Ratings and Reviews by deathbytroggles

Considered one of the most difficult games in the Infocom catalogue, Spellbreaker deploys an excellent plot that neatly and satisfyingly wraps up the Enchanter trilogy. Yet, as seems to be in the case in all of his games, Dave Lebling’s puzzle structure maddeningly gets in the way of most of the fun.

Magic is failing in the Zork universe, with spells by even the most powerful sorcerers fizzling out on the regular. During a council meeting to discuss the problem, a shadowy figure (presumably armed with the cleesh spell) turns everyone but you into an amphibian. Unable to chase the figure down but obtaining a magical white cube in the process, you must explore the far reaches of the empire to save your colleagues and magic itself.

By using a spell to investigate its mystical properties, the cube transports you to a void, presumably inside the cube itself. From there you can go various directions to explore a random area (in the real world) in search of additional cubes. Each cube contains its own void and connection to other parts of the world. Delightfully, each area is not its own vacuum; you will need to acquire spells and secular items to help you solve puzzles in other sections. Sometimes you will need to return to the same cube on multiple occasions and multi-step puzzles abound.

This setup is frankly brilliant, giving a sense of realism to the adventure while allowing the player to work on several different puzzles at once. At times you need to draw connections between the worlds to understand how your actions in one area can affect another. In true Zorkian fashion, there is little sense of atmospheric continuity; for example, a slippery field of talking boulders lays near a random treasure vault with no explanation for their existence. While there is a bit less randomness to the map than in Sorcerer, it still feels difficult to be truly immersed in a world where nothing seems to make any sense.

For a while I quite enjoyed myself, landing a couple of eureka moments while solving puzzles. But mixed in with some truly fun brain teasers (including several involving the manipulation of time) are monotonous math problems, random chance exercises, and instant death rooms. One requires you to map out an area while trying to corner another party in order to catch them. This would be fine if there was a pure solution, but the movement of the other party is random and it took me almost a half hour of repetition to catch them despite knowing exactly what to do. There’s a coin-weighing puzzle, which are boring enough in their own right, and a slog when needing to do so via text commands. A copyright protection puzzle also comes at a very key moment about midway through the game, and should you answer incorrectly, you won’t even find out until the very end, requiring you to replay large swaths of the game, including those two obnoxious puzzles just mentioned. At least in Sorcerer, the copyright protection was at the beginning and required some deduction; this one is just mean, given that a simple typo could set you back hours.

And there is so much learning by dying. While a few of these instances can theoretically be avoided with some lucky educated guesses, at least one situation is literally a 50/50 shot. And it’s not as simple as saving, dying instantly, and restoring. It’s puzzling around for a good long while down a dead-end path, eventually learning later through trial and error that you made the wrong random guess (that you don’t even realize is a guess at the time). That’s not an expert level puzzle as the game box suggests. It’s just patently unfair. And let’s not forget to mention the game’s final puzzle; it’s pretty awesome, but also requires dying at least once unless you luckily perform an action that would be considered foolhardy anywhere else.

Some concessions were made by Lebling. The thirst and hunger daemons are gone, which I imagine was tough for him given he brought the latter back for The Lurking Horror. The sleep daemon is here as in the other games, but the dreams are even more pointless than ever. You also acquire an object which can help you carry unlimited inventory. But he couldn’t help himself and threw in several puzzles around water that require you to do some lengthy and dull inventory swapping to avoid ruining some of your possessions.

It’s all a shame, too, as Spellbreaker has so much going for it. Essentially it takes the best parts of the first two games, the atmosphere of Enchanter and the humor of Sorcerer, while expanding upon the fun spell casting system, all culminating in a rewarding conclusion. But the road to get there is inconsistent and annoying. The longer I played, the more grouchy I became, which led me to consulting hints more frequently. I still recommend it to fans of the series; just don’t feel any shame about using help.

Steve Meretzky took over the reins from Marc Blank and Dave Lebling in his second adventure after the wildly popular Planetfall. His style is quite evident here. While telling perhaps a weaker story with a significantly less serious atmosphere than Enchanter, Sorcerer far exceeds it as a sequel thanks to a more user-friendly design and some truly excellent puzzles.

