Ratings and Reviews by AmberShards

Unlike others who have loved this game (and most games I review it seems are of this variety), I can't say that I enjoyed Lost Pig after about an hour. It starts strong, unfolding the world of the PC and who the PC is bit by bit. Then the impossible puzzles hit. You'll bang your head against the keyboard as you strive for even two points and move game objects around at random, utterly perplexed as to what is supposed to do what. The NPCs that you find may be loquacious, but they talk an awful lot about nothing at all. As that doesn't help you in any way with your objective in the game, their conversational skills quickly become annoying and frustrating. In short, the pacing and puzzle difficulty are seriously out of whack. It's a shame, because there's obviously been no small effort expended on the early parts of the game and the conversation structure. Playing Lost Pig is like you're driving a new car and just as you reach second gear, you drive off a cliff.

No, it's not IF. On one hand, this should receive zero stars. On the other hand, it does use the Z-machine. What is it, besides a game with a lackluster name? It's one of those "make the colored objects touch to get points" game, where the more balls of the same color that touch, the higher your score. It comes with a hall of fame with some scores already filled in. It's not timed, but you only play one screenful. There are no bonus rounds. It's a simple, straight-ahead, entertaining arcade game. It deserves some kudos for using the Z-machine to do it, and succeeds at what it set out to do. With that said, there are far better examples of this particular arcade genre.

Zork I holds a special place in my heart. Although I had played Adventure and enjoyed it, I fell in love with Zork I. Adventure was ultimately frustratingly random and obscure, but Zork I was descriptive, challenging, and intriguing. It kept you hungering to find out just what was around the bend, and what the next puzzle would reveal. If you factor in the state of the technology at its release, when moves would occasionally cause the floppy disk drive to whir, you can get a feel for the fun that playing IF was then. You never knew just what would happen when that disk whirred.

In Zork I, you are an adventurer and the world is your oyster. While the plot may be tired by now, when Zork I was released, this was novel. Blame the following deluge of rip-offs and hacks for the decline of the cave crawl genre, not one of the founding games. Though to be fair, a goodly part of Zork I occurs outside, so the "cave crawl" genre is a rough fit.

The prose is evocative without being excessively detailed and by turns slyly humorous; the puzzles are easy-to-medium in difficulty; the parser is head-and-shoulders above Adventure's, which is to say just a step or two behind modern Inform. Also worth noting is that Zork I encourages you to explore by not introducing movement-blocking puzzles right away. This is a key factor in the sense of immersion.

While Adventure opened the world of IF to many, it was Zork I that made people want to stay. If you have never played this game, play it by all means.