Wishbringer

Released in 1985, Infocom's Wishbringer was an attempt to create a simplified adventure to ease new and younger players into the often baffling and brutal world of early text games. Forty years later it may not be the best introduction to IF in general (the story is simple, there's plenty of deaths, a surprise maze, and it's easy to render the game unwinnable within a few turns) but the game remains an excellent and accessible example of old-school text adventure in the Infocom house style. In fact, it's one of the very best text adventures I've ever played.

The story is fairy tale stuff, combined with some early computer nerd wish-fulfillment: you play as a small town postal worker who fantasizes about being a heroic adventurer. Luckily for you, a special delivery to a joke shop turns out to be a ransom note, the proprietor is a witch, and you must set out on a quest to travel across town and rescue her kidnapped kitty with the help of a magical stone which grants wishes. Upon climbing down the town's northern hill, you find that the village of Festeron has been transformed into the dark and threatening Witchville. Like in all good fairy tales, there's a great deal of frightening atmosphere. Some scenes actually gave me the creeps, especially one set in a movie theater. But the darkness is balanced by a lot of whimsy: you're pursued by literal foot soldiers and a hungry mailbox, and just wait till you learn the truth about the (Spoiler - click to show) platypus.

The game's most unique mechanic is the one that seems to annoy people the most. The magical stone Wishbringer can grant seven different wishes, depending on which items you hold. Many items exist only to enable the casting of wishes, though a couple double as solutions to puzzles. Using wishes is optional, a feature intended to provide "easy mode" puzzle solving and give hints to inexperienced players. Here's the rub: you don't receive points for solving puzzles using wishes, meaning that if you want the highest possible score you can't use the titular item at all.

In the game's defense, I think this approach works for Wishbringer's stated purpose of introducing players to text adventures. You can choose to wish your way through puzzles just to enjoy the story, but you are encouraged to solve them through traditional adventure game logic once you feel ready. It's a confidence builder. The wishes also provide the game with replayability: beat it once with wishes, then see the alternative solutions! All this said, in practice the Wishbringer implementation is flawed. There are only a few puzzles that can actually be solved by using wishes, and I'm not sure if I would say that using the wish solutions are easier at all. In fact, I wasn't able to figure out how the wishes were useful for solving the majority of obstacles in the game - the "hard" solutions were easier for me!

The excellent game prose by implementor Brian Moriarty is what elevates Wishbringer above most of its contemporaries. It's funny, evocative, and has that extra literary quality that's present in the best Infocom games. The feelies are minimal but essential for solving a puzzle and wishing, and they contribute a lot to the complex and wistful tone. There's a theme of doubling throughout the game that I found fascinating: there are two versions of the village with two hills on either end, on top of which (Spoiler - click to show) live two witches and two black cats. The doubling theme extends to the gameplay. There are two ways of solving the game, using wishes or using adventure logic. Meta-textually, this echoes the way that there are two ways to play any adventure game: do you follow a walkthrough to experience the story without any challenge, or do take the time and effort to solve the game yourself? But maybe these doubles aren't quite so binary. After all, the name of the "good" town is named Festeron (fester on), implying that there's an element of darkness even in the light.

Contemporary players might find some frustrations in Wishbringer, particularly the harsh timer in the game's opening and a few easily missable but essential items that can softblock your game if you don't get them in time. But I think that even these elements are fun in an old-school way, and their presence helps gently familiarize players with these conventions. This is an excellent game for those who want to get into classic IF or experience a simple but satisfying adventure.

That isn't true, of course.

There is no such thing that "everybody" loves, unless it is a good night's sleep. Still, Wishbringer is emblematic of the shifting critical fortunes of Infocom games over the years. If we consider this site's aggregation alongside Victor Gijsbers's top 50 polls, we might guess that only a handful of Infocom's games retain the stature that they enjoyed, say, twenty-five years ago. At last polling (2019), those most-loved games include Spellbreaker, Wishbringer, Zork I, A Mind Forever Voyaging, Suspended, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Trinity. The mix has shifted slightly in each successive poll, but Wishbringer has remained a constant. The aggregation tells an entirely different story: Planetfall, as only one example, is on the front page of IFDB games listed by rating!

