Zork II

I'm trying to work my way through the Infocom catalog, posting my thoughts on a gaming forum all the while.

I find it hard to evaluate Zork II, but perhaps this is my problem alone. After all, it is the second best-rated Zork game on IFDB, surpassed only by the rather corpulent Zork Zero.

It contains what many consider the two worst puzzles in the Infocom canon. One, I am happy to forgive, considering the intent behind it. In creating the infamous "baseball maze," Dave Lebling wished make to something interesting out of Zork I's least interesting obstacle: the maze. It is, in other words, a failed attempt to innovate. The other notorious Zork II puzzle is the Bank of Zork, which is only inches away from being a worthwhile and challenging puzzle. Unfortunately, it was simply ported directly from the mainframe version of Zork. I wonder if Lebling was unwilling to alter Marc Blank's work (the puzzle was his creation). Judging from his talk at a GDC Post Mortem years ago, Lebling knew that the puzzle had issues. He knew that others at Infocom had problems with the puzzle. The Bank of Zork went in untouched, all the same.

So I will forgive one and begrudge the other.

In other good news: Zork II's map feels far more organic than Zork I's, despite the fact that they were largely cut from the same puzzle-laden cloth. My only complaint is that its central hub, the carousel, is a massive waste of your lantern's batteries, and there is no torch to save you this time. On your first playthrough, you may immediately stumble upon the source of the carousel's spinning, or you may not reach it until your lamp is flickering. Just as many game developers today do, Infocom was perhaps struggling to find the line between a challenge and a hassle.

The game's final act before victory appears to be unmotivated, and a related event can render the game unwinnable.

However, the game's new additions, the Wizard and the demon, take Zork II in an interesting and new direction. This time, the treasures are actually FOR something. There is a reasonable, in-game reason for collecting treasure that propels Zork, a game and a half later, beyond the reach of ADVENT's shadow. Slight as it is, we have something new here: a bona fide story.

The titular Wizard is a mixed bag. At the time, of course, he was a bit of a marvel, performing feats of magic that had differing effects based on multiple factors. He was additionally a font of Zorkian humor, alternately causing you to levitate out of a hot air baloon or... conjuring the smell of fudge.

By the time your second playthrough rolls around (the one where you are better able to conserve lantern batteries), you will likely have tired of him and his battery-burning abra kadabery. Though far less remarked-upon, the really compelling new character is the demon--Lebling obviously enjoyed writing him.

Zork II is an interesting pivot point for Infocom. The Adventurer is no longer *just* a looter of fallen civilizations. They are playing a bigger game now, defeating wizards and ordering demons about. While few saw it coming, the glum ambiance of Zork III makes sense. The time has come, as they say, to put away childish things.

I like Zork II more than Zork, and I think I am in the minority despite IFDB's numbers: these things are hardly scientific. I feel that, in Zork II, the confines of ADVENT's "cave game" have begun to buckle. Lebling's addition of Wizard, Demon, and modest plot are quite innovative for their time, and they were brought to life by what was then the world's most sophisticated parser.

Like Zork I, Zork II is historically significant. It is worth a visit if nothing else, and can be quite enjoyable if one is accepting of such an old game's eccentricities.

I give no rating for Zork II. I'm not sure that measuring it against contemporary standards is relevant.

In my effort to get through all of Infocom's games, I have determined that Zork I-III and Deadline are too big to judge. I'll give a rating for Starcross if/when I get there.

Zork II incorporates my favorite puzzles from MIT Zork: the palantirs, the tea room, the round room, the robot, the volcano, the glacier room. The dragon (a callback to Adventure) was a fun challenge, and the two or three NPCs made the game quite fun. I enjoyed watching the wizard travel around zapping me.

I prefer Zork I's treasure drop off system, however. It was annoying having a huge pile of treasure, not knowing what to do with it.

I used a walkthrough on a few places (especially the oddly-angled room), because I wanted to see the whole game. Having completed MIT Zork before made some of the hardest puzzles trivial.

After many failed attempts at Zork I before finally completing it, I was very eager to jump into Zork II for the first time! I was expecting more of the mysterious and vibrant, yet utterly abandoned world that the first painted such a glorious picture of. Zork II has shades of that world, but is so much more surreal and less consistent that it feels less like a world to explore and more like a loose collection of puzzles strung together.

