Ratings and Reviews by deathbytroggles

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.

"The encounter could create a time paradox. The results of which could cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the space-time continuum and destroy the entire universe!...Granted, that's the worst-case scenario." -- Doc Brown, Back to the Future 2

And such is the world logic of All Things Devours. The inventor of a time-travel machine, Natalie Williams comes to the same realization about paradoxes and sets out to destroy the machine. However, she soon realizes that her plans have been taken and she must find them so that the machine can never be made again. And soon the player realizes that time travel is necessary to find those papers, and there's a total span of nine minutes in which to work to avoid the guards, avoid your present self, and avoid creating a paradox for your present self.

Toby Ord crafted an incredibly tight puzzle box that is a delightful gift to unwrap, with Natalie's insight and foresight the present (and the past!). There is a lot of learning by dying as you get to know what Natalie already knows about the facility as well as the game's internal logic about time travel. The logic, as with all time travel stories, breaks down if you think about it too much; however, it is consistent within the story. I took extensive notes while playing, detailing the exact time of each move I made, and then after destroying the universe with another paradox, adjusting actions ever so slightly the next time around. Normally, learning by dying eventually exhausts me, but because every death here taught me something new, I never stopped having fun.

Despite the incredibly tight timeline, there is still a little flexibility with decision-making as well as multiple solutions to several puzzles. Some of those solutions require knowledge it would be impossible for Natalie to know without dying first, though there is a path through the game that is plausible if you care about that sort of thing. My only critique is the final solution only insofar as I thought my alternate solution should have worked!

One of the best uses of time travel I've seen in a game and a treat for those who enjoy a complex puzzle.

To start I want to say I love that the Aurora Public Library created and hosts this game on their website. Just a great opportunity for children to be exposed to interactive fiction in a very welcoming manner.

Escape from the Wizard's Castle is a short and simplistic adventure that holds your hand throughout the game. You play a generic adventurer who discovers a castle that is trapped in time, and to succeed you must solve five spells the wizard cast prior to him inexplicably forgetting how to break them. He wants you to succeed, however, and will provide constant encouragement in the form of terrible puns. There is also a raven who wants you to succeed as well and who can provide strong hints if you're stuck.

The game provides a tutorial on how to navigate a Twine game and the goals are always obvious, making this non-threatening to newcomers. Each room comes with a pleasant hand-drawn art style reminiscent of your typical hidden object game and serve well as a visual aid to the text. While you are frequently picking up everything not nailed down, you never have to manipulate your inventory to solve a puzzle. For example, if you find a key and then come to a locked door, all you need to do is click on the suggested hyperlink to open the door. In fact, the inventory is more of a log of your progress than anything. When you check it, the game lists the items you have and then says, "To look at these items more closely, you'll need to go attempt their puzzles."

The puzzles themselves are separate from the main narrative. When a puzzle is present, the game will prompt you to solve the puzzle by taking you to another screen. These puzzles are the highlight of the game, as they all require either logical reasoning or interpretation of symbolism. The game description warns that small children may need help with some of the puzzles. I can attest that a full grown adult who solved All Things Devours without hints may have also needed help with some of the puzzles. One of the answers was fairly obvious in retrospect (but would be impossible for visually impaired players), and one I still didn't quite understand even after solving it.

The main critique I have for the game is that given the basic story and simple punnery, the audience who would thoroughly enjoy this game is probably limited to elementary school-aged children, while the puzzles seem to be more for a middle-school aged audience. This would be fine if playing with a parent, but I am worried the intended audience would get frustrated at times if playing alone.

Overall, this is a solid effort. I enjoyed a couple of the puzzles, and I smirked a few times at the wizard's running commentary. And even if young players are not enamored by the game, I imagine it could be still inspire them to get into the medium.

I was a senior in college when this game was released and played it the moment it dropped. I took copious notes while playing and brought those notes to my classes, occasionally ignoring my professors to hammer out this puzzle. No regrets.

The conceit--building a dungeon worth of death traps as a contract to hire for a perverse king--is brilliant. Despite the dungeon having 16 rooms and there being 17 traps to purchase, there is only one solution to killing off the prisoner; as such, Lock & Key more than any interactive fiction feels like solving a logic grid puzzle from a games magazine. As the prisoner continually foils traps, you must determine what traps are completely worthless versus what traps slow him down (and in the best order they slow him down).

Naturally, there is much "learn by dying" as you take notes on why each traps fails and why. And, unfortunately, every time the prisoner escapes you have to start over from scratch. So every play through involves a tedious resetting of doors and resetting of traps. There are some shortcuts implemented to tackle this and if you are confident in your door layout or some of the trap layout you can create a save file to save you some time. But even while taking advantage of both, I was beginning to resent the game a little before I solved it, which in turn took some of the joy out of the triumph.

If you're a fan of dark, witty humor (which a game like this requires in order to be palatable) Cadre provides plenty with nearly every possible action. It certainly takes a little bit of the edge off the tedium.