Adventure in the Fifth Dimension!

Gaming After 40
Adventure of the Week: Adventure in the 5th Dimension (1983)
Brian "Professor" Moriarty is well-known to adventure fans as a talented designer whose career spanned generations of interactive fiction technology, including fine work for Infocom (Wishbringer, Beyond Zork) and Lucasarts (Loom). But Moriarty's very first published adventure (according to Wikipedia) was written (mainly) in Atari BASIC and published by ANALOG Computing back in 1983: Adventure in the Fifth Dimension!

The game takes some time to initialize, but runs at an acceptable speed once it's underway. We begin on a street corner, where a handy morning newspaper tersely summarizes our mission -- to retrieve The Declaration (of Independence, it develops) for the local police department, an organization apparently possessed of remarkable patience and/or laziness.

From a historical perspective, it's really interesting to recognize Moriarty's design sensibility (and extra-dimensional tendencies) operating in the limited world of the two-word parser. Adventure in the 5th Dimension has a degree of imagination, and some interesting puzzles, but it seems intentionally designed as a beginner's adventure so it's not particularly challenging. I was able to solve it in less time than it took to write this post.

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This game is certainly not a fifth-dimensional beast, nor even a minor fourth-dimensional monster -- I was able to solve it in less than 90 minutes.  It's a fun little title, and well-suited to beginners -- everything gets used, the puzzles all make sense in game terms, and it's fairly forgiving, with only a few fatal and dead-end scenarios.  It's not bad at all, but veteran adventurers will find it interesting mostly as an early Brian Moriarty effort.
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Magazine Adventures
The Declaration of Independence has been stolen from its impenetrable display case by alien beings from the fifth dimension. You are a top-notch private investigator who has been hired by the government to retrieve the Declaration. You must search the city of Washington for clues, find a way into the alien universe, find the Declaration and return it to the police station.

Adventure in the Fifth Dimension is an all text Adventure, but as it is written specifically for the Atari, it runs much faster than the SoftSide Adventures. Moriarty has used a couple of machine language routines to speed up execution and has also used a sensible screen layout. I liked the way it changed colours for different 'dimensions'. Very enjoyable.
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