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Tangle.z5
Requires a Z-Code interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links.
tangle.sol
Walkthrough
Russian version
Contains tangleR.z8
By Vsevolod Zoubarev.
Requires a Z-Code interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links. (Compressed with ZIP. Free Unzip tools are available for most systems at www.info-zip.org.)

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Spider and Web

by Andrew Plotkin profile

Science Fiction, Espionage
1998

About the Story

A vacation in our lovely country! See the ethnic charms of the countryside, the historic grandeur of the capital city. Taste our traditional cuisine; smell the flowers of the Old Tree. And all without leaving your own armchair! But all is not as it seems...
[--blurb from The Z-Files Catalogue]


Game Details

Off-Site Reviews

IF-Review
A Game Untangled
Despite the linearity of the game, its ultimate meaning is entirely in your hands. Or perhaps entirely in your mind. There are a couple of endgame options -- *important* options, things that sum up the whole meaning of the story -- but you're not told how they play out, one way or the other. You get to choose, but you don't get to know all the final ramifications. People have found this unsatisfying, and griped. I myself found it unsatisfying, and griped. There's something about it that is nonetheless true to morality in real life: not only do we often have to make our decisions blindly, but we cannot always know for certain even after the fact what the outcomes were or would have been.
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PC Gamer
An oldie but a goodie, this spy story is one of the most enjoyable examples of unreliable narration, and a story that couldn’t be told any other way.
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SPAG
The experience of playing it is unique and vaguely reminiscent of "1984"--it forces the player not only to accept someone else's account of a certain truth, in this case his own memories, but to replay them in conformity with what he's told--and the feeling is often unnerving. (Duncan Stevens)

The mechanics and prose are, as in every Zarf game, excellent. The one fleshed-out NPC is convincingly drawn, and Zarf's choice to limit conversation with him to "yes" or "no" works well both in the context of the game and as a tool so that the amount of coding is kept to a minimum. The spy gadgets work intuitively and the interface seems very believable. And they're fun to play with. (Adam Thornton)
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Xyzzy News
While the game's turning point has a wonderful "Aha!" quality to it, it's a point that I never would have gotten to without relying heavily on a walkthrough solution. And although the descriptions are expansive, the characters' dialogue believable, and the plot is richly complex, I was left feeling that I could have done without some of these features if only I could have really played more of the game for real, without outside intervention.
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v.11: 21-Sep-2013 06:06 - Edward Lacey
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v.10: 05-May-2013 09:20 - Edward Lacey
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v.9: 18-Mar-2013 15:11 - Edward Lacey
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  v.8: 03-Mar-2013 11:22 - Edward Lacey
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v.7: 17-Feb-2013 06:57 - Edward Lacey
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v.6: 07-Nov-2010 01:22 - Zarf
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v.5: 19-Mar-2010 02:55 - yandexx
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v.4: 29-Apr-2009 19:02 - Dave Chapeskie
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v.3: 05-Apr-2008 13:34 - Emily Short
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v.2: 11-Mar-2008 22:02 - David Welbourn
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v.1: 16-Oct-2007 01:47 - IFDB
Created page