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.