A Taste of Terror

(This review was originally posted on the IntFic forum during ParserComp)

In the first couple turns of A Taste of Terror – an Inform 6 reimplementation of a lost ‘80s game by an unknown author – the ten-year-old protagonist, whose defining backstory element is that he’s a middle-school chess champion, gets his hands on a matchbox and also a dagger. “We’re going to get into the fun kind of trouble,” I thought to myself, and reader, I didn’t know how right I was: by the end of the game, I’d added a pitchfork, bolt-cutters, and a length of chain to my melee-weapons arsenal – to say nothing of the two severed heads I was toting around – and used accelerant to make a big bonfire, and blown a witch away with my trusty double-barreled shotgun. The grindhouse air perhaps makes little Sean an inapt protagonist (most fifth-graders can’t do quite such a convincing impression of Ash from Evil Dead) and while the game has a modern polish, there are some archaisms like a bigger-than-it-needs-to-be map and a lack of clear direction for much of the middle section. But beyond the mayhem, this is a tightly-constructed adventure with some cute flourishes and a satisfying execution of its theme.

The plot ultimately goes to predictable places – there’s a cult, evil magic, a ritual to perform – but I enjoyed the grounded way Taste of Terror starts: as it opens, you’re visiting your aunt and uncle’s farm on a school break, but your uncle just died under mysterious circumstances, your aunt is acting weird, and you’ve woken up in the middle of the night with odd back pains that make it hard to sleep (bad news, kid: in a couple of decades, you won’t need to cast about for a supernatural explanation for those). It doesn’t take too much effort to effect a cure, at least as long as you remember this is an old-school adventure and you should be SEARCHing and LOOKing UNDER and BEHIND everything you see, but the game prevents you from just going back to sleep. In the event this turns out to be a good thing, but it does mean that you’re then left to explore the rest of the house, and a large outdoor area, with no real in-character goal other than to poke around. Fans of detailed character motivation might find themselves a bit nonplussed by the amount of unprompted breaking and entering you need to perform – as I crawled my way through a broken window in the middle of the night, while juggling the aforementioned pitchfork and most of the contents of a workbench, I found myself wondering whether this was going to be worth the tetanus I was most assuredly about to catch – but there is a lot of fun stuff to uncover, with some satisfying puzzles to work through, even if I wasn’t always sure why I was doing what I was doing. I was relieved that eventually there are some revelations about what’s going on, and what you need to do to stop it, so my priorities for the last third of the game were a lot clearer – again, this is the kind of the game that’s much more about the puzzles and the gameplay than a deep, never-before-heard story, but the various revelations hit their marks, and I’m always a sucker for a collect-the-ingredients-for-the-spell quest.

As that summary indicates, we’re also in pretty familiar territory when it comes to the puzzles, but there’s a pleasant variety, with a bevy of locked doors to be opened, a few action sequences and navigation puzzles, and the aforementioned ritual-components bit. There’s nothing here that will make you sit up and take notice of its daring innovation, I don’t think, but many puzzles have alternate solutions and most of them are reasonable enough – it was smooth sailing throughout, except for one time when the requirements for getting raven’s blood seemed oddly specific (Spoiler - click to show)(I was out of shotgun shells at that point, but STAB RAVEN WITH PITCHFORK and THROW DAGGER AT RAVEN both failed to get the desired result; THROW PITCHFORK AT RAVEN feels much less likely than those other two theories, though), and then I spun my wheels for an extra fifteen minutes at the end since I’d neglected to notice a clearly-marked exit in one late-game area (the instructions suggest making a map; I didn’t, and don’t think it’s exactly necessary, but it would have helped!) Meanwhile, the handful of characters are implemented to a fairly deep level, responding to just about every conversational topic I could think up (though referring to the Roma characters with the g-word is one thing that could have stayed in the 80s).

As for the writing, it’s not going for anything overly fancy, but it conveys a spooky vibe and gets across the information you need to solve the puzzles with a bit of flair – it’s not Proust, but the prose is more robust than what you would have gotten in the '80s. While I do think the lurid nature of events would have made a slightly more intense impression on the protagonist than what we see, Taste of Terror isn’t the sort of game that would be improved by a realistic treatment of PTSD – and I suspect actual ten year olds would be tickled pink by the Grand Guignol horrors here on display.