You’ve been promoted in the interim and are more or less the right-hand man of Belboz, the head of the Guild of Enchanters. One morning he goes missing and in your search for him you discover he may be in the thralls of an evil sorcerer. And, unfortunately, that is pretty much the plot. In fact, the only times you can encounter this evil presence yourself is at the beginning if you fall asleep at home (which is never clearly explained) and at the very end.

Upon starting I was immediately annoyed as I was told I was getting thirsty and hungry, my biggest complaint from the first story. But I was soon relieved to discover a magic spell that obviated the need to eat or drink. That this new spell was even necessary was a rather pointlessly cruel joke, but at the same time a humble acknowledgement of a past mistake. The sleep daemon still exists and for the same reason: to get incredibly subtle hints for later in the game. As the game has no time limit, you can sleep just about anywhere when you get tired without worry.

Most of the game takes place in the land where the evil sorcerer hails, and it is extra-Zorkified as decrepit castles and coal mines butt right up against a gnome-run amusement park with a casino and a flume ride. Most locations are vividly portrayed even if as a totality it’s an incoherent mess. As such the map is easy to remember.

The amazing thing about Sorcerer is how fairly it treats the player, a rarity in 1984. There are plenty of walking dead scenarios you can get yourself into, but they’re pretty much either obvious right before or right afterwards. For example, you can drink a potion when you don’t need it, and it’s immediately clear you need to restore. Or you might enter an area that kills you, but the signs were clear that potential danger lied ahead. But beyond that, there is an optional spell that allows you to essentially create a save point, reviving you to that location if you kick the bucket. And the really cool aspect is that not only is the spell there to rescue you, it can also be manipulated to solve a few different puzzles in the game. While the “normal” way to the solve these puzzles may be more satisfying to some, I was happy to be rewarded with what my brain felt was clever in the moment.

Sorcerer rewards the player in many other ways as well. While there are many red herrings, when you attempt to solve puzzles in logical ways and fail you are almost always rewarded with an amusing retort as to why it didn’t work. The side effect of this was that I trusted the game to communicate well and I never went to a walkthrough when I was stuck. In fact, to this point it’s the first Infocom game where I didn’t require at least one hint (outside of A Mind Forever Voyaging, which is generally puzzleless).

And to top it all off, there are some damn fine puzzles. Two double as copyright protection, but you still must use logic to correctly interpret the game’s lore from the written materials. Believe it or not, there’s a maze that is actually really cool, a statement I may never make again. Finally, an unexpected time travel puzzle near the end is extraordinarily satisfying to solve.

There are three endings depending on how you play out the endgame, with the two better endings requiring you having solved previous puzzles. They’re well written, if a little underwhelming from a story perspective, an expected outcome given the utter lack of plot progression throughout the game. 

For those who loved Enchanter, Sorcerer may feel like a bit of a letdown as it veers wildly in tone and barely does anything to further the Zorkian lore. Thankfully, the excellent spellcasting system was maintained; so if you’re mostly just in it for the puzzle-solving you’ll be right at home.

The first game of the second trilogy in the Zork universe, Enchanter tells a much more interesting tale with significantly more rewarding puzzles than its predecessors. Sadly, some questionable design choices and inconsistency make it not as fun to play today.

Rather than being a treasure hunter, you play a young magician whose skills are so pathetic that they’ve been sent under relative anonymity to a castle to defeat the evil Krill, a vastly powerful wizard. You begin the game with four spells, three of which you barely remember, and must learn more in order to prevail. As you find scrolls, you can imprint them into your spell book and use them repeatedly, with the exception of two spells that are so powerful they can only be used once. Only a few puzzles in the game don’t require magic; the rest all rely on you using at least one spell, if even for one part of the task. And your reward for solving each puzzle grants you another spell.

