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:

Spellbreaker: Monoliths

Despite a tip from a commenter telling me that it was already possible to break the seal affecting all of the hub rooms, and also possible to productively interact with Belboz, I could not figure out how, nor how to progress in any meaningful way. I turned to the walkthrough, and saw that its next instructions showed how to deal with the octagonal room.

What you do is put the compass rose in a compass-shaped inlet, as I had, to open the passageway into the octagonal room. But I was wrong in my belief that the compass controls it from here! Before entering, you remove the compass rose. The passage stays open. Then you go in, and you touch the runes on the octagonal room's walls with the compass to open a passage there.

Seriously - did anyone figure that out on their own? Placing the compass in the initial inset was pretty obvious, and removing it not quite as obvious, and I knew the compass was somehow used to manipulate the room, but why would you think that touching the walls with it would do anything?

This area is actually a maze of octagonal rooms, and each of the compass's eight directions is good for one use before turning into brass and deactivating, and north is already used up to get inside. In effect, you get seven moves to navigate the maze, and can't move in any direction twice. The rooms themselves have eight walls each, and each wall has a rune whose color dictates whether the compass will react and open a hole there or not.

The maze is not large or complicated, and one room's west wall is uniquely marked with a gold rune and alabaster inset. I couldn't find any way to reach this room without using up my west move, and I don't think it's possible, but it doesn't matter - all you have to to is Rezrov the inset and the wall opens up revealing... another cube.

The ninth cube goes to "No Place." Eastward from this hub is the Inner Vault from Zork III, still full of treasure, and the door from the Outer Vault locked and Rezrov-proof. Southward from No Place is a nondescript "plain," which is in fact a frictionless plane like something out of Mathmagic Land. Colorful rocks glide around the landscape, and another cube sits on one, but walking around is impossible, and the rocks protest if you try to climb on them.

I offered the lava fragment to the green rock in the immediate vicinity, and it gratefully allowed me to climb aboard and carry me where I wished. I moved toward the brown rock in the east, and it moved away, but I could eventually trap it in the corner of this plane and get its cube.

The tenth cube goes to a "Dark Room." And this dark room is situated over a dark, dark cave. So dark that your own light sources don't work very well.

You know what this means - grue city! And if you're in deep enough that you can see their outlines, you're already dead.

To survive, you've got to memorize a Snavig spell and then abandon any light-emitting items before going on. And then you must cast Snavig to become a grue.

Past the grues is a pool of faint light, with a climbable pillar in the middle. And on top of it, a cube.

The eleventh cube goes to a "Fire Room." South goes to back to the clifftop connected to the very first cube. North goes to a volcano - we'd been to its base before, but this part is higher up.

On the volcano, a heat-resistant outcropping can be seen to the west, but there's no obvious way to reach it.

Now I'm 415 points in, out 600, and I've seen 80 rooms, but a lot of them are part of the octagonal room maze and plains area. That's already more than the median 48KB Infocom game; only Zork I and Planetfall are appreciably bigger. I've got to be nearly done.

I have four unsolved problems:

• How do I enter the sealed rooms in the hubs?
• What do I do with Belboz?
• How do I open the door in the inner vault?
  
• How do I reach the volcano outcropping?
  

The first two should be solvable already, but I still can't figure out how.

Tips would be appreciated - if possible, I'd prefer gentle tips that prod me in the right direction to find the bit of information I'm missing to solve the puzzle over outright spoilers. I'll have updates in the comments regarding my progress over the weekend.

My Trizbort map (so far):

Spellbreaker: Megafauna

Following my impasse with the magic carpet, I reloaded an earlier save, to one just before I was forced to choose between saving a scroll in a bottle and the magic cube needed to get me there, and used a bit of fish to distract the hungry grouper so that I could collect both. Then I retraced the rest of my steps up until I had the magic carpet again.

Now then - what can we do with this flying carpet? I already know that using it outdoors just gets me lost in the wilderness, and that removing its tag prevents it from working entirely. I thought that the oubliette, accessible from the cube I just rescued, might be a good place to fly, but the carpet doesn't fly in there.

But I discovered something else here. An outflow pipe here can be entered  - secure the spellbook first! - after shrinking yourself with magic. This leads back to cube 1's Ruins Room, and another cube is picked up along the way. Continuing to go down the outflow past the Ruins Room will be your immediate death.

The water can also be frozen with magic, but I don't see what purpose it serves. The flow continues regardless.

