Spellbreaker: Won!

I missed something early in the game. The golden box in the ogre's lair containing the third cube responds to Jindak, but not just because the cube inside is magical. The box itself is magical too! It is linked to the cube, and exiting from the cube dimension's east exit will take you to wherever the box happens to be. Unless you're carrying it!

In retrospect, I now know that I cheated myself out of a clue by taking it with me and hoarding it like a pack rat. If I had just left it, I would have very soon discovered that the cube's linked exit takes me right back there (and been beaten to death by the ogre). And I might have noticed that this is the only cube without any sealed exits, and from there puzzled out the reason why. But because the box was on my person, the east exit simply bounced me back like every other cube dimension's unusable exit and I was none the wiser.

On the other hand, because I took the gold box with me and hoarded it like a pack rat, I didn't have to reload a saved game from near the beginning of the game to get it!

The box has another function. It can be linked to any other cube by placing that cube inside. I'm not sure if there is a point in doing that, but this also changes the engravings on the box to depict a thematically appropriate beast:

1. Moles - Packed Earth
2. Rabbits - Soft Room
3. Dolphins - Water Room
4. Eagles - Air Room
5. Butterflies - Changing Room
6. Worms - Boneyard
7. Fireflies - Light Room
8. Spiders - String Room
9. Owls - No Place (why owls?)
   
10. Grues - Dark Room
11. Salamanders - Fire Room
    

Knowing this, I have a way of reaching the volcano's outcropping. Toss the box over there, then Blorple into the third cube and exit east.

Here, I found a twelve cube, but this time upon collecting it, a surge of power flowed through it and into me. This must be the last one! This cube is unicorn-themed, and Blorpling into it goes to a chaotic Magic Room.

The Magic Room doesn't seem to be immediately useful. The place is a mess, and Jindak even reveals that there's nothing magical within. North goes back to a meadow that I've already been to, South links to the box, and East is blocked off by an impassable void.

Time to confront Belboz. I Blorpled to the String Room and exited south. He hadn't responded to "talk to Belboz," but I tried commanding him to stand - almost surprisingly, this worked! I doubt I would have thought of this without the hint that I'd need to talk.

Belboz told me that a doppelganger had been here, and challenged me to prove my identity with a trivia question about the Enchanters Guild. This part is copy protection! So late in the game, too. The answer is in the set of trading cards that come in the package.

Belboz gave me a key. I then asked him about the cubes - he explained that these cubes held the foundational elements of the world, and that whoever possessed them could reshape the universe. Other than that, I couldn't get any useful answers from him.

One last unsolved problem - opening the door from the inner vault. I blorpled back, tried my key, and it didn't work. Rezrov, however, did work this time! Possessing the twelve cubes of foundation makes all the difference here.

The door slammed shut as I went north to the outer vault, where I found twelve more cubes, denoted "x1," "x2," and so forth, arranged in two piles. Another door, this one made of iron, exited to the north, but the iron key does not open it, and Rezrov triggers an alarm and your imminent death at the hands of the bored royal guards.

Jindak, however, shows both piles of cubes are magical, and one pile is a bit more magical than the other. I know what's going on here.

This puzzle is a chestnut, but the rules here are that you get three casts of Jindak - after that, an alarm triggers, and two moves later, you die. Saving won't work here!

First, you want to remove two cubes from each pile, leaving two piles of four. Your first Jindak will then reveal which pile of four contains the strongest cube, and if they're the same, then the strongest cube is in one of the cubes you removed. After that, it was trivial to figure out which of those four was the strongest with two Jindak casts. I made sure to a Blorple memorized before the last Jindak - there's no time to memorize after the alarm sounds.

But... after being pretty certain that I found the powerful cube, I Blorpled in and there was nothing there! I reloaded, tried again, and this time found the powerful cube (it is randomly chosen each time you reload) in just two Jindaks, and still, nothing!

 

A commenter alerted me to my error - I assumed that the cube I want is more powerful than the fakes. It could actually be less powerful than the fakes! This complicates the puzzle a bit.

The first move is still to weigh four cubes against four cubes - this time, it identified one pile as the stronger, but the correct cube could be in either one of them.

Weigh 1: [x3,x4,x5,x6] < [x9,x10,x11,x12]

Next, I swapped some cubes around, and weighed three against three. Two from the underweight pile and one from the overweight pile, against one from the underweight pile, one from the overweight pile, and a dummy cube that was neither underweight nor overweight. No matter what Jindak said, I'd have a way to solve the puzzle with just one more cast.

This second cast of Jindak showed both piles were the same.

Weigh 2: [x4,x5,x9] = [x1,x3,x10]

All six of those are fake! That leaves x6, x11, and x12 as the only possibilities. From the first weigh, we know that x6 can't be overweight, and x11 and x12 can't be underweight.

I memorized Blorple before weighing x11 against x12. They were identical, proving that x6 must be underweight and the correct cube.

The alarm went off, summoning the guards, and I Blorpled into x6, taking me to a Sand Room.

 

This room, seemingly the inside of an hourglass, can be exited up or down, and both lead to places I've been before, but things are different. Incidentally, putting this cube into the gold box changes the engravings to turtles, but there is no linking exit.

Up goes to the "Ruins Room," but now there is a normal sack on the ground containing a girgol scroll, and the room is flooding. Down goes to the Dungeon Cell, but the door is closed and locked, and the cabinet contains a blank scroll. Attempting to leave either location is fatal; you either drown, get arrested, or if you try to leave by Blorple, spaghettified.