Initially, you can only memorize three spells at a time; after using them you have to rememorize them again if you want to use them. While this obstacle seems pointlessly cruel at first, it makes sense given the general ineptitude of your character and plays a key role in future puzzles where preparation is required before entering a dangerous situation. What is truly fun, though, is all the various ways you can utilize your spells. Some aren’t needed to win the game at all, but can be used in lieu of other spells. Several puzzles have multiple solutions to cater to the inner workings of your brain. They’re also a welcome mix of serious (defend against unnatural death) and silly spells (turn your foe into an amphibian). Better yet, there’s plenty of funny easter eggs if you want to intentionally misuse your spells.

As for the two spells I mentioned that can only be used once; they can be used in several places, but only one is correct, giving you extra pause before you deploy them. While using them incorrectly puts your game in an unwinnable state, it’s not that difficult to tell when you’ve boofed. And even if you don’t realize it, the game is short enough that backtracking isn’t stressful. 

Sadly, this wonderful spell system is almost ruined by issues rampant in the early days of gaming. Most unforgivable are the hunger and thirst daemons that clog up most of the fun. While finding water and food is easy and your supply should last you the whole game unless you completely fiddle-fart around, the whole process just gets in the way. You have an inventory limit that’s needlessly wasted on carrying sustenance. Some puzzles have delicate timing, and if you happen to be really thirsty or hungry in that moment it can ruin the process. And mostly it’s just not interesting. There’s also a sleep daemon, though it’s not as cumbersome and leads you to dreams which can provide subtle hints.

I also became frustrated on several occasions with the puzzles. While they are all generally logical (though a bit of a stretch in a couple of cases), and a few are almost insultingly easy, most are poorly clued with no guidance if you’re on the right track. While I don’t expect a cheering audience while solving a puzzle, there are many times I wasn’t sure if my issue was that I was completely off base or if the parser just didn’t like the way I was phrasing something. That’s not to say the parser is poor; many synonyms are implemented and it can handle multi-step commands. But some of the responses are so curt and generic that I assumed I was asking something of the game not possible only to learn that I was oh so close to figuring it out. Thus I had to look up a few hints for what otherwise would have been very satisfying puzzles to solve.

The prose itself is clean and in general evocative, though on occasions it’s sparse and they’re only so many ways to keep me interested in a run-of-the-mill castle. The game certainly could have been haunting, though akin to Zork there’s more focus on whimsy, which is occasionally jarring even when funny. The final game sequence, especially, feels like a bit of a letdown as it’s very quick with little time for the atmosphere to settle in.

Despite my quibbles, Enchanter is definitely worth a play by Infocom fans, especially if you intend to play the other games in the series. Just be prepared to be annoyed at times and have a hint guide handy.

Bob Bates is a legend in the world of text adventures. While his two games for Infocom (Arthur and Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels) are generally not considered among their best, he co-founded Legend Entertainment and had his hands in almost every game, including Eric the Unready, Gateway, The Blackstone Chronicles, and Quandaries. After being co-president of Zynga and working on all sorts of projects, he returned after 20 years to the world of interactive fiction with the delightful Thaumistry: In Charm’s Way. I was one of the kickstarters and even got a couple of lines into the game myself. Naturally, I was quite eager to play. And while it’s a very short game with little freedom, it’s still a joy for those who like wordplay and tongue-in-cheek humor.

You play as Eric Knight, a young inventor who got famous as a teenager thanks to a lab accident that led to a remarkable invention. However, years have gone by without anything else to add to the résumé. With his career on the verge of ruin, he is visited by a bodger, a magical user who is part of a hidden society that subtly tries to affect positive change in the world. A very successful inventor has created a device that can detect magic, which would be the end of the bodgers; you’re enlisted to sneak into a convention to destroy this device.

Thaumistry is excellently coded. I’ve played the game twice now and have detected not a single bug, incongruent response, or guess-the-verb issue that tend to be the hallmark frustrations with text adventures. Your bodger friend gives you a tutorial on magic (while the game gives you a tutorial on playing text adventures), including teaching you a few spells (or charms, as it were), as you learn about their history before being brought to the convention. Of course, the magic-detecting device is under guard and there are investors who would also like to get their hands on it.

