Reviews by Cena

On my first play-through, I wandered around in the woods for 44 turns before quitting out, having lost sight of the house early on and seemingly unable to find my way back to it.

I'm not well-versed enough in the Zork family genealogy to do a real comparison, but it feels just as annoying as it did when I first played Infocom's Zork I in the '80s.

It's a wonder how formative it remains; I still can't see a random white house with a small mailbox out front without a momentary frisson of recognition. (I did miss the mailbox in this version.)

Still, Zork/Zork-likes are like the "Stairway to Heaven" of IF: still great, still influential, but I could live without hearing it again in this lifetime.

See also: Castle.

Wander is maybe the first IF-writing system. It's playable on an instance running on Amazon Web Services, and comes with 4 'databases', or game worlds, you can choose from: Aldeberan III, Castle, Library and Tut (Binary Arithmetic Tutorial). I spent some time poking around it, but found myself frequently stymied by guess-the-verb and un-clued puzzles.

Regardless, it was an interesting experience, probably best accompanied by the saga kicked off by Jason Dyer:

https://bluerenga.blog/2015/03/19/lost-mainframe-games/

The game was ultimately found:

https://ahopeful.wordpress.com/2015/04/22/wander-1974-a-lost-mainframe-game-is-found/


Jason Dyer also has a review of the 'Castle' database here:

https://bluerenga.blog/2015/12/21/castle-using-wander-system-1974/