In contrast to Zork I where you really only had a couple different locales (forest, cavern, river, mine) and they were all mostly consistent with each other, each room in Zork II feels like it was glued together from a collage of different ideas. One minute you're standing on a bridge in a great marble hall, then you're in a frozen cavern with a glacier blocking a path, then you're on a spinning carousel that fills an entire room, then you're (Spoiler - click to show)at the bottom of a giant well in a magic bucket, then you're in a pool full of tears that are pouring in from the ceiling, then you're in a machine room with whirring gears and steaming pipes while you bark commands at a robot. You never know what the next room may hold.

There is some excitement in being able to find just about anything around the next corner, but what made the world of the first game so engaging is that it was realistic. You start next to a house in a forest, then descend through a trapdoor into a non-descript cavern. Every step along the way, what you find may be fantastical but is grounded in a pseudo-modern pseudo-fantasy setting that is very consistent and believable. This then facilitates solving the puzzles you find as you can mostly just try taking actions that you would reasonably take if you were in that world, which is not a stretch to imagine due to how immersive the setting is. Zork II on the other hand, due to its strange and inconsistent environments, makes it much more difficult to consider how you would interact with the world if you were really there. Because the world feels like a game board rather than a living, breathing place, it causes the player to think of actions in terms of locks and keys - "Do I have the specific item I need to 'solve' this room?" rather than the first game's "I want to do a thing, is there a tool I can use to do that?".

This mindset change, unfortunately, also breeds frustration as unlike the first game there are a significant number of red herrings and items that while seemingly important actually serve no purpose. This then compounds against the player when combined with many puzzles having very unintuitive solutions. For example: (Spoiler - click to show)At the top of the magic well (which has its own unreasonably cryptic solution) you enter a room with four cakes themed very obviously around Alice in Wonderland. One of the cakes is labeled "Eat Me", the tiny writing on the others is unreadable. Eating the cake shrinks you down and allows you access to the aforementioned pool of tears. There is a flask of poison here you can take, and there is a shadow of something in the pool. These two rooms are the only ones you have access to. With nowhere to go and nothing else to interact with, a player will likely take one of two actions at this point: Restore and come back later, thinking they may need an item they don't have yet for this, or try eating the other cakes to see what happens. If the player does the latter, they will discover one of the cakes makes them grow, the other two kill them. Solving a puzzle by trial-and-error is never satisfying, but the intended solution I would suggest is one I think it unlikely a player will think of. The player is supposed to use the flask as a magnifying glass to read the tiny writing on the cakes. This is actually necessary to some degree, as the player needs to throw the cake labeled "Evaporate" into the pool to acquire the critical item there. While the flask is mentioned as having a clear liquid in it, there is no mention of it distorting the room as you look through it. A student who happens to be currently studying the properties of light in fluids might think to use it in the intended way, but the average player is likely to think it just a flask of poison to be used elsewhere, especially as you can identify the "Enlarge" cake by just trying them all and be able to leave the room with your new flask in tow.

In the first game, the player's frustration could be curbed somewhat by the knowledge that if they couldn't figure out how to solve a puzzle, it was likely because the tool they needed was elsewhere and they just hadn't found it yet. Then, when the player got stuck, they could focus in on things they hadn't solved or items they hadn't found a use for. Unfortunately Zork II also throws a wrench in this process. Not only do a number of items just have no use (e.g. the (Spoiler - click to show)perfect rose and (Spoiler - click to show)wooden club - granted this is supposed to be a clue to the nature of the Oddly-Angled Room, but it's a poor clue *and* has no physical use) but from very early on you are introduced to the wizard who periodically appears and casts spells on you. This quickly gives the player the thought that they might gain the ability to cast spells themselves, (Spoiler - click to show)which they do, but now it becomes very tempting to attribute any elusive solution to "I guess I need a spell for that". In my playthrough of this game I specifically forbid that thinking from my approach as I didn't want to be wandering from unsolved puzzle to unsolved puzzle thinking I just couldn't solve them yet, but I had no way of knowing if that approach would pay off or doom me. (Spoiler - click to show)Thankfully it paid off.

I could go on about a number of other puzzles in this game I thought unfair, but this review is long enough already and I think I've gotten the point across. Overall, this is not a bad game. I still had fun playing it and the world portrayed here is definitely creative, if less immersive. I don't know how many of this game's issues come from mainframe Zork being split into three parts and just not translating well and how much of it is just it being less well designed than the first game - the lack of many of these issues being present in Zork I leads me to think the latter. I do hope Zork III, which I move on to now, will be more like the first and less like the second. Either way, I am looking forward to finally experiencing the conclusion of this trilogy that I have held in such high regard for so long!