Cutthroats

Infocom released both Seastalker and Cutthroats in 1984. These two back-to-back releases reviewed poorly (relatively speaking, as Infocom games tended to review well) and didn't feature the long sales "tails" of Infocom's other catalog staples. In fact, after this bizarre instance of schedule-packing, Infocom would never release another seafaring adventure.

Of the two games, critics have been kinder to Cutthroats, and deservedly so. Occasionally, the inventiveness of Mike Berlyn (Suspended, Infidel) manages to break through, if only briefly. The first two thirds of the game takes place on Hardscrabble Island, a dangerous place where dangerous men brave dangerous danger while endangering one another. The characters are all seedy types, but a player may forgive their familiarity. We have come for just this sort of adventure with just this sort of people, after all, and they do not disappoint. There are characters named "rat" and "weasel," for instance, practically daring us to complain about too much of a good thing.

Unfortunately, the gameplay on Hardscrabble Island would be greatly improved by a cliche or two. The primary challenge is hiding pocket-sized objects without putting them in pockets, since the game becomes unwinnable should the owner/operator of the local marine salvage company see the protagonist carrying and/or doing a surprisingly large number of things. These failures don't always make sense, which can be forgiven if the play is fun. Unfortunately, it isn't, and it's a shame that Cutthroats takes so long to get to what most players are really interested in: diving for treasure.

On that front, the game acquits itself reasonably well. The wrecks (there are two) feel like Zorkian cave crawls with the exciting addition of underwater exploration. Sadly, these parts of the game are all too short and cannot compensate for the tedious bulk of Cutthroats's misadventures on dry land.

However, it is worth mentioning that Cutthroats features an interesting formal experiment: multiple game variants. In the course of the game, a randomly selected shipwreck (there are two possibilities, but the packaging and source code suggest that four were originally planned) becomes the goal for that playthrough. Unfortunately, the wreck is selected very early on, so the most boring parts of the game must be repeated before exploring the other wreck. Infocom would only attempt this sort of branching narrative structure one more time, in 1986's Moonmist.

Cutthroats was the first game to be released in the iconic "Gray Box" format, and featured a pleasantly mimetic bit of copy protection in a local historical society's booklet about local shipwrecks.

For its formal and metatextual innovations, I have awarded Cutthroats three stars, but compared with Infocom's better games it comes off quite badly. It's a shame that Mike Berlyn's considerable talents were squandered on the middling "Tales of Adventure" series of Infocom games. This would prove to be his last text adventure game at Infocom.

In spite of my love for Infocom, or maybe because of it, I have to warn anyone tempted to play this game. Unsatisfying at best, mostly downright frustrating, it is unworthy of its brand.
I'll cut to the chase for the busy reader. Cutthroats is technically crude, thematically dry, ridiculously short, and simply poorly designed. I want to caution those new to IF in particular, for whom such a sad first contact may lead them to dismiss this wonderful genre of games.
Now if you're an Infocom aficionado, you may want to know more about the rationale behind my unforgiving judgment. Here it is, with, like they say, massive spoilers ahead.
Let me start with the worst offender; The game is bugged. Wait, I’m not talking about the oh-that’s-kinda-odd type of bug. I’m talking about the how-in-hell-could-they-let-pass-such-a-game-breaker-monstrosity kind of bug. Let me explain what happened. First, the game is riddled with oddities.
(Spoiler - click to show)Being able to interact with Red when he’s not in the same location. Getting “there’s no table” answer to the input “look at table” in a room described as full of tables (you’ve guessed right, “look at tables” work). Finding an oak chest and getting two different results to the commands “push chest” and “push oak”. Having Red accepting 0 coordinates without question to only ask you a turn later why you didn’t give him any.
Granted these are common nuisances in IF, but the frequency of them had me uneasy about the whole affair. So when I finally got too desperate being stuck in the Sao Vera shipwreck (and I’m a very perseverant player), I gave in to the invisicues with the nagging doubt that maybe, just maybe, I had encountered a bug. So I went through the clues, deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole, only to confirm the horror; I had done EXACTLY what I was supposed to.
(Spoiler - click to show)But in my game, the orange line never showed up, and the “cut rope with sword” command when standing on the cask returned a plain unscripted “you can’t reach the rope”. I had to get to the bottom of this, no pun intended, so I started over, redoing everything pretty much the same. And of course this time the line was there, and the rope was conveniently at sword’s reach.
I’ll never know what happened, and it’s not worth investigating. Suffice to say that I had done a perfect 250 points in my first attempt but the game robbed me of my victory.
The second treasure hunt is no less disastrous, with a ridiculous puzzle which, if not bugged, is totally absurd.
(Spoiler - click to show)According to Cutthroats logic, touching a mine will blow you up, but putting an electromagnet on in and dropping the whole contraption is perfectly fine. And that’s only part of more stupidity which I can’t even find the resolve to describe further.
Let’s also mention the inelegant structure of the game, which picks a random adventure every time, forcing you to save right before the story branches out, and hope you get the favors of the random generator.
I must admit I was excited with the theme. The whole ocean treasure hunter business in itself is enough to make my imagination go. However, even in that department Cutthroats fails. The game lacks ambition and scope, making you feel like a week-end metal hunter fishing for trinkets on a beach.
Hopefully at this point I’ve convinced you to skip this enormous failure of a game, unless you’re into diehard Infocom completionism. And if you've never played an Infocom game, I recommend you pick another title, for it would be a shame to judge this legendary company on the basis of Cutthroats. I’m just baffled that the same developer could put out a jewel like Trinity and something of the nature of Cutthroats. There must be a fascinating inside story about this, probably better than the game tries to tell.

This game is by the author of Infidels, plus Jerry Wolper. To a greater extent than most Infocom games, this game is full of small, tiny choices that will keep you from winning much, much later.

The game at first is fairly straightforward. You are a diver on an island who discovers the existence of sunken treasure (in one version of the game, it's in the Titanic; in the other, it's in a pirate ship). You're given a sequence of instructions telling you to go to different places at different times, and you just have to follow them.

Eventually, you dive, and search the wreck, finding treasure.

So where can you go wrong? You can be carrying the wrong things around the wrong people, shutting you out of victory. I think you can have stuff stolen. You can buy the wrong equipment. You can guess the wrong wreck. You can neglect to do certain activities when everyone else is busy.

So this game must be replayed over and over, following the same directions each time.

I enjoyed the story. I ended up using eristic's walk through.