Ratings and Reviews by Mr. Patient

The title is certainly fun. I figured The Smirking Horror would be a broad, probably scattershot parody of The Lurking Horror, or Infocom in general, or maybe the whole genre of Lovecraftian horror IF. It's not any of those things. It's a low-res adaptation. The premise, the map, and the puzzles are all similar to the original, just highly compressed, and with significant loss of information/entertainment value.

The game plays it straight, swapping out some names and objects, but there's no comic bite, or even an attempt at one. This is partly the result of a much less capable platform and parser. You can't exactly take the piss when you've only got room for your own minimal descriptions. The cramped margins also mean that the game is dependent on your knowledge of the original. Some actions (e.g., (Spoiler - click to show)wedging open the elevator doors and lowering a cord) seem to be entirely unmotivated in The Smirking Horror unless you've played The Lurking Horror.

I confess I didn't spend a lot of time with the game, for a few reasons: 1) it's at least Nasty on the Zarfian scale, if not Cruel; 2) there's no UNDO; and 3) I didn't bother figuring out how I could save a game with the emulator I was using (more notes below). I solved a few puzzles and mostly clung to the walkthrough. I don't think it would be worth wrestling with even with modern amenities.

Notes: I found the game (including walkthrough) on an Amstrad CPC archive, and I played on my Windows laptop using caprice32. There was probably a way to mount a blank tape image on the emulator where I could save games, but I did not investigate this.