Cutthroats

Cutthroats
by Michael Berlyn and Jerry Wolper

Thriller
1984

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

A fiddly Infocom game about deep sea diving for Titanic/pirate ships, February 3, 2016

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.

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<blank>, December 17, 2015 - Reply
Quick note - it's not the Titanic per se, though the Leviathan is very obviously very heavily inspired on it. But it's not the Titanic. More specifically - the inclusion of the Titanic would force the game to have accuracy it doesn't pretend to have.

<blank>, December 17, 2015 - Reply
A note: true to Infocom, most times it's either obvious when something bad happened in the game (carrying something other people shouldn't have seen) or you have *some* information to base an educated guess in (when deciding which equipment to purchase) - though as regards to this latter, possibly not *enough* information. Then again, that's what a wreck-dive is - you stock up on what you think you'll need and hope for the best! Does it make the game more realistic? Yes. Does it make it more fun to play? I doubt it.

The only instance in which you're not clued at all is in the "certain activities while everyone else is busy". Totally unprompted, and if you don't, you'll lose the game much, much later. It's the One Big Red Mark this game gets from me.

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