The disappointing feature of the game is that it's overly linear. While there is often a few puzzles you can be working on at a given time, each has only one solution. And with few exceptions, every spell you learn throughout the game is only relevant to one puzzle, often obviously so. There are a couple of spells that require some acute thinking, including a two-step puzzle that involves time travel. And most alternative solutions that aren’t accepted are at least recognized and explained away. However, I would have much preferred a system like in Wishbringer, where every puzzle has multiple solutions and more points were awarded for the more clever angle. Speaking of points, this game has 100 of them, and there is no way to win the game without getting all 100, defeating the purpose of the scoring system.

The game also needlessly locks off certain areas until your bodger friend feels you need them, making him seem less like a sidekick than a manipulative dungeon master. More than that, these additional areas (such as the zoo and the financial district) are neither near the convention nor connected to it in anyway, making the exercise feel quite contrived.

While there are no graphics or sound of any kind, a helpful map is one click away so that you don’t need to make one yourself. Though, the map is so small that within twenty minutes of playing you’ll have it memorized anyway. And there is an excellent nested hint system that recognizes where you are in the game and offers gradual hints for available puzzles only.

What ultimately saves the game is–-forgive me-–its charm. Nearly every character and scene exudes whimsy, from the twin sisters who created a literal copy machine to the inventor who values his privacy so much that nobody is allowed to see his product. Perhaps my favorite is a stranger you bump into who is playing with an invisible dog, and you must figure out how to convince the dog that you are a worthy play partner. The game also has the classic Infocom-style digs at pop culture and authority figures without it feeling like Mr. Bates is hitting you over the head with his personal grievances.

While it doesn’t offer much in the way of length or challenge, Thaumistry is an amusing romp that should take even text adventure novices no more than an afternoon or two to complete.

Vicious Cycles does an excellent job of utilizing a time loop mechanic while struggling to deliver a story that makes the puzzles worthwhile.

Awakening in a subway station, you have about 25 moves to prevent a terrorist attack that blows up a passing train. There are only six "rooms" you can access, some being on the train itself. Nearly every puzzle that brings you closer to your goal requires learning by dying. Not because you learn information via death, but rather you are required to pursue objectives that will take up the full 25 moves. Each success here is quite satisfying, as information learned is generally easy to apply on your next cycle. One puzzle involving a gas mask does not feel intuitive, but otherwise there's nothing terribly frustrating.

Unfortunately, the story is not delivered quite as smoothly. Backstory is more or less dumped in between cycles. While you are given prompts during each info dump, you have no agency to do anything interesting. During the final flashback, you are suddenly given agency to make a change to the past. While the story is interesting, no character has time to grow on you and it was presented too haphazardly to land with me on an emotional level.

My favorite part of the game happens in the background. In one of the train compartments, there is a girl and her younger brother on their way to school, and he really really doesn't want to go. Listening to their conversation is fun, but you can engage the boy and learn more about his relationship and home life. You learn nothing that helps you but it humanizes the world and provides ample motivation to keep going.

Recommended for anyone who enjoys time loops.

I played this as a child and never got out of the first area. I figured I was young and impatient and decided to revisit this with additional forbearance and wisdom. I got exactly as far as I did thirty-five years ago before pulling up a walkthrough.

Demon’s Forge is the first game Brian Fargo designed (and self-published!) at the age of 19. Two years later he would start his own company, Interplay, and helped designed some well-received games including the Bard’s Tale series, Tass Times in Tonetown, and Neuromancer. He definitely got better at his craft as time went on.

The plot of Demon’s Forge is hilarious; you were caught murdering four of the king’s guards, so your punishment is to be thrown into the forge which spells certain death. But if you manage to escape, the king will be like, “Impressive, you may go. I didn’t really like those guards anyway.” Along the way you will need to throw everything including the kitchen sink at every problem in hopes that something works.

The first puzzle that most people will never solve (and the one that got me stuck both times) involves accessing a room that is not mentioned in the previous room’s description and can only be found by using a non-directional verb. And it can only be accessed during one specific turn. A very stretched imagination could consider this fair if the verb required was mentioned in the manual or hinted at in the game in any fashion. But, alas. Thankfully, future puzzles are not quite as cruel, but they are also not alone in their moon logic.