Why Wishbringer? Much comes down to the talents of Brian Moriarty, who makes his stunning debut with this "Introductory" game for all audiences. The prose is descriptive and charming, and a "double world" of light and dark fills exploration with feelings of recognition and wonder. Its good-natured humor lacks the snark of so many Infocom games, and the experience is better for it.

The feelies and packaging only enhance the fairy-tale ambiance of the game and include a glow-in-the-dark "wishing stone" and an illustrated "Legend of Wishbringer" story. The story is darker than one might expect, but the quality of the content is excellent.

Regarding gameplay, I have "good news and bad news." The good news is that Wishbringer features multiple solutions to puzzles, which widens its audience and essentially offers multiple difficulties. This is an innovative approach that I'm not sure Infocom replicated elsewhere. (Spoiler - click to show)I wouldn't count Zork III's "hello sailor" solution, since that's more of an easter egg. If you can think of other cases, please mention them in a comment!

The bad news, at least for me as a little boy, is this: making wishes is the "easy" mode and awards no points. As a kid with a game called "Wishbringer" and a glowing wishing stone, I wanted to make wishes. I also wanted a high score. I cannot fault any child, young or old, for feeling disappointed.

I should recognize that this is still an Infocom game from the 1980's, which means that some of it will seem quite unfriendly to contemporary players, despite obvious efforts to make itself accessible to audiences of its time. In particular, one can make the game unwinnable early on without knowing. Wishbringer also punishes the player for (Spoiler - click to show)not drawing a map in a specific place, and it feels quite jarring in a game so friendly.

Still, these are all faults that Wishbringer manages to transcend. Don't let the "Introductory" designation fool you. This game is incredibly charming, very well written, and, whatever its failings might be, quite innovative in terms of its approach to difficulty. Highly, highly, highly recommended.

I play interactive fiction intermittently, as life often has me too busy to dig into larger games. I decided that I was tired of missing out and wanted to really dig into the classics of the commercial era, the ones I'd heard so much about but never experienced firsthand. What order should I play then in? How about by difficulty? Of the two introductory games, Wishbringer sounded more appealing than Seastalker, so off I went.

I'm pleased to say that I've kept my skills sharp in the gulf between games. I beat the game in an evening with no hints and a 100% score. Moriarty's prose is wonderful and his puzzle design is perfect. The game is a Nasty on the Zarfian Cruelty Scale. You can absolutely make the game unwinnable. However, it's pretty easy to figure out where you've gone wrong, and this is a good thing. It teaches the novice to pay attention and play optimally, as later games will not be as kind.

I struggle to think of criticisms. This is a simply an enchanting little slice of the Zork universe, worth a play by everyone.

I'm a newcomer to IF, and so I've been working my way through some of the classics to get acclimated and learn a bit about the history of the form along the way. As a game consciously designed for and marketed to 'adult novices,' I thought this would be an ideal game to play early on in my IF career.

Wishbringer definitely fits the bill as a good game for beginners. The story is charming, the atmosphere is engaging, the puzzles are interesting but not difficult, and the game overall is quite forgiving. I appreciate how the narrator prompts the player to save at key times when an irreversible action is about to be taken, for instance.

The fairy tale tone and the at times whimsical to surreal atmosphere of the town was done to good effect. I also found the map to be perfectly sized, as I quickly internalized the town layout of Festeron. This works well since meat of the game is a non-linear treasure hunt/puzzle solving deal that involves exploring the mostly open map. Despite the relatively small map, there are really two Festeron's that you get to explore since the world goes topsy-turvy after the introductory section of the game. I may play through again just to explore some of daytime Festeron.

While I liked all of those aspects of the game, there's a major flaw (to my mind) in the game design that keeps this a merely good not great game. The game centers around a magic stone, the Wishbringer, that can grant 7 different wishes. However, Moriarty &co decided to make using the Wishbringer optional, a way to make puzzles easier to solve for newcomers and build in more challenging (and more rewarding) ways to solve puzzlers for advanced players. I was looking forward to the magic/wishing aspect of the game, though I never actually used the stone. Even as a newcomer, I was able to solve the game without using the stone. If the wishes had been actually integrated into the puzzles and story, rather than leaving them as an optional feature, I would have loved rather than just liked this game.