Molesworth

On reading that there was a text adventure called Molesworth I held out high hopes that it was about Nigel Molesworth, hero of Geoffrey Willans's The Compleet Molesworth. If you haven't read it, you should. In it, Nigel chronicles the horrible happenings at St. Custard's, his primary school and dreams of defeating the Mekon.

Here, though, it's a different story. In this game written in Quill, you're looking to disable a nuclear missile at Molesworth RAF. It's a long, wandering game, and it has its own retro charm, but all the same there are so many ways to get lost or killed or trapped with no way to win. There are plenty of rooms with no exit, where you're just dumped. Often the game tells you a joke in the process, but that's not quite enough. Also, you get randomly hungry, and if you haven't found the sandwiches yet, it insults you with "You should've listened to me." This is much funnier when you have a walkthrough handy.

And certainly many of the puzzles are arbitrary! There's a maze that's clued by a newspaper article, but I can't figure how. There's a pub where you trade a CAMRA pamphlet for a pair of wire cutters, and another one that won't let you in if you're wearing a CND badge. (I'd not have known what these had meant if I'd played when the game came out. Thanks, acronymfinder.com!) There's limited inventory and red herrings. Some are king of funny, like the French onions in the Peugeot. The best clues are that you get 5% more for finding certain items, so you know they must be useful!

I'm snarking on the mechanics, many of which are about odd item trades, but there are neat parts, where you need to wear disguises so the military base personnel don't wise up to you. With the limitations of the ZX Spectrum, too, there's only so much to be done. But the game does have a lot of filler rooms, and X is not a shortcut for EXAMINE, PAPER is separate from NEWSPAPER, and so forth. (At least you only need four letters per word.) There are plenty of instadeaths, including at the start when your car is low on petrol. And the narrative voice does mock you a bit for not picking up on some very thin hints.

That said, Molesworth has an innocent earnest retro charm, even though it violates the not-yet-created Player's Bill of Rights and you must do ridiculous things like pole-vault across a stream. It's hard not to laugh at the pronouncement at the end where THIS IS YOUR BIG CHANCE, DON'T BLOW IT. I sort of wanted to see what happened if I did, but I was having trouble with save states on the ZX Spectrum, so I was too much of a weedy wet to try.