Temple of the Orc Mage

Baf's Guide

Highly linear little cave crawl. You're seeking a wizard's Magic McGuffin, in theory at least, but mostly you wander around a cave solving lock-and-key puzzles. Lots of keys, some useless objects (notably, food, apparently because the hunger daemon wasn't turned off), plentiful bugs. What you see is what you get, really--there aren't many surprises. But at times it's atmospheric, and as a throwback to the early days of IF, it works, I guess.

-- Duncan Stevens

>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction

Temple of the Orc Mage does not bring new meaning to the term "dungeon crawl". It's a generic, Dungeons & Dragons style quest for a magical gem. Of course, there's nothing inherently wrong with this, and Temple doesn't do it exceptionally badly. However, it doesn't do it exceptionally well, either. The game occupies a sort of limbo between a bland interactive story, with little plot (besides "find the treasure") and character development, and a bland RPG, with arbitrary magic items and valuables strewn around a dungeon setting so conventional that anyone who's read a few D&D prefab modules could recite its elements before ever seeing the game (an underground river, a ruined bedchamber, deep pits, tapestries).
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