This fifth cube can be Blorpled into a phase-shifting hub leading to a room containing an ornate, and magical compass rose, and another room with an inset in the wall. Inserting the compass into it causes the north arm to change color and opens up a passage to an octagonal room with no way out.

I think I know what I'm meant to do here, but I'm unsure how to communicate it to the parser! Moving, rotating, or pushing the compass, its arms, or its knobs just produces the unhelpful message "nothing happens."

I turned to a walkthrough - turns out I missed something! The trap door at the top of the oubliette can't be reached by magic carpet, but it can be opened with Rezrov. And freezing the water does serve a purpose - one freeze does nothing, but a second freeze blocks the outflow, flooding the hole. A third cast - you've got to memorize three casts ahead of time and then secure the spellbook - solidifies the pool surface and lets you climb out.

The dungeon has yet another cube on the floor, but also a moldy, disintegrating book, found inside a cabinet in one of its cells. It can be magically repaired, and inside, a lone spell 'Snavig' - shape change - is found and transcribable with Gnusto. There is also a guard tower overwatching, but nothing useful seems to be within, and when you stick around, the roc swoops down and snatches you.

 

This sixth cube takes us to the boneyard where death would normally deposit you. A north exit goes back to Belwit square, and a west exit is sealed. But I couldn't find anything to do here, so I went around the world again to see if Snavig could be useful anywhere.

Snavig doesn't work on the roc, but it does work on the grouper - and you'll want to leave everything behind before doing this. Which means you've got to memorize it, plus a Blorple before you step through the ocean portal, and if the spell randomly fails, you've got to Blorple back and retry.

As a grouper, you can dive to the bottom of the ocean floor, where a seventh cube sits! Whatever you brought with you will also sit here, which is why you want to bring nothing. You can't pick it up as a grouper, and eating it produces a humorous (but very undesirable!) result, but you can just wait for the spell to wear off - you've got enough oxygen to retrieve both it and the cube that brought you here, surface, and use your Blorple to return to safety.

 

This new cube leads to a brightly lit hub whose only functioning exit is a volcano, where a lava fragment can be found and collected if magically cooled first. But I couldn't see what to do with it, or find anything else to do, so I turned to the walkthrough again.

Finally, I learned what do do with the magic carpet. You take it to the guard tower and ride it before the roc gets you, which I had actually tried doing, but did not realize that in this place, and this place only, you can take off, land in the place it takes you, and survive. From above, the wilderness surrounding the guard tower is completely indistinguishable from any other wilderness area, but if you go west toward the jagged mountains, you'll reach the roc's nest, where you can get the cube before the mother returns (or the baby hatches).

This eight cube goes to a "string hub" with one valid path - south, to an enchanter's retreat, where Belboz meditates, and will quickly kill you if you attempt any hostility. He will submit to a magic mind probe, but this reveals nothing suspicious.

I'm now 340 points in, out of a maximum of 600. This is a pretty long game! I've only seen 47 rooms, which is probably the majority, but there's very little padding here. Almost all of them have at least one functional purpose.

I have three unsolved problems:

• How do I enter the sealed rooms in the hubs?
• What do I do with Belboz?
• How do I manipulate the Octagonal Room?
  

 

I suspect the first two problems don't get solved until I'm near the end, and the third is just a matter of finding the right verbiage. We will see.

My Trizbort map (so far):

Spellbreaker: Rummy cubes

Spellbreaker seems like a deadly game - I've barely begun to map it out, with only 14 rooms visited, and already found two locations where you die if you do the wrong thing, or even just wait around too long.

To recap - magic is failing, all of the land's guildmasters except myself have been turned into frogs, and a mysterious cloaked figure has selected me for some mysterious purpose, but left no clues; just a magical white cube that represents some kind of pocket dimension with four passages and a hole. The north passage is invisibly sealed. East leads to a stone hall where a massive serpent devouring its own tail blocks off a circular passage. South goes to a precarious cliff, with avalanche-triggering rocks at the top, and a grumpy ogre at the bottom.

 

I restarted, quickly reobtained the cube, used the Blorple spell to enter it, and quickly discovered there's not much more to explore! The west passage goes nowhere new - it just leads directly to the ogre's cave, and the hole is a very long drop to the bottom, which the game shows uncharacteristic mercy by telling you instead of just killing you for trying to take it.

I tried to find productive use for any of my magic - in particular, it seemed like Throck, a spell to make plants grow, might be weaponized against the allergic ogre, but to no avail. Half of the time my spells just failed outright, and Throck didn't seem to do anything the other half of the time.