We've time traveled into the past! Infocom does seem to love this trope.

By setting the Dungeon Cell to the state in which we originally found it, we can Blorple out and live. This means retrieving the scroll, leaving the spellbook inside, locking it - it can be unlocked and locked with Belboz's key - and Rezroving the cell door before immediately Blorpling the power cube. Or, as I realized later on further experimentation, any other cube.

But this trades the all-important spellbook for a seemingly useless blank scroll!

Resolving the past Ruins Room is simpler - you just need to move the Girgol scroll into your zipper and leave it behind, taking the sack with you. But you don't have a lot of time to do this before the room floods enough to ruin the scroll.

I reloaded to the Sand Room and did the Dungeon Cell time paradox routine - but I made sure to memorize multiple Blorples before giving up the spellbook. In preparation for the Ruins Room, I Blorpled to the Magic Room first, where I'd have time to empty out the zipper, save for a few items I'd need next.

In the Ruins Room, I moved the scroll from the sack to the magic zipper, first taking a moment to inscribe the Girgol spell onto the blank scroll, and then Blorpled back to the Magic Room where my stuff waited and could be moved back into the sack.

Now that I had the final power cube, the swirling void here was passable, and took me to a castle, where the shadow - my shadow - appeared. He relieved me of the cubes, magically froze me in place, and explained that he, quite predictably, used me to get them for him, as he started assembling them into a structure which emitted rays of cosmic energy as he completed its construction. Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy might have had just a touch of influence here.

The spell on me wore off shortly after he put the last cube in place, but by then it was too late to do anything - he entered this hypercube with a dramatic backflip and ascended to a higher plane of existence, and deleted me from mine.

I soon discovered that by attacking the shadow, he casts his spell sooner, which will wear off before he finishes his spiel, at which point he ignores you. Cast Girgol just before he enters, and you have a few turns to act.

Removing a cube foils his plans, but isn't the best outcome.

The shadow, now as solid as a real person, performs a back flip into the tesseract. "No!" It screams. "Stop! Fool, you've destroyed me! You've destroyed everything! All my lovely plans!" Now glowing as brightly as the construction it made, the figure approaches the center. It dwindles in size and grows in brightness at the same time, until it reaches the empty center. Then you, it and all the world blink out like a spent match.

 

The correct move, and I'm not really sure I understand why this works, is to replace the cube with another object of sufficiently large size. Most of the things you've got will do.

"Stop! Fool, you've destroyed me! You've destroyed magic itself! All my lovely plans!" Now glowing as brightly as the construction it made, the figure approaches the center. It grows smaller and smaller, and just before it disappears, the hypercube vanishes with a pop, and the "twelve" cube melts in your hand like an ice cube.

 

You find yourself back in Belwit Square, all the guildmasters and even Belboz crowding around you. "A new age begins today," says Belboz after hearing your story. "The age of magic is ended, as it must, for as magic can confer absolute power, so it can also produce absolute evil. We may defeat this evil when it appears, but if wizardry builds it anew, we can never ultimately win. The new world will be strange, but in time it will serve us better."

 

Your score is 600 of a possible 600, in 771 moves. This puts you in the class of Scientist.

GAB rating: Above average. 

I put this conclusion ahead of Sorcerer, but behind Enchanter. Much of what I said about those two applies here - the writing is still good, the room descriptions nice and evocative, and the magic-based puzzles are some of Infocom's best yet. The economy with rooms and objects is admirable as well; almost everywhere you go and everything you see serves a purpose, if not at first, then eventually!

But the worldbuilding, which is so often the strongest part of Infocom's best games, feels flatter than usual, despite the literal multidimensionality. Unlike in Zork and Enchanter, I never felt I was exploring or immersed in a fantasy world. Being structured around a collection of magic cubes and corresponding hub areas makes it feel disjointed and chaotic - this may well have been Lebling's intent, but it means the world never really comes together in any satisfyingly cohesive way. I initially thought that the cubes' unused exits might wind up linking together and join the world for one big interconnected payoff in the end, but they wound up being mostly irrelevant, used only once for a minor (and moderately unfair in my opinion) puzzle.

Spellbreaker isn't quite free of annoying genre conventions either. Granted, there are no mundane mazes, no hunger, and no expiring light sources, but having to constantly juggle inventory items partway in got annoying, and having to stop what you're doing to sleep got annoying. The many, many ways you can die or make the game unwinnable, forcing a reload, was also annoying, but at least it tended to be obvious when this happened. Many of the puzzles are based around strict timing, and are failed if you use a "turn" to examine anything or to check your inventory - that was also annoying. So was having to type "MEMORIZE BLORPLE" a thousand times - couldn't we have just had that one committed to memory? So was having spells fail randomly.

Speaking of which, the major premise of the game - the end of magic - isn't explored all that deeply. It would have been interesting to see magic further deteriorate as you progress through the game, forcing you to adapt and rely on non-magical means of problems solving, but nothing like that ever happens. From start to finish, all of your problems are solved with the right spell.

Besides, the Coconut of Quendor is just going to bring it all back anyway.

In the end, Spellbreaker's positive qualities stand out, but I still feel a bit let down by it, and by the Enchanter trilogy as a whole.

My Trizbort map: