Reviews by End Master

This was one of the first Infocom games I got along with Zork I. While I went back to each one about equally, the writing in this one is what kept drawing me back in. Good thing it was so funny because I never got very far in it until I finally bought the hint booklet a few years later.

Up until this point, I had only really been familiar with Hitchhiker’s thanks to a mini-series of it that was on PBS. I remember enjoying it with my parents when we watched it, so it made sense that they bought it for me at some point.

While this doesn’t have nearly the same issues as the IFs based on Dracula or Frankenstein, there is still a bit of a confined feeling since you’re essentially playing “the book.” In the game’s defense though, it does deviate quite a bit from the book in many ways even if still follows the general plot line of the first part of it. Generally the further you get in the game, the more it starts to deviate.

The feelies that originally came with the game were pretty fun. Ranging from an empty plastic bag (supposedly containing a microscopic invasion fleet.) to a pair of cardboard glasses (Peril Sensitive Sunglasses).

Funny writing aside and getting back to the puzzles, yeah this one was pretty unforgiving. The babble fish one is the most infamous, but that wasn’t really the only one. It’s just one of the “worst” since it comes pretty early in the game so you get stuck pretty quickly. In fact most of the beginning of the game until you get to the Heart of Gold is difficult mainly because of timers. You only have so many turns to escape before earth gets destroyed. You escape to the Vogon ship and you only have so many turns before they find you. So you really have to make sure you do everything necessary in those situations before moving on. Lots of times if you didn’t take a certain item, you won’t be able to get it again and without it, you won’t be able to win.

The game will outright lie to you in a few instances, there’s also at least one time you can end up in a literal walking dead situation via randomness. (The game will actually tell you, you'll die in a few turns, but you can still play up until then) Add the fact the game will often outright mock you when you die and it’s definitely a case of the game creator trolling the player.

Not that I’m against trolling the player of course. But given how much the game stacks the deck against you, I can’t imagine most completed the game without a guide. Which sort of defeats the purpose to some degree because it gets to the point where you’re not really “playing” so much as you’re just reading a book every once in awhile you type commands to move the story along. (Unless the point was all a cunning plan by Infocom to sell more hint booklets!)

Still, I can’t say I didn’t enjoy the game, even if I was doing more reading than playing.

I’m pretty sure I just got this one out of the sense of not wanting to come away with nothing from Electronic Boutique at the time. Didn’t really read what it was about. The word “ghost” caught my eye, just looked at the cover and the name and figured, yeah this looks like horror, maybe this will be like The Lurking Horror.

Yeah, it wasn’t as I soon learned.

Of course that’s my own fault, so I can’t get too disappointed about that, well I can, but that’s not the only thing I didn’t care for.

I will point out a positive which is the fact of how they did four variations of the game. Doing it by your favorite color was an odd choice, but it was as good of way as any I suppose. About the only problem with this is I wasn’t really engaged in the game the first time around to want to replay it.

Time passes in the game so you only have a limited time with figuring out the mystery. There are also certain events that are scheduled, like dinner, gathering in the drawing room, bedtime, etc, but of course you’re not really bound to be present for things like this. It’s more of a flavor thing and probably during your first play through to gather information.

Amusingly you can by pass the formalities and solve the mystery as soon as you get in the castle assuming you know where all the needed items are and arresting the culprit. Pretty sure if you’re fast enough you can confront the killer with everything before dinner even starts.

You just don’t get involved with the other characters too much other than some brief talking. As I remember in my play through, I kept flirting and kissing with one of the female characters who seemed to be into it quite a bit based on her reactions. I tried visiting her in her bedroom later at night (through the secret passage) and doing more, but you don’t get much further. In fact the game says something to the degree of “Hey this is an nice game, not a video nasty.”

Yeah, that was more entertaining.

The thing about arresting/confronting the culprit should have been dangerous as well. Like maybe you’d need at least some sort of weapon on you to make sure you didn’t get shot or something similar. Seems sort of laughable they would just give up so easily.

All in all the game just rather dull regardless of what color you played as (Just like the boardgame!), but at least it came with some nice feelies.

One of the issues of writing reviews for the old Infocom games as opposed to other old text adventures is they were popular enough to stand the test of time so more people even to this day have gone over them quite a bit already. Still, no reason to not try to to say a few things about them even if one is probably treading old ground.

Lurking Horror honestly is probably my favorite out of all the Infocom games mainly due to the genre. Funny thing is I had no real idea of what I was supposed to be doing in it for quite awhile. I probably wandered the halls of the university several times wondering what to do never realizing the “plot” didn’t actually start until I turned on and logged on to the computer I started out sitting in front of.

Might have helped if I’d read some of the feelies that came with the game immediately since there’s clues about in game elements in some of the booklets (like a needed password for the game). I guess I was more fascinated by the little rubber centipede instead.

While I liked this one a lot, there are more than few problems with the game as far as the storyline.

The plot that sort of drives you to be wandering university in the first place doesn’t really inspire. I can’t say losing my term paper in the system would be a big motivator for me to suddenly wander the university’s steam tunnels and forgotten basements. Might have been better if your character had a friend that was one of those that had gone missing which caused you to start your search. At least more of a motivator.

Another thing that would have increased the horror aspect would have been a more pro-active “lurking horror.” As it stands most of the hostiles you encounter are stationary. You’ll encounter them in one area, deal with them once and then they’re gone. The semi-exceptions being the rats and maintenance man who even then still only move around in a particular area until you figure out how to get past them.

I could have seen maintenance man continually popping up randomly nearly anywhere (Because, y’know he’s a maintenance man) a lot more as a constant threat much like how the thief would move about in Zork I. Being occasionally being harassed by an undead janitor would have at least made wandering empty corridors a little more interesting.

The timer aspect and the way it was integrated into the game was fine and at least there was a way to extend it (up to four times)

As far as the parser and puzzles go, well it’s an 80s Infocom game so it’s pretty good for it’s time, though there is ONE very infuriating area involving a ladder where the game really needed to be able to recognize more commands. I swear getting stuck just because I didn’t know I had to specifically use “Lower ladder” as opposed to several other more obvious phrases was the most frustrating thing about the game. Even the maze wasn’t as bad since there was an easy alternate way around it.

Despite the problems though, it doesn’t change the fact that this is the Infocom game I kept coming back to the most.

I played the original Uninvited on the C64. I enjoyed it quite a bit even if it was on the unforgiving side. The original doesn’t really use a parser though so it probably doesn't qualify as an IF in the traditional sense. I guess it could be considered sort of a “static” point and click adventure since you’re using a cursor to click on verbs and objects on the graphics display and only reading text at the bottom as opposed to typing anything in like you would for even something like say Tass Times in Tone Town.

This reboot of the game does a really good job of turning the original into a pure text game. Had to make a few adjustments of course, but that’s to be expected.

The general horror feel isn’t lost, though I can’t say it necessarily does a better job so much as it’s just different. While I do agree that the imagination from pure text can often come up with stronger images in one’s mind, there’s also the idea that what has been seen, cannot be unseen.

The picture of the southern bell ghost for example is fairly iconic for anyone that played the original. Her image is burned into my mind to this day. So I sort of missed seeing her again and the impact of the encounter wasn’t as great. Of course it could just be that horror in general doesn’t really scare me so much as I enjoy more it on a visual level. Probably depends on what you played first too, but I know what I like.

In any case, I have no problems with this update not making the game less lethal for today’s players who seem to squawk at the mere hint of any sort of death outcome in IFs. It’s a farking haunted house filled with ghosts and demons, not a pre-school ball pit. Death should be stalking you around every corner. Even the time limit makes sense in the setting of the game.

Could have gotten rid of the maze though.

Back in the 80s there weren’t many games that let you play as the “bad guy” so seeing something like Knight Orc where you get to play as an orc was enough to interest me. (Hey this was long before playing as an orc was mainstream) This technically qualifies as a graphic text adventure, but not everywhere is accompanied by a picture. In fact, I typically turned them off since it just made the load time longer. This game was nowhere near Corruption level of long load times though.

So Knight Orc is another one of those odd games that had some interesting ideas, but it’s questionable if it shouldn’t have just stuck with one thing. I say this because there’s a big reveal later on in the game which would be considered a major spoiler, so I won’t go too much into it and I’ll just address the first part.

Yes, this another game that divided itself into three parts. First bit involves you being an orc and going about your orc life which mostly involves you getting attacked nearly at every turn by just about every other character walking about the game.

“Hey look an orc! Let’s kill it!” or “I’m fighting a filthy orc!” are words you’re going to be hearing a lot by NPCs. You can somewhat curb this by “disguising” yourself with cloak you can get near the beginning, but it isn’t foolproof. Linger around the other NPCs too long and inevitably one is going to realize you’re an orc. You’re a terrible fighter for the most part too so you’re unlikely to win. Not impossible though.

Getting killed by any of these NPCs isn’t a big deal anyway. You literally just respawn elsewhere in the forest area which is more or less nondescript. You can wander a lot in it and never really get anywhere.

In fact wandering the forests in any direction is rather pointless. There are key locations that you can instantly go to by typing something like RUN TO GIBBET. That’s actually the preferred way to travel. (The game understands a sizable vocabulary) Of course it’s not really readily apparent what all the unique locations are if you’re playing the game for the first time. There’s sort of clues though in the instruction book that came with the game and there actually is one location which allows you to see all of the places you could instantly run to.

Which brings about what it is you’re exactly trying to do in the first place. Well, that’s not really spelled out either. You’re just sort of dropped in the game with no real instructions. Through trial and error (and wandering) I sort of got the idea that I was supposed to figure out how to get back home but the bridge is destroyed.

So you basically have to build a new way to get across which involves rope. However, there is no rope so you have to make a rope which hilariously involves going to all these unique locations and trying to get bits to make a long one. (Halyards, cords, belts, hair, etc)

There’s a few more items you need too, but bits of “rope” are the main things. You’ll also come across a lot of items made of gold which seem like you’re supposed to gather, but most you don’t really need and just act as a distraction.

Manage to accomplish all the goals you need to and get across to your home and you’ll be heading to part two which is where the big reveal happens. Parts two and three both deal with it so they’re more or less played together.

As mentioned earlier and in the title, while this reveal is certainly a concept that makes the game a bit ahead of it’s time, I honestly would have rather been playing a more “mundane” text adventure as a looting and pillaging orc. As it stands, you’re hardly even a “bad guy” given how everyone is just sort of picking on you without provocation most of the time. I’m sure that might have even been the joke of exploring how adventurers generally do just sort of barge into orc lairs and slaughter them all even if they haven’t been doing anything particularly evil and keeping to themselves.

Oh well, I can’t fault the game for what it did do though even if it didn’t live up to my own expectations.

I saved the “best” for last, or at least the one I kept coming back to the most which is Night of the Walking Dead.

The goal of this one unfortunately isn’t about fighting the hordes of undead, it’s just you trying to find your Aunt’s locket so you can prove your claim to the inheritance. So naturally the logical course of action is to go dig her up and bring it back.

Wandering about a graveyard digging up your dead relatives isn’t quite as glamorous as seeking out King Solomon’s Mines or a lost temple with a golden moon goddess statue, but you’re not the fortunate son.

While you may not be fighting off hordes of undead, there are certainly are zombies walking about. They go for your head quite a bit too, though not to eat your brains, they just wallop you in the back of the skull from time to time and steal your items, making things a lot more inconvenient for you.

While not quite as bad as constantly backtracking to gather water to survive, this ongoing event just stretches the game out longer than it needs to be. There’s actually a few places the zombies will outright kill you, but most of the time it’s a punch to the back of the head, waking up and finding a vital item like your flashlight is missing and you finding it elsewhere later. Funny thing is the zombies in this tend to only move about when you’re not looking directly at them. They’re like Dr. Who’s Weeping Angels in this aspect.

You’ll be doing a lot of backtracking and running between a graveyard and an island. More than a few places you can find yourself among the walking dead if you drop certain items in the wrong place, forget to do something before doing something else, etc. making the game unwinnable. Lot of juggling items around too due to limited inventory space.

I’m almost certain that it was the setting that kept me coming back despite a lot of the frustration tactics employed in this game. The version I had used a light gray background which for a game filled with text sort of made it a bit immersive for the time (Foggy graveyard).

Could have been much better, but for the time it was definitely one that kept my attention.

Moving on to the second game of this collection is Revenge of the Moon Goddess.

The goal of this one is to find a lost city and get the idol of the Moon Goddess. Despite taking place in another hot environment (South America) there’s none of the gathering water every five turns nonsense of which I was very glad about.

This adventure is a very straight forward one compared to the other two games in this bundle. Just a simple search for an idol in a jungle setting and solving puzzles along the way type thing. The stuff you have to solve all feels natural seeing as you’re exploring a lot of temples with traps and such.

While this makes for an adequate adventure, it didn’t really stand out too much to me.

And once again I will be doing this next group of reviews like a mini-series since I got them all packaged together in a box called “The Thriller Series” from CodeWriter. Not quite an ominous black box with “Terror” written in big capital letters, but it had an interesting (and misleading) picture on the cover.

As I remember my mom got this from a local corner store of all places off a rack. I have no idea if these were ever sold separately, but they were small enough to all fit on one disk (Unlike the Terror games) so it’s just as well there were three.

It looks like some of these were re-released later in the 90s with different games bundled in MS-DOS, but the collection I had was for the C64 in the 80s.

One interesting side bit with all three games is they have a note you can find somewhere near the beginning of them that acts as a minor advertisement. It basically asks if you need help beating the game and gives you a mailing address of where you can send money to get a hint sheet, map or complete solution (One dollar for the first two and three or five dollars for the last). In game relic of a time when you couldn’t just look things up on the internet!

