The Lurking Horror

I played The Lurking Horror right after Anchorhead, which served to highlight the limitations of Infocom's older games. The Lurking Horror, because of the style and size limitations of the time, lacks the depth and richness of Anchorhead, where virtually nothing reasonable produced a default response. On the other hand, it shows Infocom reaching its maturity, with smooth, elegant gameplay despite some necessary terseness.

The thing that impressed me most about TLH was that I never got really, really stuck, despite having to spend several days on some puzzles. Throughout the game, I was free of the nagging sensation that I'd screwed the whole thing up right at the beginning. Instead, I was always sure that the solution would come to me if I just looked at the situation in the right way. And when the solution did come, it was immensely satisfying. My favorite puzzle was one I encountered early on, but didn't solve until several weeks later. (Spoiler - click to show)(Using the elevator to break through the wall in the Steam Tunnel. As soon as I realized the two locations were connected, the pieces fell right together.) The game provided perfect encouragement when I was on the right track and led me quickly to the solution, once I had a basic grasp of what was going on. It was a really deep level of game-world interaction that could have been a nightmare of guess-the-phrasing - yet it posed absolutely no parser problems at all.

The game is full of wonderfully reusable objects, and useless things are relatively few and relatively obvious, although you're likely to do some trekking back and forth across the map at the end, for things that you had to drop because of capacity limits.

The atmosphere of "Lurking Horror" was consistent - a few horror-appropriate laughs and not too much MIT in-jokiness, and lots of creepy stuff going on. I think perhaps the game lacked focus; there was a colorful variety of monsters, but how they related to each other or to the main story was quite vague.

Amazingly, this is the first Infocom game I've ever played that did not require me to draw a map. Along with the PDF I used from the Masterpieces collection, it was very easy to make my way around. I did eventually draw a map, simply because I was stuck at one point and needed something to do, but I ended up not using it most of the time. I have one spoilery comment about the map, which may serve as a hint without giving away too much: (Spoiler - click to show)There is a maze. I mapped the maze. But it turned out that I didn't need to. As soon as I finished mapping, I discovered a shortcut. Unfortunately, the shortcut won't help if you've left behind an item that you need, because you can't use it to go back. Save your game.

Like many Infocom games, and perhaps appropriate to a horror-themed game, there are plenty of learn-by-dying situations. It pays to save often. But none of these situations seemed terribly unfair to me: there's usually a pretty obvious point right beforehand where you can save, and if you keep on restoring from there, you're likely to sort the problem out eventually.

I have only one complaint about this game's otherwise phenomenal parser. Right at the very end, there is something of a guess-the-noun problem. (Spoiler - click to show)The final monster can't be referred to as "grey," "gelatinous" or "mass," despite being described that way in the text. It also can't be referred to as a "monster" or a "horror." The only words I could discover that worked were "creature" (not in the text) and "being" (in the text, but I didn't notice it at first). This was only a minor annoyance, and didn't stop me from completing the game, but it was a surprise after the smooth interactions I'd had up to that point. I think it might be another case of the endgame not being as fully implemented or tested as the earlier portions.

So with some great puzzles, flawless interaction, and strong atmosphere, why was I slightly disappointed? Is it just the standards of modern IF, or was this a bit below Infocom's other work? Maybe the puzzles were too easy. I really appreciated being able to complete the game without hints, and the best puzzles did seem pretty hard. But at the start, I breezed through several initial steps - making it to 50 out of 100 points - without any real mental effort. In fact, a few of these very early puzzles were more tedious than challenging, requiring multiple steps and trial-and-error of some obvious combinations. (Spoiler - click to show)Heating up the Chinese food felt like hashing out an example from the I7 manual, not a real puzzle. I think also, this was a game that could have benefited from having the plot and characters fleshed out more. There probably was no room for Infocom to do so at the time, but I sorely missed that extra depth. The characters were some of the highlights of the game. The hacker's final scene is brilliant and somehow touching. The urchin was so brilliantly painted with so few strokes, I only wished he had more than half a dozen lines. But perhaps his elusiveness made him more poignant. (Spoiler - click to show)Even the rat - and perhaps especially the animated hand - were memorable personalities that lit up the console. I think a little bit more from each of them could have taken the game from merely fun to truly powerful.

One final note: I got a bit of a teaser for the sound in Lurking Horror, but unfortunately I could not find a Mac interpreter that could both play the sound and save the game, so I only heard a couple things. I look forward to playing the game through and hearing more of the sounds - the couple I did hear enhanced the spookiness quite a lot. Since they come as a total surprise, they can be very startling - perfect for a horror game.

I went to MIT. Almost all of the Infocom team went to MIT. It would make sense that there would be at least one game set at MIT, and this is it. The GUE Tech Map is basically the same as the MIT campus. The Aero lobby sits at the entrance to the department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the Great Dome sits on the infinite corridor (which is what it is really called), and with some minor changes (e.g. what in real life is the Green building, is now the Brown building), the map is MIT. Even the steam tunnels are largely real (albeit exaggerated to make a game).

Given that, I perhaps have a different response to this than many others, because there is an element of nostalgia built in, but I finished this while still a student at MIT. Looking at it with fresh eyes, 30 years on, many of the criticisms leveled at the game are both right and wrong at the same time.