The girgol spell - a one-time use scroll to freeze time - proved useful. After deliberately triggering an avalanche, I cast girgol, and was able to climb a series of free-falling boulders to reach the clifftop! Here, a Ƶ500 coin lay on the ground, and a hermit's stone hut was perched by the edge. Inside, another white cube was embedded in the walls, but the hermit wouldn't let me take it. The malyon spell, which animates inanimate objects, fatally demonstrates that this is a load-bearing cube.

I couldn't see what else to do here, or find a use for the coin, so I turned to a walkthrough. First, it says to write a "1" on the cube - I assume this helps distinguish it from any other cubes we find. But second, and I have to call this unfair, you actually do have to jump into the hole! Go down once and be warned that this is a bad idea. Go down a second time to actually do it. And there's still a chance that you die from doing this.

I didn't die, but fell some distance, until a roc swooped down and picked me up, and dropped me into her nest, where a scroll of Caskly - "cause perfection," could be found and Gnusto'd, and another cube, which the roc wouldn't let me take, was wedged underneath an egg.

I returned to the stone hut and cast Caskly on it to give it a little more structural integrity. After this, I could take the new cube and Blorple inside.

 

This cube, which I wrote "two" on, goes to a different pocket dimension with only two exits. One is sealed, the other goes to a meadow, where I find garden sheers and a conspicuous ragweed.

It's pretty obvious what I need to do here. I pull - not cut - the weed, and return to the ogre's cave, where I could replant and Throck it, sending the ogre into a sneezing fit long enough to steal his cache - another cube, and a scroll of epnis - sleeping.

Espnis does not work on the mother roc and allow me to take the cube in her nest, so I Blorple this third one.

The third cube's hub world is a watery one and has three exits, two of them unsealed. One leads to the bottom of an oubliette. The other leads to the middle of the ocean, where your spellbook gets waterlogged, you drop your cube (which soon gets eaten by a grouper), and a bottle is seen floating.

I reloaded, and knowing what would happen, I first memorized Blorple, then put the spellbook inside the magic zipper so that it would not get ruined. I stepped into the ocean, grabbed the bottle, and Blorpled the first cube, knowing I could never return here.

The bottle, which I then opened, had a "liskon" spell, which shrinks living things. I knew where this would help - the ouroboros reacted as promised, letting me slip past it and into a temple adorned with a very large basalt rat statue featuring a prominent mouth. Malyon would animate it, and espnis would make it yawn, letting me reach inside and grab a fourth cube.

The fourth cube is air-themed, made of solid clouds, and has four passages out, including a gap downward.

North takes me to a deadly frozen glacier, where a freezing scroll of "tinsot" lies in the snow banks.

South drops into thin air, where the roc once again picked me up and dropped me into her nest. Tinsot seemed like it might let me freeze her in place long enough to take the cube here, but it does not.

West goes to a busy bazaar, where a wheeler-dealer (threader-vendor?) carpet salesman can be lowballed and bartered down to Ƶ500, but he'll try to push the red one on you. Don't accept this - insist on the blue. He won't allow you to cast jindak (detect magic) in the shop, but trial and error shows that the blue carpet is magical and the red carpet is just a threadbare rag.

I put the carpet down on the ground and sat - and it flew! Up into the clouds, where it eventually took me to a mountainous wilderness. Although the carpet responds to directional commands, it seemed endless, and landing here is immediately fatal.

At this point, I'm stuck. I did discover two things, neither of which is immediately useful - first, that the magic carpet has a tag on its underside, which if removed, causes the carpet to lose its flying ability. Second, that in the middle of the ocean, the grouper can be fed with smoked fish taken from the guild's banquet hall, allowing you to retrieve both the cube and the bottle. I have some ideas about things to try next, mostly involving the magic carpet in various places, but for now I'm calling this a stopping point.

My Trizbort map (so far):

Game 443: Spellbreaker

Read the manual here:

https://www.mocagh.org/loadpage.php?getgame=spellbreaker

 

Get Frotz (if native Windows execution is your wish) here:
http://www.davidkinder.co.uk/frotz.html

 

I skipped over an Infocom game this year - one of my favorites, actually; A Mind Forever Voyaging, simply because I've played it too much already and would gain nothing from a replay. Infocom's first game to use the new V4 format required a then-luxurious 128KB of RAM and allowed much bigger worlds than ever before, more interactivity, more vocabulary, and more in-depth game mechanics. This one, designed by Hitchhikers' Steve Meretzky, is set in a near future ruled by neoconservative technocrats, and downplays puzzles in favor of narrative, as you'd observe and interact with a 60 year time-lapsed computer simulation of your hometown's projected future.