This first review will focus on Perils of Darkest Africa. The goal is to get the treasure of King Solomon’s Mines.

This one was my least favorite of the three mainly because it had a survival element that made the game longer and more annoying than it really needed to be. You had a thirst meter of sorts and the game would mention when you needed water and to take a drink.

Some problems. First, you don’t even start with a canteen of any sort. So you have to get something to gather water with first, granted it’s pretty close by, but it’s still annoying and the plastic bag you find and end up using throughout the game is your “canteen.”

Really? I prepared for a trip to Africa to seek King Solomon’s Mines and I’m drinking water out of a ziplock bag? It’s pretty silly that it wasn’t just a regular canteen.

Oh and you have to keep refilling this bag of water from time to time from various sources. So be prepared for a lot of backtracking. Granted a lot of early text adventures involve backtracking to a degree, but in this case it’s really just a time waster. Though you’ll be using the plastic bag for stuff other than water in places, but that just makes this even sillier.

If it seems like I’m complaining about this aspect a lot, well it’s because it really annoyed the hell out of me. Never mind the fact you really need to carry this vital item with you most of the time and your inventory space is limited as it is.

In fact you’ll be doing a lot of dropping and picking up items due to the limited inventory space.

As for the puzzles and parser, they’re probably fine for a game of this era. It’s the above issues mentioned that are the problem to the point where I would have rated the game higher otherwise.

The final terror box entry is Jack the Ripper. While this one was published by the same company, it wasn’t created by the same person as the other three. Though the style certainly feels like it was one of Rod’s works. (This one came out after Drac and Frank, but before Wolf)

Interestingly this one was created by a short lived religious movement at the time called the Silver Sisterhood. (It created a school called St. Brides which is listed as the creator of Jack the Ripper) They mainly believed God was female and returning to matriarchy which they said was true norm. Despite these beliefs or perhaps because of them, they did a game about one of the most infamous serial killers of all time that went around killing women.

The game is also divided into three parts and with this one you really do have to play them in sequence because you have to get a name at the end of each part to proceed at the beginning of the next one. Much more structured in that regard which isn’t a bad thing.

This one out of all the games is probably the bloodiest and for the time I can certain see why this one got the warning on the box. At least one of the pictures not only has a bloody body, but the dead girl also has her breasts exposed. I applaud the ladies of St. Brides for going all out.

The main concept is you’ve been framed as Jack the Ripper and you’re trying to clear your name and find the real Jack. Funny enough this isn’t the only game I’ve played with this theme. A game that would come out later in the 90s called Waxworks had a section like this except it wasn’t a text game of course. Still, can’t help wonder if this game hadn’t influenced a designer on that game.

As far as the descriptiveness and feel, it follows the Dracula style a bit more in that you get a lot of colorful descriptions but it feels like you’re a bit confined. Some of the parts are on a pretty unforgiving timer to solve the puzzles which detracted from what I thought might be the best of the lot.

I’d rank it better than Dracula, but not as good as Wolfman. It’s certainly not as dull as Frankenstein, but it’s about on par with that one for some of the already mentioned reasons.

The third entry in this series is Wolfman. Once again this game has been divided into three parts. Parts one and three deal with you playing as the man infected with lycanthropy. Fighting the curse and eventually finding the cure. The second involves playing as a woman that falls in love with him.

First, I’ll say that out of the three games involving the classic monsters, I found this one to be the best one. It did come out after the other two, so again there is more polish all around, but I just liked playing as the protagonists better. It might have been because unlike Dracula or Frankenstein, there isn’t a proper “werewolf novel” to draw off of and it had to be a little more creative just using the traditional folklore.

This one also has the infamous bloody pictures from time to time that the box warned everyone about. These seem a bit more gruesome in that they’re in the beginning stages of approaching one of the Elvria games (Most notably Personal Nightmare). Still, nothing to shriek in terror about.

The second part of the game is probably the most unusual mainly because the female protagonist’s motivations since it seems a little silly. She takes home some stranger who’s already a bit suspicious and her goal is to spend a night with him without getting ripped apart, but also fall in love (and bed) with him. Oh wait, that’s the plot of 90% of today’s urban horror romance novels. Inserting a romantic angle wasn’t very common in IFs at the time either, now they’re over saturated with the stuff.

Never mind, this game was obviously ahead of its time!

Still, as I said, this one feels a lot more engaging as it dipped into multiple genres, a bit of mystery, drama, the already mentioned romance, and even some action as you even fight another monster in werewolf form and deal with hunters chasing you.

Third time was definitely the charm.