Reviews by dvs
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Strong theme, yet somewhat unsatisfying, September 30, 2022I remember loving this game when I played it back in the 80s.
The theme is strong - the find-the-pyramid start to the game has lots of flavor and excitement as we establish our character to be a selfish jerk. Once we get into the pyramid there are florid descriptions of paintings and a wonderful sense of place as we explore deeper underground.
I loved Indiana Jones movies so all of the traps that lead to instant death are fun and thematic.
The hieroglyphs ... well, they add to the setting, but they don't make much sense. Why are they there? It's like a D+D dungeon with signs on the walls telling you how to avoid the traps or what to do to kill the dragon and get the gold.
I remember the gripping ending from my youth. It's both satisfying and unsatisfying.
I appreciate how this game broke some of the Infocom conventions of the time but I wouldn't recommend it for a modern gamer.
There is a great short story in this game. The author creatively captures the emptiness and cottony lack of motivation in depression. "The clock on the wall ticks the seconds away into the air." However, I'd much rather read this as a short story than play it as an interactive fiction game -- there are too many problems in the gameplay which distracts and confuses from the poignancy of the writing. I found myself doing the minimum to move the story along.
A grand SF adventure with awkward language, May 23, 2022The author wrote this game with so much love. It shows in all the details and the slowly revealed world. I love the setting of a world slowly falling apart and the reluctant hero trying to save it.
However...I had such a hard time visualizing several of the rooms or even solving some of the simpler puzzles due to some awkward language choices. I think simpler, clearer descriptions would have been better than grand words which do set the mood of a grand world...but it kept me from enjoying the game.
There's so much done right ... but by the end I was just trying to finish the adventure rather than enjoying the prose.
However, there are some great scenes I will always remember. This is truly a mixed bag of a game, worth trying to see if you like it.
Works on multiple levels, March 2, 2022The game starts as a simple meet-the-next-goal puzzle game with a young protagonist...but we soon discovered the clever twist and kept unraveling layers of consequences which brought us great joy. Even the ending held a nice surprise for us.
There was gentle hinting that eased us in the correct direction without feeling like we were being railroaded. The language was fresh and joyful.
A delightful game, highly recommended!
The canonical IF dungeon crawl, February 12, 2022It was the original mainframe Zork from the 1980's which showed me that text adventures could do more than just the two word commands of the Scott Adams adventures. The breadth of the dungeon was astounding and I loved the variety of puzzles. My eighth grade self loved the experience.
Zork I reduced the original Zork into bitesized puzzles. I helped my nephews through this dungeon crawl over the past few months, only giving advice when the puzzle just wasn't well clued and I wanted to save them from trying everything. There is a nice feeling of exploring caves but there is so much that just doesn't make sense. The puzzles surrounding the (Spoiler - click to show)egg were particularly well-made.
Although this is a classic game that deserves all of the praise for inspiring so many to write IF, it just isn't that much fun as a game in 2022. Enchanter & Planetfall do a much better job of giving motivation beyond just gathering treasures.
A remarkable but less entertaining conclusion to the Enchanter trilogy, February 1, 2022Spellbreaker is a much larger puzzle (by sheer number of rooms) than the previous two games in the trilogy. However, there are many rooms which are basically a description and a container of a single object. I felt the spareness in these rooms and several of the interactions with characters. I presume there just wasn't space in the original file formats. This game would benefit greatly from a filling out of all of the innovative ideas in the game.
The theme is compelling, some of the puzzles are appropriate tricky, but the final brief concluding paragraph along with the spareness made this game feel very thin. It's an important game for its time but fails to entertain as much as it could.
Well-crafted, self-scaling, puzzle-filled labor-of-love!, December 9, 2021I spent a glorious year playing Curses with my nephew over Zoom. The puzzles are well-crafted and usually obvious in retrospect. Although it starts with wandering around your attic, pretty soon you have adventures in many locations, all of which are cleverly presented and contained. There is so much joy in the witty responses and the vocabulary-expanding descriptions. The in-game hint system (once you find it) is a delight.
We got frustrated mid-game with so many rooms and unused items that we couldn't figure out how to proceed. (Did we not have the right items yet? Did we miss some detail?) The community at intfiction.org provided a few crucial hints that helped us finish.
One can win the game without getting a full score -- perhaps that's a bug or a final "curse" that we can never resolve.
A clever idea in text adventure form, July 26, 2021My nephew and I were amused by this bare-bones vignette in which every turn another minute passes and we're already late and the phone is ringing and ...
We enjoyed the ambiguity of the game and we kept trying to guess the genre. Is it a puzzle to finish the tasks before the time runs out? A Groundhog Day game? A pointed criticism of the banality of corporate cubicle lifetyle? Clearly something was going to happen at some point.
In the end it was amusing but we were annoyed by the sharp edges of the railroaded short story format. Neither of us felt the ends justified the journey, even on a few replays.
Impressive Wordplay, June 21, 2021This game is what Infocom's "Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It" was trying to be, a clever puzzle-based game based on wordplay. The author added depth, political angst, and much more interesting characters and settings. It's an incredible achievement. (And there are different levels of difficulty! It's amazing!)
I, unfortunately, didn't enjoy playing the game even though I was impressed by its scope, depth, and technical prowess. The dark theme felt like it belonged in a separate game. But the main reason was that I was playing (over Zoom) with an eighth grade friend of mine (her first IF!) and when we came across the "double entendre" puzzle we were both extremely uncomfortable with the solution and we stopped playing altogether. (I finished it by myself months later.)
I suppose I should really be aiming that disappointment at IFDB for not having an "adult content" warning on games. It was hard to resist playing the highest rated game on IFDB that was based on wordplay. (It seemed innocent enough!)