This format's requirements completely locked out the Commodore 64, the most popular computer of the day, and required anyone with a stock Apple //e - the second most popular computer of the day, to upgrade. It would be reserved for select prestige titles. V3 remained Infocom's popular format and continued to be used in more games, including our next whale, and conclusion to the Enchanter trilogy - Spellbreaker.

This one, authored by Enchanter's Dave Lebling, is marked Expert Level on the box. In fact, this is the final Infocom game with that label. This would have once intimidated me, and it still does a little, but I've had a pretty good track record with enjoying expert-level Infocoms, if not always with finishing them without help.

 

Infocom's box feelies are, once again, dissatisfyingly thin - all we get here are an Enchanters Guild pin, a set of six Topps-style trading cards of famous enchanters, and a manual that takes the form of a Frobozzco wizard's catalog, whose only concession to the game's premise - the decline and fall of magic itself - are a "Special Crisis Edition" hallmark on the front, and a listing for conventional swords within alongside the expected potions and scroll parchments.

We begin in the Council Chamber, where a meeting of the guildmasters is taking place. Do you know how difficult it is to make butter pastries by hand?, sniffs the boulanger. Now 'gloth' hardly works, and when it does, it folds the dough too often! Far more troubling, though, is the brewmaster's dire warning - Without magic, there isn't going to be any beer! Murmurs run through the room, and fingers are pointed, mainly at us, and just before the Poets Guild has a chance to drop some devastating burns in rhyming verse, everyone mysteriously turns into newts! Everyone but us, and an unidentified figure in the back of the room, who I pursue.

It's a short-lived chase, though - I go out the chamber door, past a buffet in the grand hall, and out the door to Belwit Square, where the suspect, obscured by a black cloak (of course), vanishes in a dramatic billow of orange smoke.

I take a moment to review my inventory - it consists of a knife, a magic stylus, and my spellbook, which contains:

• Blorple - Explore mystic connections
• Yomin - Probe minds
  
• Rezrov - Open locks
  
• Frotz - Illuminate
• Gnusto - Inscribe scrolls into the spellbook
• Malyon - Animate
• Jindak  - Detect magic
• Lesoch - Wind
  

 

The game specifically notes that we've never seen "Blorple" before, but Jindak and Lesoch are new spells too.

A cast of Lesoch clears the smoke from the square, leaving a white cube on the ground. Jindak takes a few tries to get right, but eventually reveals that the cube is magical.

Normally this where I'd start Trizborting, and I do, but there's not much to map out! Belwit Square extends infinitely to the east and west, the way south is blocked by a guard, and there's nothing in the Enchanter's Guild to the north but a bunch of frogs and a banquet hall, from which I help myself to some bread and fish.

I try out Blorple on the magic cube - instantly I'm teleported into a pitch black, subterranean chamber, and I quickly Frotz the spellbook so that I don't get eaten. And here, I start Trizborting.

East from the initial chamber, which has exits in all four cardinal directions and a hole leading down, I enter a stone hall leading north and south. To the north, an ouroborosan serpent fills a circular passage. To the south, a vast field of ruined pillars and water stains, and a zipper, which I take. But I find no passage back to the initial chamber.

Soon I grow tired, and unable to find any sort of bedroom, I just sleep on the floor, where I dream of mages viewing premonitions of violence through a magic mirror.

The zipper seems to be a bag of holding. I can open it, put things inside, even enter it myself. Inside is a Gnusto-proof scroll of girgol - time stop. Casting Blorple on it takes me to an empty room, which exits right back to wherever I came from.

 

Unable to make any progress with the serpent - it reacts to Yomin but only informs me that the serpent is punished for its pride - I Blorple the cube again, and return to the underground chamber. The north exit is magically sealed, but south leads to a new set of rooms -  a sheer cliffside, which as I attempt to ascend, gives way and dumps my body down a ravine!

Death isn't necessarily the end in the Zork universe - the cloaked figure appears, mocks my failure, and sends me to a corridor of bones, from which I can exit back to Belwit square and Blorple back into the cube again to resume my task.

I return to the cliffside - a spell of Throck - "cause plants to grow" - is found and can be Gnusto'd into the spellbook. Climbing down, I find a cave guarded by a sneezy ogre, who pounds me flat as I try to explore.

