About the Infocom >RESTART Reviews

>INVENTORY started as a pandemic project. I’d known for a long time that I wanted to get my many comp reviews, and various others, off of my student website, but it wasn’t until the spring of 2020 that I found myself with the time and motivation to get this site started. My son Dante was 14 at the time, and all these new reviews, brought into the light, piqued his interest.

So he started reading, and learning about the 1990s IF cast of characters — Graham, Zarf, Rybread, and so forth. He also learned about IF history as it stood up to that point, and in particular how Infocom loomed large for all of us at that time. We’d talked about Infocom before — in fact, when he was five we played Zork together for about 45 minutes, resulting in much cuteness.

Meanwhile, revisiting those old reviews started to give me a hankering to spend some time in the Infocom worlds again. So I decided to replay some Infocom games, and Dante decided he’d like to join in. Because we (and a whole lot of IF-ers) started with Zork, I thought that’s where we could restart. I listed out what I think of as the 9 Zorkian Infocom games:

  • Zork I
  • Zork II
  • Zork III
  • Beyond Zork
  • Zork Zero
  • Enchanter
  • Sorcerer
  • Spellbreaker
  • Wishbringer

Then, to make it a nice even list of 10 games, I added Moonmist, more or less at random. It was a game I’d never finished, it seemed like it was going to be on the easier side, and it had a little historical significance, apparently, for being one of the first games featuring a lesbian character. Dante is an LGBTQ+ activist, so I liked that connection, though as it turns out the depiction is very slight indeed.

Even before I embarked on this replay project, Dante had been exploring newer corners of the IF world — Lock & Key, Counterfeit Monkey, Steph Cherrywell’s games, and some others. So he was familiar with the basic idiom and mechanisms of these games. Essentially, he was right about where I was at his age in 1984, except that his primary text game experiences had been with 21st-century interactive fiction. Plus, he’d been playing video games of all sorts pretty much since he could talk, as opposed to me whose only other video gaming came at the pizza parlor, skating rink, or occasional arcade. Oh, and those friends’ houses lucky enough to contain an Atari 2600.

A vintage Infocom advertisement, with an image of a brain and the caption "We unleash teh world's most powerful graphics technology".

So our Infocom odyssey was a combination of me revisiting childhood memories, with dim recollections of puzzles and landscapes, and him seeing these vintage games through fresh eyes, his expectations shaped by a far more evolved version of text games and computer games in general. I’m still the faster typist between us, so I sat at the keyboard and read aloud, while he directed the action. We transcripted all our interactions, so that I could remember how they went when I wrote the reviews. We also used the invaluable Trizbort to map our progress, generally starting out with the automapping and then inevitably abandonding that when some mazy thing confused its relatively simple algorithm.

If I remembered a puzzle’s solution, I’d try to keep my trap shut and give him the pleasure of solving it for himself, though sometimes if we crossed the line between fun flailing and ragequit flailing, I might drop a subtle hint. More often than not, I didn’t remember the puzzle either, so we could genuinely collaborate on solving it. When we got really stymied we’d turn to the invaluable .z5 Invisiclues at the Infocom Documentation Project, but that wasn’t terribly often.

So as I write about these games, I’m writing about that experience. I’m not trying to write the definitive history of an Infocom game — for my money Jimmy Maher has got that territory 100% nailed down. Instead, I’m presenting an idiosyncratic and personal account of how Dante and I experienced those games — how I felt upon returning to those oft-trod trails and how Dante’s insights illuminated them for me like a trusty brass lantern.

We started Zork I on August 5, 2020, and finished Moonmist on December 20. Given sufficient time and interest, there may be more to come! Note that all of these reviews will be spoiler-laden — they aren’t written to promote a game but rather to analyze an experience, so I won’t shy away from getting specific.