Enchanter levelled up , May 31, 2021My friend and I have been using this Pandemic period to play the Enchanter trilogy over Discord. We just finished Sorcerer and we have previously finished Planetfall/Stationfall.
This game was one of our favorites Infocom games we've played. It has a definite story arc, from the tense intro to the final "chapter". Because there were so many red herrings (puzzles that don't need to be solved and items that are never needed) we didn't even know we were in the endgame until we looked at our score and realized we were close.
There were several unique puzzles we hadn't seen before (both areas which had maze-like mechanics). Unlike in Enchanter, we never had to look at any Invisiclue hints to solve them. The setting succeeded in giving us the feeling of constant danger, particularly when we ended up in the super creepy Chamber of Living Death.
A quibble we had were some areas that felt like randomized deaths that were more annoying than fun. (I was ready to give up on getting anything useful from (Spoiler - click to show)the slot machine when we kept getting killed over and over randomly before my partner's perseverance finally paid off.) Otherwise this is a classic worth playing.
An adventure for a first-level magic-user, March 16, 2021This early Infocom game seems well-designed for first-time players to explore the world of text adventures. However, to a modern player, the descriptions are overly spare. I understand that many of the empty rooms are there to give the feeling of being in a castle or wandering around the nearby world but I would have loved to see much more description and interaction.
The gentle intro teaches the player how to cast spells and search the outskirts to find a way into the castle. One has to keep track of food and water throughout the game - although that is a nuisance it does make us aware of the passing of time and the passing of days and nights. It's a little irritating but not bad. Similarly, having to juggle items can be a nuisance but was part of the convention of the time.
Not everything is important. There are some random encounters with critters that don't affect the puzzles but do provide flavor. There's an odd emphasis on discovering treasures that mattered in Zork but seems to be just extra here. There were in fact so many unessential details that we missed something which turned out to be essential. (We ended up having to look at the Invisiclues for hints.)
Mid-game was frustrating as we figured out some tricky puzzles early on and missed out on easier puzzles. We ended up in a dead-end a few times by casting a spell incorrectly but didn't realize this.
Getting to talk to animals was wonderful, and a few of the NPCs were quite entertaining.
The endgame was very satisfying, even though we had to save and restore multiple times to figure out the key things we needed to complete our goals.
Enchanter is a good game for its time and was fun to play.
Lighthearted ghost story, March 5, 2021I played this game with a few friends (over Zoom) over two evenings. We enjoyed the breezy humor and several of the puzzles. Barnaby Mooch was definitely a memorable part of the game, as were several of the rooms in the hotel. We found it distracting to switch between command mode and interaction mode.
After we solved all the puzzles we were presented with a long non-interactive outro which resolved the story plots but we were no longer engaged and were just clicking through to finish. Perhaps if that section were expanded into an epilogue with more interaction it would have more emotional impact.
Puzzles with a Purpose, December 12, 2020I finally finished Trinity, a game I started 20 years ago and finally joined forces with a friend (over Zoom) to finish.
The game could be thought of as in three parts: the prologue, the Wonderland puzzles, and the stressful endgame.
The prologue itself is perfect, one of my favorite compact text adventures with emotional moments and whimsy.
The Wonderland middle section is long but also tightly created with its dreamlike setting and classic Infocom humor and puzzles. This is a save-often, unforgiving type of IF but nothing too tricky.
The endgame has a time limit where you have to do things in an efficient order. The feelies (available online by searching for "trinity feelies") become essential here. This was the weakest section of the game for me - there were more red herrings and harder puzzles. We did have to give up and look at the Invisiclues because we hadn't brought the right item(s) from the middle section (without any hints to guide us).
The ending...well I applaud Brian Moriarty's attempt to be moving and artistic but I thought for a while it was simply buggy. In the version we played (using Lectrote) we actually missed the final few paragraphs so it was even more abrupt for us than it should have been. It didn't have the effect on us as it has for many other players over the years.
It was one of my favorite Infocom replays that still feels fresh after so many years. Highly recommended!
Sweet, sad, funny fiction with few puzzles, December 12, 2020I first played Photopia about 15 years ago and cried at the ending. It took me a while to figure out how the different vignettes fit together and it hit me hard. I had never experienced such emotion playing a silly text adventure. I will always love that about Photopia.
I played the game last night over Zoom with my sister and her two adult sons, introducing them to their first IF experience. They quickly found the boundaries of the interpreter and explored. (What happens if I go north forever? Can I "x up"? How come I can't use this verb which is in the sentence above?) In the end they enjoyed it describing it as a choose-your-own-adventure book or the tabletop role-playing game Expedition.
There are so many clever bits I saw the second time through, how the game feels huge and open and yet is really just railroading through the story. They found rooms I hadn't found in my first playthrough which was a delight. They figured out to just hit "z" when it was clear their actions had no affect (rather than trying to speak to the NPCs). There was one moment when they accidentally hit something and started the next "chapter" before finishing reading the end of the previous vignette. There's no way to go back or scroll up to see what they missed. (We were playing the web version at iplayif.com.)
They want to play another game together sometime over Zoom. (Not the Z-code interpreter.) Thank you, Adam Cadre, for bringing us long-distance joy!
Painfully dated and old-fashioned, September 12, 2020This classic Infocom game is essentially seven short adventures, mostly needing knowledge of idioms or other wordplay, with a final endgame.
A few of the short adventures were basic and occasionally amusing, but half (Eat Your Words, Act the Part, Manor of Speaking, the endgame) are so random or painful or annoying to solve. The only way I could get through was with the hints but I found these extremely annoying.
Perhaps I would have enjoyed the struggles and found the wordplay and amusing in high school but in 2020 this game did not age well.
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