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Review
Considered one of the most difficult games in the Infocom catalogue, Spellbreaker deploys an excellent plot that neatly and satisfyingly wraps up the Enchanter trilogy. Yet, as seems to be in the case in all of his games, Dave Lebling’s puzzle structure maddeningly gets in the way of most of the fun.
Magic is failing in the Zork universe, with spells by even the most powerful sorcerers fizzling out on the regular. During a council meeting to discuss the problem, a shadowy figure (presumably armed with the cleesh spell) turns everyone but you into an amphibian. Unable to chase the figure down but obtaining a magical white cube in the process, you must explore the far reaches of the empire to save your colleagues and magic itself.
By using a spell to investigate its mystical properties, the cube transports you to a void, presumably inside the cube itself. From there you can go various directions to explore a random area (in the real world) in search of additional cubes. Each cube contains its own void and connection to other parts of the world. Delightfully, each area is not its own vacuum; you will need to acquire spells and secular items to help you solve puzzles in other sections. Sometimes you will need to return to the same cube on multiple occasions and multi-step puzzles abound.
This setup is frankly brilliant, giving a sense of realism to the adventure while allowing the player to work on several different puzzles at once. At times you need to draw connections between the worlds to understand how your actions in one area can affect another. In true Zorkian fashion, there is little sense of atmospheric continuity; for example, a slippery field of talking boulders lays near a random treasure vault with no explanation for their existence. While there is a bit less randomness to the map than in Sorcerer, it still feels difficult to be truly immersed in a world where nothing seems to make any sense.
For a while I quite enjoyed myself, landing a couple of eureka moments while solving puzzles. But mixed in with some truly fun brain teasers (including several involving the manipulation of time) are monotonous math problems, random chance exercises, and instant death rooms. One requires you to map out an area while trying to corner another party in order to catch them. This would be fine if there was a pure solution, but the movement of the other party is random and it took me almost a half hour of repetition to catch them despite knowing exactly what to do. There’s a coin-weighing puzzle, which are boring enough in their own right, and a slog when needing to do so via text commands. A copyright protection puzzle also comes at a very key moment about midway through the game, and should you answer incorrectly, you won’t even find out until the very end, requiring you to replay large swaths of the game, including those two obnoxious puzzles just mentioned. At least in Sorcerer, the copyright protection was at the beginning and required some deduction; this one is just mean, given that a simple typo could set you back hours.
And there is so much learning by dying. While a few of these instances can theoretically be avoided with some lucky educated guesses, at least one situation is literally a 50/50 shot. And it’s not as simple as saving, dying instantly, and restoring. It’s puzzling around for a good long while down a dead-end path, eventually learning later through trial and error that you made the wrong random guess (that you don’t even realize is a guess at the time). That’s not an expert level puzzle as the game box suggests. It’s just patently unfair. And let’s not forget to mention the game’s final puzzle; it’s pretty awesome, but also requires dying at least once unless you luckily perform an action that would be considered foolhardy anywhere else.
Some concessions were made by Lebling. The thirst and hunger daemons are gone, which I imagine was tough for him given he brought the latter back for The Lurking Horror. The sleep daemon is here as in the other games, but the dreams are even more pointless than ever. You also acquire an object which can help you carry unlimited inventory. But he couldn’t help himself and threw in several puzzles around water that require you to do some lengthy and dull inventory swapping to avoid ruining some of your possessions.
It’s all a shame, too, as Spellbreaker has so much going for it. Essentially it takes the best parts of the first two games, the atmosphere of Enchanter and the humor of Sorcerer, while expanding upon the fun spell casting system, all culminating in a rewarding conclusion. But the road to get there is inconsistent and annoying. The longer I played, the more grouchy I became, which led me to consulting hints more frequently. I still recommend it to fans of the series; just don’t feel any shame about using help.
