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Review
As I write this, Planetfall is #7 on the IFDB top 100, narrowly beating out Trinity and Blue Lacuna. No doubt it was one of Infocom's best, but now it has to be judged against the best games of the 21st century; it just doesn't hold up.
The sprawling map full of empty rooms with nothing interesting in them, the simplistic NPC conversation mechanism (wouldn't it be cool if you could "ask floyd about achilles"?), but above all the gotcha-game cruelty, where you're never sure if you just permanently locked yourself out of solving a puzzle.
We used to think this was just part of what IF had to be like. This game was an important historical milestone, but now, we've moved beyond it.
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I command your honesty and the courage of facing the fans emotional judgment. I recently reviewed the game myself and we converge on the essence, if not on all points. I enjoyed playing Planetfall but I actually think that even at the time it was not the best in the genre. I certainly don't think it deserves the status of classic, which I gladly grant to Trinity.
That's a bit... reductive, isn't it?
I mean, the sprawling map full of empty rooms was key in creating a geography - one of the first, together with Snowball, to actually bother to make a realistic geography, even if it ended up empty because there just wasn't enough content to go around. Just because they have nothing interesting, doesn't mean that they serve no purpose; their presence, and the world they build, is very important.
The cruelty is... well, trust me, Planetfall is definitely one of the least Cruel games (while still being Cruel) I've ever played.
You also neglect to mention how, say, Planetfall wonderfully messes with player's expectations by providing them with fake puzzles than can't be solved (the dark rooms in particular are brilliant).
Floyd may not be much of a conversationalist, but within the constraints of space that little bot proved to have an enduring personality.
Some of us still like IF like this, and still have meaningful experiences with games like this. So... "moved beyond it" is rather unfair. I mean, I'm not even sure that we HAVE; few games dare to increase room count merely in the name of atmosphere (Nightfall springs to mind as a modern example), and having an NPC become a Floyd must be every author's dream. The fake puzzles mess with player's expectations in a way that Jon Ingold would later similarly mess much deeply with conventions.
I mean... sure, we've moved beyond Bach, but does that mean Bach is no longer enjoyable? And that we can no longer learn anything from Bach?
PS - Whether it holds up against all the games that have come later... probably it doesn't. It would have been a poor thing if it was still one of the very best, I mean, what had everyone been doing for those twenty years or so? I'm not contesting that. But you tick off items in a check-list, without giving them proper due... as though they were actually faults, which is a loaded assumption.
I felt the same way when I played it! It was one of my least favorite Infocom games. I liked Spellbreaker a lot better. I even liked Stationfall a lot better. Meretzky has too many empty rooms and red herrings.
