A Legacy for Alaric

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Average Rating:

This game is an old Commodore 64 text adventure. For anyone who is unfamiliar with these old types of text adventures, they're a different breed from today's modern interactive fiction adventures. These old text adventures feature sparse descriptions and clunky parsers. These old games revolve heavily around puzzle-solving, and the stories that underlie the games are usually cliche' excuses to go on a quest.

However, these gems hold a soft spot in my heart, and I imagine that I am not alone in this regard. In an era before graphic computer games, this was the only way to experience epic adventures outside of a good Dungeons & Dragons group. Furthermore, the puzzles in these adventures could be deeply satisfying. Thus, I have gone on a quest to unearth a few of these ancient gems.

Once you get past a few parser problems, this game is cute and playable. It's charm mostly lies in its nostalgia, so I recommend it only if you, like me, crave one of those cute early games. In the game, you play an adventurer who is looking to free a captured heir. The goal of this game is to get to the island where the boy is being held prisoner. (Apparently the game was part of a series, and later games involve rescuing the heir.)

I was delighted to find that I could finish the game without solving all the puzzles and gaining the highest score. I had to resort to a walkthrough a few times, mostly for parser troubles. Most notably, the game requires you to "Take [item] from sack" (I spent 10 minutes attempting to get things out of my bag by "taking" them, taking them "out of", and "emptying" the sack.) Also, the game does allow you to talk to NPCs, but does so through the command 'Say to [NPC] "[Hello]"' Although a few of the puzzles seemed unfair, upon replaying the game I realized that all the necessary puzzles were clued in some strange way. Interestingly, many items go completely unused in the game and several puzzles that contribute to your score seem pointless. I will also warn that there is one occasion of sudden, unclued death; there is also a small maze at the end, but I found it to be easily navigated even without mapping.

I have been playing through many of these old games, and can say with authority that most of them are too frustrating to play for even ten minutes. It was wonderful to find one that I can finally recommend as playable from start to finish. In fact, I plan to play the next installment without the aid of the walkthrough.

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