They are right, in that this never really becomes an atmospheric horror game. At no point are you even a little bit creeped out (compared to say Anchorhead). Rather, Lebling's silly sense of humour, which was at the crux of the Zork series) is given full rein. Be it the inscription over the western entrance to GUE Tech, or the graffitti in the elevator, Lebling regularly puts in a gag because he can. Partially, as a result, the horror never really builds. This has led many to dismiss the game as a horror-less horror game. But while that is true, it is also wrong as well.

It is not a valid criticism of an apple to note that it is not a banana. Someone going in looking for a horror game that will scare their socks off is in for a bad time. However, this is a Zork game with a horror overlay, and a decent one at that. The puzzles are generally decent. The internal logic holds together, and while it is a bit silly, that is not necessarily a bad thing.

Infocom released more than thirty Interactive Fiction titles in their time, setting a standard for sophisticated text adventure game parsers in the process, but only one of these games declared itself as belonging to the horror genre. That one was 1987's The Lurking Horror (TLH). In this adventure you assume the role of a student at the fictional GUE Tech whose essay on the topic of 'Modern analogues of Xenophon's Anabasis' is due tomorrow. The game begins with you sweating away at your essay late one night in the campus computer lab. A blizzard is raging outside and your only company is a geeky hacker whom you're told you recognise, though whom you really don't.

TLH initially suggests that completing your assignment might be your goal, but almost immediately does some thwarting stuff which makes you feel you're unlikely to achieve this goal any time soon. If you've read the back of the box and taken note of the game's title, you'll be expecting to run into bad supernatural stuff at some point, but it's hard to anticipate how or where or why. If you venture beyond the terminal room, you'll find there's a fair bit of campus to wander but that most of it seems empty. If you try to go outside, you will be driven back inside by the extreme weather. And if you're as thick as I can be when playing an Infocom game, you may fail to trigger the crucial dream sequence in the first location which would have obviated all of this noodling and given you a concrete goal – to locate GUE's Alchemy Department.

The onset of creepiness can be slow in TLH if you don't do the right things right off the bat. I thought that the hacker was there to help me kickstart proceedings with my recalcitrant computer, so I fetched some Chinese food for him from the nearby kitchen to try to grease his wheels a bit towards this end. I also had to microwave the food, entering explicit commands to press each relevant button on the microwave to set the timer and power levels correctly. This might have been my idea of gaming torture if I hadn't fluked acceptable settings on my first attempt.

After all my efforts, the hacker seemed momentarily pleased to have been fed, but then lapsed back into his regular oblivious character, and I was no wiser as to what I should ASK HACKER ABOUT...

Thus I found the opening of TLH to err on the unhelpful side in terms of getting the story going. Nevertheless, I began to explore the campus more thoroughly, expecting that my purpose would become clear. What was weird was that I found myself trying to overcome some of the obstacles I encountered in the heavy-handed manner by which I might expect them to be overcome in a horror film, only because the game's packaging and title told me that the genre was horror. I had not encountered such weirdness or scares in the game prior to these moments which would otherwise have caused me to act this way.

For instance, I found my passage along the campus's so-called Infinite Corridor blocked by a passively aggressive maintenance man driving a floor waxer. Whenever I tried to pass him he would manoeuvre into my way. This was the most untoward thing that had happened in the game up to this point, yet I found myself taking to the man and his machine with a fire axe extracted from a nearby emergency cabinet. It was an unprovoked act of extremity I felt a bit silly about trying, but when the maintenance man responded by pulling the axe out of his chest and attacking me in turn, this was the first time the game had donged me over the head enough to say I was definitely in some kind of supernatural horror story.

Whenever and however you crash through into this realm, the events and threats from that point approach Lovecraftian expectation. You will find yourself investigating the suicide of another student, catching glimpses of some slimy horror which thrashes around in the snow, digging severed body parts up out of a garden and fending off things which live in the sewer. The cloistered atmosphere of the snowed-in night time campus is evoked through the finely written location descriptions, and as always in an Infocom game, atmosphere is a huge part of the overall effect.

The dynamics of TLH's puzzles play equally to a long-term view and to the here and now. There are obstacles in the game which you might come back to at any time after you have found an appropriate object with which to deal with them, but there are also sequences where you must improvise exactly the right moves in the right order and at the right time. The combination of the two approaches and the game's moderate overall difficulty (Infocom's own difficulty assessment for this game was Standard) make TLH a decent starting point for a newcomer to Infocom games.

The game's map layout is clear and logical and the puzzles are more practical than abstract, but inventory management is difficult. Your inventory space is limited in a realistic and un-fun manner, and you can't just temporarily drop things wherever you like because a roving basement urchin will pick them up. This can result in some tedious plodding back and forth to cart objects about. It's also easy to lose or destroy crucial items (monsters will eat them, or jerky professors or urchins will relieve you of them) so it is important to save often, but this is probably relevant advice when playing any Infocom game.

One flourish which I didn't get to experience as intended is that the original package sometimes came with a creepy toy bug. The bug's presence wasn't announced on the box, so the idea was that you would open up your software and flinch in shock as something gross fell out.

Apart from the dynamic mistake of it being possible to get some way into the game before the horror strikes – and I assume that if it happened to me, it probably happened to someone else – TLH is a fine all-rounder in Infocom's adventure library. It is solid, atmospheric, varied and creepy, and without some of the weirder idiosyncrasies that can make Infocom titles too vexing.