To no surprise the parser can’t compete with Infocom’s at the time, but man oh man there are almost no synonyms implemented. There will be several times you are on the right track but you can’t guess the correct verb. Sometimes “use” is the correct choice while most of the time its more specific. Also frustrating is the inability to just look at the room you’re in; if you want to read the sparse description you need to exit and come back (which is not always possible).

There are a few puzzles that are indeed reasonable, though these are mostly near the endgame when you’ve already resorted to a walkthrough. Strangely enough, defeating the demon itself is probably the easiest puzzle in the game.

The graphics are standard for 1981 and similar to what Sierra was putting out with their Hi-Res adventure games at the time. It is generally easy to tell what’s what and in a few areas the pictures enhance the mood.

There is no real reason to play Demon’s Forge outside of curiosity’s sake, though I want to give credit to Fargo for making me laugh a couple of times. At one point you can find a secret room by going north when there’s no actual exit; you enter an empty closet with just one clothing rod and the game yells, “What are you doing in the closet!” But my favorite is when you come across a bunny. It’s in the same room with a wand and a top hat, so I was looking forward to a potential magic trick. Nope!

>Get rabbit
“The rabbit bites you and you die.”

Best instant death ever.

Playing a tomb raider is a perfect setting for a text adventure, and there’s so many things about this game that Infocom got right. Unfortunately, I just didn’t have a lot of fun while playing.

You wake up in a abandoned encampment off the Nile River; during your expedition to uncover a pyramid and hopefully gain the fortune and glory you’ve always deserved, your paid Islamic crew has left you for dead. Why were you abandoned? Because — as the feelies and the introduction to Infidel so clearly state — you’re a racist, narcissistic jerk. Thankfully, your character’s personality doesn’t come out a lot as the game progresses, but it’s still a disconcerting character to play in the second person.

The game begins as you search for supplies your crew didn’t take off with before taking on the entire expedition yourself. Finding the pyramid is fairly simple and the rest of the game is essentially recognizing booby traps and gathering treasure. A significant portion of the puzzle-solving involves finding and deciphering ASCII hieroglyphics. While it turns out not to be a terribly complicated process, it’s an uneven design choice.

Some of the puzzles can be solved using basic deduction skills (and satisfyingly so), but if you’re able to read the glyphs the answers are given away. Never mind that it doesn’t make sense for the Egyptians to have written such helpful instructions around the pyramid (and never mind that there would be no booby traps in the first place). But if you’ve solved the language, the puzzles are then a cake walk. This would make sense if the intent was to give the player the option of solving each puzzle the way they found the most fun. But there are a couple of puzzles (including the final one) that definitely cannot be solved by deduction; thus, deciphering the hieroglyphs is required.

There is also a thirst daemon and a finite light source, but thankfully they are very lenient and more present for realism than as a puzzle. There is an inventory restriction as well but it’s also quite reasonable thanks to a knapsack you carry around. Stupidly, the game requires you to take off the sack every single time you need to get something from it, which becomes quite obnoxious after the thirty-fifth time you’ve had to do it.

The writing is average quality. Some room descriptions are quite evocative and you definitely begin to feel like you’ve traveled to the past. But many object descriptions and action responses are terse and lifeless. For example, in one room you find a golden cluster, and when you try to examine it, the game responds with, “There is nothing special about the golden cluster.” Well, sure. But what is a golden cluster? As it turns out, knowing what the game thinks is a cluster is very important to a future puzzle, and only through the process of elimination was I able to figure out what clusters were for.

That being said, compared to most Infocom games Infidel is rather easy and it took me only a couple of days to beat it. I required one hint due to having difficulty conceptualizing what a specific door looked like, but otherwise I found everything else to be pretty straightforward.

My apathy towards the game is in no small part to the character I was playing. There was little joy in helping him towards his goal. Perhaps if he had done some soul-searching as the game progressed, it would have made advancing more exciting. But the ending you’re playing towards is never not obvious and always not motivating (Spoiler - click to show)(I would have much preferred his comeuppance to be a painful life spent without fortune or recognition, rather than death), so the game relies squarely on the puzzles to keep the player going. And the puzzles are only just okay. And so it goes with Infidel.