The shade warns me that I'm on my last try as I resurrect one more time, and return to the cliffside. Girgol freezes the ogre in place and lets me pass - this is probably not the correct solution; Infocom would not waste bytes on details such as his hay fever if it weren't important - but it works, and I enter his lair where I find a bed, a golden box, and a scroll, which I cannot interact with until the spell wears off. And as soon as it does, the enraged ogre charges in after me and curb stomps me.

My Trizbort map (so far):

Wishbringer: Won!

 

Last session, we delivered a letter - an ultimatum to deliver Wishbringer into the hands of The Evil One - to the kooky, isolated magic shop at the top of a windy, treacherous mountain path, and subsequently watched the township of Festeron go dark and transform into a foreboding, fog-swept pit of a city, a massive tower erected where the post office used to be.

Wishbringer itself is in our hands, concealed in the bottom of a rattlesnake-in-a-can taken from the shop's joke shelf, but the fog is quickly rising, concealing the safe footing of the trail back down.

I have the means to wish for advice, luck, or rain, but each wish is only granted once. Opening my umbrella and wishing for rain quickly disperses the fog, and I found myself at the bottom of the cliff again.

Returning to the bridge, things have changed. Festeron has become Witchville, and a troll guards it, demanding payment of a gold coin to cross. I had none, and couldn't see a means of obtaining one - perhaps one could be found in the fountain that I neglected to search during my trip through, but that was on the other side of the bridge now.

I thought that perhaps I could scare the troll off with the rattlesnake can, but to do that, I'd have to reload to a save from before opening it. And this also means I'd have to descend the foggy trail without magic. Blindly. But thanks to my Trizbort map, this was simple.

My thought was correct - the simple-minded troll opened the can and got spooked off by the snake inside, saving me a wish and a hypothetical gold coin. Crossing the bridge, an ominous sign bared a warning:

   ENTERING WITCHVILLE

  Curfew Begins At 6 PM
   Boot Patrol On Duty
Violators Will Be Jailed!


 

Not good! And it was already after 6:00 when I left the magic shop.

I explored Witchville:

• Giant, magic boots patrol the rotary. The sound of them stomping around can help you to sneak around without getting caught.
  
• God no longer dwells in the church. The candle can be taken now, and the mouse infestation has become a rat infestation.
• I searched the fountain water and saw a brass token, and a piranha that prevented me from taking it.
• The police station has a wanted poster with my picture on it! Enter and the sergeant threatens to arrest you, but won't pursue if you leave.
• The movie theater is open (How? There's a curfew!) and the gravedigger works as a ticket collector.
• The vicious poodle south of the rotary is now a vicious hellhound.
• A platypus is trapped in a pit near the cemetery gate, too narrow for us to enter, too deep for us to reach into.
  
• The gate to the cemetery is unlocked, but ghosts infest it. Try to cross through and they carry you off to a random part of Witchville, and your possessions scatter all over the place.
  
• The mailbox on the wharf is alive, and demands mail. I tried giving it Ms. Voss's note, but it rejected the offering; "Not STAMPED!" And it followed me around for awhile.
• The rocky path leads to a familiar scene - an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door, and a little mailbox beside it. Soon, the big mailbox found me, and they fought to their mutual deaths.
• Getting caught by the boots lands you in jail, but escape is pretty easy; an obvious secret passage leads to an underground maze.
  
• Three ways out of the maze; a grue's nest with a refrigerator you don't have time to open, a stump at the top of Lookout Hill, and the open grave in the cemetery.
  

 

Stuck, with no ideas on what to do next, I wished for advice. The conch shell rang like a telephone - I picked it up, and a voice whispered "release a prisoner, be rewarded." I was pretty sure this referred to the platypus, but couldn't find any way to get it out, and so I turned to a walkthrough to see what I might be missing.

I restarted the game and followed it for a bit, mostly repeating prior actions but with a few more things picked up:

• A gold coin (not bronze!) is found in the Festeron fountain during the day.
• After descending the foggy trail, a branch can be broken off the tree at the base.

 

The branch rescues the platypus, who gratefully etches an 'X' into the sand. Digging reveals a silver whistle, which when blown began a surreal little episode where I was magically transported to a majestic castle of platypuses, who thanked me for rescuing their princess, and commanded me to bring a magic hat to a creature of the sea.

The creature was a pelican perched on the fake lighthouse. I gave it the hat, and learned the magic word - SORKIN.

