A Taste of Terror

Garry Francis's A Taste Of Terror (TOT) is a classically-styled horror text adventure with an exotic provenance. Francis completed it based on translated almost-forty-year-old design notes for an Italian adventure which was to have been released on the cover tape of Viking Magazine issue 12, circa 1987. The magazine was cancelled, the game never completed and the original designer's identity remains unknown; fuller details are available in the game's ABOUT.

I found these details added a pleasing aura of horror timelessness to the experience. These trapdoors and attics, concealing curtains, consultable books, chapels with pews, openable coffins, mystery-concealing locked doors - and your aunt's hairpin - they all could have been in the original game, they're in the new game, and many are staples of horror IF, and some of all IF.

The PC is ten-year-old, judogi-wearing chess champion Sean. He's visiting the farm of his beloved aunt Clarissa for a break from his apparently intense chessing life. The game begins with Sean waking up to find his aunt missing and his back hurting. The mystery is wide open, as is the map. On my first play I wandered out into the countryside, my back pain increasing until I dropped dead. The time limit imposed by the initial problem is both suspenseful and helpful, as it gives a range limit and a focus.

With sixty-ish locations, mapping is essential. The game's open style means you'll ultimately need to apprehend most or all of its contents at once to solve the puzzles. As there are several ways to die and an eventual level of physical grisliness (manipulating severed bodyparts) which some might find extreme if it weren't tempered by the chilled and sometimes humourous tone, the game feels dangerous for the player but mostly ranks as Polite on the cruelty scale, occasionally Tough. I'd say it takes a minimum of two hours to complete.

There's a mixture of modern niceties and old-schoolness in the tech. Sean has a respectable inventory limit, and a holdall can be found to increase that, but there are still more items to be found than the player could ever hold at once. The PunyInform engine used to create the game hasn't the space for much automation, so expect to handle a lot of keys and doors manually, to take extra steps off things stood on, etc. The game's contents, however, are precise. They are precisely described, placed, and fit well into a design. There's one barn location with numerous tools, and TOT is the kind of game that will distinguish between the uses for a screwdriver, a pair of pliers and a hammer in a stimulating way while allowing for red herrings.

The story develops in stages with different goals, an interesting design for such an open game. The goals escalate from the mundane to the spectacular via a shock-horror moment which demarcates what might be considered the first act. Yet once you've solved your back pain problem, you have access to almost all the map, except the locked door silos. Story development is controlled by a few major encounters and conversations. The final act is the classic IF puzzle game where you have to find all the parts, identify the puzzles, solve them and win.

There's a tone to the game's writing that's recognisable. It leans more to traditional IF description than to horror, occasionally making a joke at the PC's expense or going glib on the violence. Pared back, it might have read as fairytale, but it sits in the place where practicality has to win. After all, the player is eventually going to be carting around bodyparts to solve puzzles. This particular tone has its own charms, and given the amount of puzzle-solving that has to get done in this game, it's probably the right place. There are definitely some really good shocks and creep-outs, often just by surprise.

I found A Taste of Terror to be thoroughly engrossing. It opens in the tradition of horror stories about kids having to face off with adult levels of mystery and supernatural horror, then becomes a big, enjoyable mapping and puzzle-solving game.