Castle Amnos: The First Legend by John Evans [Comp00]

IFDB page: Castle Amnos
Final placement: 30th place (of 53) in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Competition

Today is November 7th. It’s 11:30pm, Colorado time. I’m writing this review on my creaky but trusty 386 laptop, the television on in front of me (muted) so that I can continue to keep tabs on the US presidential election, which is still in a dead heat after seesawing all night long. It was, to say the least, a bad day to play Castle Amnos. Not that I didn’t have the time — I played my first hour over my lunch break at work, then did another hour after the commute home, dinner, watching election returns, and being at least somewhat present in my marriage (oh yeah, that). Then a quick shower to clear my head, and I’m ready to review.

With most comp games, this time investment would have been sufficient. Not with this one, though. For one thing, Castle Amnos is big. I didn’t expect this, since the game file size is 122K, but that’ll teach me to rely on file sizes — turns out you can squeeze in quite a few rooms, objects, and puzzles when you implement hardly any first-level nouns, code minimal responses for reasonable object actions, and only give your NPCs the bare minimum necessary for them to participate in their puzzles. Consequently, even when I reached the end of my two hours, I had no sense of closure at all — I doubt I’d even seen a third of the game.

What’s more, there are several mazelike sections in the game, and a few others where the geography is quite non-intuitive. I had made maps of these during my first-hour session, but I forgot and left them at work, and I’d be damned if I was going to draw them again. I have a pretty good memory for IF geography, so this didn’t cripple me in my second hour, but it did slow me down. I wonder how many comp judges’ experience is like mine: fragmented, squeezed in at the edges of our lives. I wonder how many others felt frustrated at playing a game that clearly didn’t fit into those small spaces we can create for it.

This is my 42nd game of this comp, and usually by this point I’m ready to name a trend for the year. Last year it was non-interactive games. The year before that, one-room games. This year, though there are some rather surprising similarities — two games prominently featuring peyote (?), several pointless joke games, far too many starvation puzzles — I’m not sure I can put my finger on one overall trend among the games for the entire comp, except that their index of quality has tended to be higher. I have, however, noticed a personal trend: I’m getting more and more impatient with games that, in my opinion, don’t belong in the IF competition.

Mostly, these are games that are so large, it’s really unlikely that most players will see anything like a majority of the game in two hours’ playing time. It’s discouraging to make a sincere effort to play a huge number of games in a six-week timespan, only to discover that several of those games simply cannot be played to any satisfactory conclusion in the two hours allotted. It makes me want to just avoid playing anything over a certain file size, but even that strategy would fail: My Angel is almost twice the size of this game, but it’s easily finishable in two hours. Amnos, on the other hand, is anything but.

I’m not sure what the solution is, but I will say this: Authors, I implore you. Please think carefully about whether your game can be played in two hours. If, realistically, it cannot, I urge you not to enter it in the competition. I know about the feedback problem — people are working on it. In the meantime, isn’t it better to have your game played all the way through by 50 appreciative people than to have its first 25% played, then the whole thing dropped, by 200 people who are terribly pressed for time?

Okay, I realize that I’ve gotten on my comp soapbox and delivered very little useful feedback about the game itself. To remedy that: Castle Amnos appears to have some very interesting ideas at its core. I found sections, and resonances, that intrigued me a lot. I obviously wasn’t able to get far enough in the game to get any sort of resolution on what had been set up, so I don’t know if the payoff fulfills the promise of that setup, but if it does, I think it’ll be an interesting game.

It is, however, hampered by several problematic design decisions which are a bit of a throwback to the earlier days of IF. There’s a more or less pointless inventory limit, which forces you to keep all your objects in one central location and trundle back and forth between it and whatever puzzle you happen to be working on. There is a room somewhat reminiscent of the Round Room in Zork II, only about twice as aggravating because you have to perform an action before the randomizer will run again each time, and it opens on fewer options, making repetition more necessary. It appears to be somewhat circumnavigable, but only somewhat. Then again, who knows whether there isn’t some later section of the game that makes that room behave in a deterministic fashion? Certainly not me.

