?
The game controls fine, which is paramount for such games and you can even play the game with the cursor keys , which is not something I’ll recommend doing with the C64 keyboard!