Return to Zork: Another Story

Baf's Guide

A rather traditional text adventure set in the Zorkian universe. Well, it's not *entirely* traditional - for the author tries to inject RPG-elements into it - in form of quests the NPCs entrust the player character with; however, since these quests were trivial, they didn't add much (at least, for me). The game has got a branching story with two different "winning" endings, but since entering one of the plot branches depends on a pretty unmotivated and obscure action somewhere in the middle of the story, it's not very likely for the player to find it on his/her own. The setting is rich and detailed, though an assortment of randomly scattered minor bugs spoil the impression a bit. I think my main complaint about this work was, the puzzles just were too easy. On the other hand, going through familiar rooms of the Zork trilogy, the descriptions of which received a new interpretation, was a great feeling, so that a certain amount of nostalgic value surely was present.

-- Valentine Kopteltsev

>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction

I just played a text remake of Return To Zork. For those of you who didn't play RTZ, it was Activision's first graphical adventure to use the Zork license they had inherited from their purchase of Infocom. It was, in my opinion, pretty weak. It had a fairly cool interface, as graphic adventures go, and some nice features (like the various bits that took notes for you or recorded people's speeches), but it was cursed with an incomprehensible plot, highly annoying puzzles, and absolutely execrable voice acting. Most of all, it just didn't feel very Zorky, at least not to me. The cleverness was missing, and the splendor was, too.

For me, it's completely baffling that somebody would want to actually remake this game. In fact, RTZAS isn't just a remake -- call it a "remake-plus". It takes much of the original structure from RTZAS, alters some things, and adds a bunch more. It's kind of like if somebody was such a fan of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier that they wrote an entirely new novelization of it, changing a few bits around and adding whole new scenes and subplots.

SynTax
Return to Zork is a traditional adventure set in the world of Zork and developed with permission from Activision. [...] You will find many references to the Zork Universe [...]
-- Dorothy Millard
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