The Dungeons of Dunjin

Magnus Olsson is perhaps best known for writing Uncle Zebulon's Will, a game which won the TADS division at the First Annual IF Competition in 1995. Four years earlier he had completed The Dungeons of Dunjin, a very large cave crawl written in Pascal which had taken him five years to hone into a shape which he considered releasable. The effort involved is very evident in the polished nature of the game, its home brew parser putting most other efforts at text adventure self sufficiency to shame.

The aim of the game is diverse: part treasure hunt for the Holy Grail and sundry other valuables; part odyssey to rescue a princess and part dragon slayer.

I played the DOS release via DOSBox-X and it is a long time since I played a game of this size which has scarcely a typographical or grammatical error anywhere. Considering the game has almost 200 locations and pretty verbose room descriptions this is laudable, even more so when you consider the author wasn't even writing in his first language.

You start off as so often in a forest (yes, really) and explore fifteen odd locations featuring tunnels, an office and a cottage. Magnus obviously has a vicarious feel for player sensitivities as the problems early on are pretty straightforward and you should soon find yourself underground and ready to explore a Zorkian/Crowtheresque landscape of caves.

The game features many locked doors and gates, some of which require keys (there are lots of 'em) and some incantations to breach them. Rather cleverly the whole map links up after a while and therefore negates the need for endless peregrinations across the map. It is to the writer's credit that he manages to park incongruous settings next to each other (a computer room next to a reservoir for instance) without it seeming like a hash of ideas just plonked together.

There are an awful lot of items to port about, in fact nearly 70 and despite the generous inventory limit you will still have to work out where to mass the unused ones without cutting off the path back to them later on; this ceases to be a problem when short cuts are discovered.

As you progress the problems become much more difficult and towards the end I was saving often as I experimented and screwed up on a regular basis.

The author states that his home made parser isn't up to Infocom standards but even so it is better than the one in many commercial games of an earlier time. HELP is available early on if you want it but apparently ceases to work later on. In fact using it crashes the game back to a DOS prompt - one of the few examples of a bug in the game. TAKE ALL is catered for and X for examine, L for look although there is no UNDO. The multi word parser occasionally struggled when speaking with NPCs but not in a game breaking way. The coding must be extremely clever as there are so many changes in location and object statuses along the way. Most of the descriptions are well done with only a few perfunctory "you are in an east-west tunnel" locations and I felt fully immersed in the world due to the high standards of writing. The realism of the game is augmented by the fact that magic only works in certain places, so the mundanity of the world outside the magic gates is a clever juxtaposition. The intensity of the mission you have undertaken is lightened by some welcome shafts of humour; PRAY and you will think of Zork and a "hands and knees tunnel" took me straight back to Colossal Cave. I also liked the plastic skull with "Made In Taiwan" written on it. There is also a puzzle with a knowing wink towards Sweden's second biggest ever export after Volvo.

The NPCs in the game include dwarves, trolls, a princess, a demon and a warlock. There is not a great deal of colloquy between the player and these other crepuscular characters which is a slight weakness. As in a lot of games the other characters are really there as puzzles or lubricants in the flow of the story rather than as flesh and blood entities.

I have seldom played a game with so much scope for soft and hard locking oneself out of victory. You can find yourself in one corner of the map and stranded in an Andy Phillips kind of way early on- later as you find short cuts this problem largely goes away. There are quite a few red herrings as well as items that have multiple uses so throw nothing away. At least there is no lamp timer or any hunger/thirst/time daemons. One puzzle involving the transportation of a wood table would be at home in a Peter Killworth game in its toughness and some of the magic words require considerable leaps of intuition. Save often. Most are very clever and not too taxing to solve and some are tough and clever. Drawing a map is essential for some of the logistical puzzles. Many of the puzzles revolve around magic words and character traits, and it is very important to read all the information that can be gleaned from the manifold books, scrolls and pieces of paper scattered throughout the game. The denouement of the game is really rather hard and I screwed up on numerous occasions. I know that you can draw a sword but its use (there are two of them) is hardly obvious. There may be a clue in there!

Overall this is a lovely big, tough old-fashioned cave crawl which feels like a mainframe game from the seventies both in demeanour and difficulty. I loved it, even though I felt worn out at the end.