In addition to these problems, there are (as I mentioned earlier) several mazelike sections of the game. To me, that kind of thing is just no fun. Mileage, I’m sure, varies. All this is not to say that it’s a bad game. It is implemented minimally, but competently. I don’t think I found any major bugs, though the game’s fascination with non-standard geography and randomness sometimes made it difficult to tell what was a bug and what wasn’t. The prose, like the code, is sparse but error-free. Perhaps, if I was able to play it all the way through, I’d even think that Amnos is a really good game, or at least a draft of something on the way to becoming a really good game. With what I was able to see, though, all I was able to tell was that its entry as a competition game impaired my ability to enjoy it.

Rating: 5.7

The Land Beyond The Picket Fence by Martin Oehm [Comp96]

IFDB page: The Land Beyond the Picket Fence
Final placement: 14th place (of 26) in the 1996 Interactive Fiction Competition

Picket is a gently whimsical fantasy without much of a plot, whose main interesting feature is its interface. I haven’t played much DOS executable IF before (Inform, TADS, and Infocom games seem to monopolize my time), and it was an interesting experience to play a piece of IF in different colors from my normal white letters on blue background. The different colors of background and text lent a distinctive mood to the piece, and the effectiveness of this technique makes me realize some of the special effects we sacrifice in the name of platform independence. A small sacrifice, perhaps, but a pity nonetheless. As to the content of the game, it was basically average — nothing too irritating or pointless, but nothing astounding or groundbreaking either. It provided a pleasant hour’s entertainment, with a few jarring moments where the prose deviated from standard English. All in all, an enjoyable if unspectacular game.

Prose: There were a few moments in the prose where it was clear that the writer did not speak English as a first language, but the fact that those moments were noticeable as exceptions to the general trend means that overall the writer did a fine job of writing in an unfamiliar language. The descriptions were sometimes a little thin, especially with the game’s two NPCs, but in general the fairytale fantasy mood was well-evoked by the writing.

Difficulty: I found this game’s difficulty to be pitched a bit below average. I never needed to look at the hints, and felt that I progressed through the narrative at a satisfactory pace. I finished the game in a little under an hour, which may mean that it was a little too easy if a two-hour playing time was intended (I’m certainly not the quickest IF player, as earlier reviews may indicate). However, I never felt disappointed with anything being “too easy” — easier than usual, perhaps, but never to an annoying degree.

Technical (coding): There were a few coding problems, and in fact one fatal bug which first made some of my possessions disappear after a restore and then kicked me out of the game altogether. Also, some fairly common verbs (“throw”, and the “character, command” mode of interaction) were not implemented, which was a little disappointing. Aside from these problems, the coding was smooth and relatively bug-free.

Technical (writing): As I mentioned above, there were a few instances of awkward grammar which indicated that the writer was not quite comfortable enough with English to sound like a native writer. The problems were relatively infrequent, and had less to do with spelling or grammar errors than with awkward or unusual constructions.

Plot: Well, the only plot here was a basic “find the object” quest, though cast in much less epic/heroic terms than usual, which was refreshing. There wasn’t much of a sense of unfolding narrative, and many objects were either totally unexplained (the key to the gnome’s treasure room tied around a swan’s neck with a red ribbon? How did that happen?) or so convenient as to be ridiculous (how handy that the scientist just happens to have a powerful fungicide that can kill the problematic mushrooms!), causing the game to feel less like a plotted story than an excuse for stringing puzzles together.

Puzzles: The puzzles were rather average pieces, some quite derivative (the “key tied around an inaccessible animal’s neck” is of course a direct crib from Zork II.) The ordinariness of the puzzles contributed to the game’s low level of difficulty — they weren’t too difficult to solve, because they seemed quite familiar, and those that weren’t derivative were of the “just-happen-to-have-the-perfect-item” type.

OVERALL — A 6.7