On the heels of A Mind Forever Voyaging, Infocom told another story about a nightmare future brought down on us by power and hubris. But rather than a projected future brought along by Reaganomics, this game explores the impacts of Project Trinity, the first detonation of an atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert. While the examination of atomic history is impressively accurate and subtly powerful, the game itself gets in the way, with the fallout leaving a pernicious impact on its emotional resonance.

The game begins as you are on vacation in London, taking in the sights of Kensington Gardens. Within the hour, you are witness to and a victim of a nuclear attack that presumably begins World War III. Successfully avoiding the attack entails escaping the gardens through a magic portal into a fantasy world filled with giant mushrooms, incredible but twisted landscapes, and a slew of innocent animals. It is clear fairly quickly that this world is a metaphor for Earth’s atomic history and that your goal is to try to make things right. In order to travel back in time to visit the Trinity test site, you must first visit other atomic sites such as Nagasaki and the Bikini Atoll.

Brian Moriarty (author of Wishbringer and Loom), does an excellent job of portraying the subject matter earnestly and without sanctimony. There is no judgment leveled on any character or any political power. The symbolism in the fantasy world is neither overwrought nor heavy-handed. He even manages to weave in poignant quotes from Lewis Carroll to Walt Whitman to Emily Dickinson that help this world feel less cold and dark.

There’s a very puzzly game to be played to get to all the good parts. In a sense, the decision to include a lot of puzzles helped Trinity from becoming just a political statement. The game’s protagonist isn’t on some mission of glory; he’s just caught in the situation and fumbling through to survive. Unfortunately, there are so many missteps with the puzzles that the game’s poignant moments had to fight for brain space with my endless frustration with the gaming experience.

The first problem, and an expected one in 1986, was that so many puzzles require dying in order to learn what to do. While this can work well in comedy or light-hearted adventures (especially if the deaths are quick), here it just continually disrupts the mood. To be clear, dying is an important and I would say necessary part of Trinity for its core message to come across. But the need for random, non-atomic related deaths (such as running into an angry barrow wight) just isn’t there.

I can’t even count how many walking dead situations I encountered, including a couple that require restarting the game completely and obtaining items that are not exactly out of the way but also not obviously important either. While again this is expected for an 80s game, it still hurts the spirit of the experience to suggest the reason you aren’t able to save the world from atomic destruction is because you didn’t pick up a piece of paper in London right before the bomb dropped.

One ridiculous game mechanic that leads to many deaths and walking dead scenarios is the inventory limit. Yes, carrying a heavy axe in real life would prevent me from carrying much else. But the axe is needed often and unpredictably and so deciding when or where not to take it with you is an impossible guessing game. And it all could have been solved with a simple rucksack. There are some types of game where deciding what to bring with you is a fun, logical puzzle. Trinity is the exact opposite of this type of game.

Finally, I encountered a bug that I couldn’t find reproduced anywhere on the internet. One of the portals to a past atomic site becomes completely unavailable if you do things in an arbitrarily different order. So yet again I had to restart almost the entire game for no good reason.


All of the said, there are still many fun puzzles! If you have the correct items with you and are in the right place at the right time, they are generally entertaining and not overly difficult. The endgame is easily the best part as Moriarty meticulously recreated the Trinity test site and implemented, for the most part, organic puzzles that help you immerse yourself in the timeline. Again, you still have to have a couple of arbitrarily correct items in your possession. And the time limits in this area are a bit cruel. But all in all it was still satisfying, with an ending that has been well debated but completely satisfied my sensibilities.

Despite all of my frustrations, I rated the game as high as I did because of how well Moriarty handled the subject matter. It inspired me to read a lot about the Trinity project as well as the world history of atomic testing, including an enormous seven-part series by Jimmy Maher over at the Digital Antiquarian. I’m glad to have played Trinity. I’m just not sure I could bear doing it again.