Temple of the Orc Mage

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>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).

This is a standard epic fantasy quest exploring a temple, just like a DnD module.

You find a variety of keys and hidden passages, and different pieces of things that look like they go together, and magical clothing.

It's just not clued well, and its tedious. Keys are used multiple times, without much sense to it, so you end up trying every key on every door.

It's pretty long, and could be fun for fantasy fans.

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- Walter Sandsquish, February 2, 2011

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