Spellbound Dizzy is an adventure

Adventure game

An adventure game is a video game in which the player assumes the role of protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and puzzle-solving instead of physical challenge. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media such as literature and film,...

 video game, featuring the character Dizzy, released in December 1990 by Codemasters

Codemasters

The Codemasters Software Company Limited, or Codemasters is a British video game developer founded by Richard and David Darling in 1986...

. The series was originally developed by the Oliver twins

Oliver Twins

The Oliver Twins are two British brothers, Philip and Andrew Oliver, who started to professionally develop computer games while they were still at school. Their first game, Super Robin Hood for the Amstrad CPC, was published in 1985 by Codemasters...

; however, they had little involvement with this title other than executive sign off - confident in leaving Big Red Software

Big Red Software

Big Red Software, also known as The Big Red Software Company Ltd, was a computer game developer set up in the UK in 1988 by Paul Ranson. It was bought out by, and merged with, Eidos Plc in 1995 along with Simis and Domark forming Eidos Interactive....

 to redesign the graphics engine and design the game and puzzles.

The game is the fifth in the Dizzy series, excluding arcade spinoffs such as Kwik Snax

Kwik Snax

Kwik Snax is an arcade style maze video game play developed by the Oliver Twins and was published in 1990 by Codemasters for the Amstrad, Spectrum, Commodore 64, DOS, and Amiga...

 and boasted the largest map of any Dizzy game yet at the time of release, having over 100 screens. Consequently, it is by far longer and more difficult than any other game in the series. Еven 'instant walkthrough' would take about one and a half hours .

The gameplay is also complicated by the fact that Dizzy loses health when falling from heights (the feature was removed from subsequent games). This level of difficulty made many players cheat

Cheat

Cheat can refer to:* A cheat code, a hidden means of gaining an advantage in a computer or video game* Cheat!, a television show on the G4 network* The Cheat, a 1915 Cecil B...

 by using patch

Patch

-Computing:* Patch , fix for a software program* Patch , UNIX utility* Patch, a 3-D Bézier curve used in computer graphics, or a primitive in some 3-D software packages* Patch Media, website for local news and events-Electronics:...

es giving Dizzy unlimited lives.

The game also presents slightly different user interface, graphics and concepts that never occurred earlier or later in the series: an inventory with items icons, separated collection (stars) and healing (apples) items (in other games they are always '2 in 1'), hidden passages and dynamic animated set pieces (the travel tunnels, the mining cart etc) There are additional Dizzy animations and abilities, Swimming for instance (once you get the Flippers), Eating frames, Concussed frames(after falling) and so on.

Plot

Dizzy's been visiting his local friendly Wizard Theo. Now Theo, who may be a dab hand in the waving of wands area, is not much cop at the filing-things-away-neatly department, and he's left his Book of Really Powerful Spells lying round in his laboratory.
What's more, the book's been left open at the page headed A Really, Really, Powerful Spell (That Shouldn't Be Read Out Loud).
Whether Dizzy actually read the heading is not known but - yikes! - he said the spell and it's caused a catastrophe- Dizzy's spirited all his Yolk Folk chums and Wizard Theo into the underworld! Cripes!
There's only one course of action open to the brave little hero- read the spell again and spirit himself into the underworld to save his rotund group of pals!