Stuck again, I wished for advice, and got some - "One path Magick; one path Science; both lead to thy Goal." Useless!

 

So I turned to the walkthrough again. I am supposed to get arrested, take a blanket from the jail cell, and go to the grue's nest, where I may cover the grue with the blanket and raid its refrigerator.

Um. Okay. I did that, and found a bottle of grues' milk and an earthworm.

The earthworm baited the fish, letting me grab the brass coin, which I put into the sole working machine in the arcade, now titled "TRANSMATTER." The screen displayed a map of Festeron, corresponding to the map in the game package, and the machine's purpose became clear; operating the joystick selects a sector of the map, and pushing the button teleports you there (and fries the machine). Only the post office tower cannot be reached by foot, making it the obvious destination, and five points awarded upon its selection confirm this. But I didn't save just yet - it's a one-way trip, and my business in Witchville seemed unfulfilled. In particular, the movie theater's purpose wasn't yet clear.

SORKIN lowers the tower drawbridge, and upon entering it, Mr. Crisp seized me and dragged me to a torture chamber, where Princess Tasmania of the platypus kingdom was clamped into some diabolical machine. Really, Taz, twice in the same night?

I offered him the note from Miss Voss, and he blushed, removed his coat, and took off in a hurry. Grabbing and searching the coat procured a key, which freed me and the princess, who thanked me and blew her own magic whistle to leave.

Reading the note, an invitation to cookies from Miss Voss, revealed a clue - the poodle obeys the command "ALEXIS, HEEL."

Climbing up from the torture chamber, I ascended into the tower, where a room was described as "Fuzziness." I couldn't go anywhere, or look at anything - it was all too fuzzy. Every object in my inventory had become fuzzy. I couldn't seem to do anything, not even wish for advice.

Surely enough, I had missed something important at the movie theater. Miss Voss, who waits outside, sells tickets for the price of your gold coin if you type "BUY TICKET."

The gravedigger took my ticket and let me in, where the picture was a blurry double-image. I know what this means. I looked at the floor - this is something I'd never think of doing except for the fact that adventure game logic meant there had to be something useful in here - and found a pair of 3D glasses, letting me watch the movie.

I repeated my actions leading to the tower. Wearing the 3D glasses let me see inside the laboratory, where I found a telescope, control panel, broom, and a black cat - "black as night from head to tail," and therefore not Chaos.

The control panel de-activated some security system, and a crank hidden behind a painting lowered the drawbridge, letting me leave.

The hellhound outside Violet's cottage obeyed my command, letting me enter, where I found a steel key and a cutsey love message scrawled in the dust.

The key unlocked the library door, and upon entering, the door slammed behind me. No matter - here, I found a cat sculpture inside a display case, which I smashed with the umbrella. The sculpture was black marble, with a shallow hole carved into the forehead, just like Chaos!

With no other ideas, I put Wishbringer inside the hole. An old woman appeared, demanding I hand over the stone. Obviously a fraud, I ignored her and carried on. Energy rays shot out from the stone, annihilating her disguise, and afterwards herself.

I found myself transported back to the cliff edge.

The door of the Magick Shoppe creaks open, and the old woman, dressed in a nightgown, stands blinking in the morning sun. "Who's there?"

The black cat leaps into the woman's arms. "Chaos!" she cries, laughing and sobbing all at once as the cat licks tears of joy from her face.

At last the old woman lowers Chaos to the ground and walks over to where you're standing, red with embarrassment.

"Now you know me for the old liar I am," she chuckles, clasping your hands gratefully in her own. "I promised to give you Wishbringer, knowing full well that, if you succeeded, its virtue would be lost.

"In truth, the Stone would make a poor reward," she continues, stooping to tickle the cat's white forehead. "As you can see, it brings more joy in the shape of a companion than in any other. This is Wishbringer's finest Magick. A pity that my sister, the Evil One, did not know of it."

The old woman touches the violet note in your hand. "Make sure you give this to Mr. Crisp when you see him," she says with a sly wink. "And tell him I said hello."

Cradling Chaos in her arms like a child, the old woman ambles back into the Magick Shoppe. "Farewell!" she calls from the closing door, and the sunlight makes her face look young. "Now you are a true Adventurer."

A concealed bell tinkles merrily.



Congratulations! You've finished the story of Wishbringer!

Your score is 100 points out of 100, in 297 moves.


 

GAB rating: Good, but not great. There's some decent writing and storybuilding here, albeit with some aspects that can come across as childish when I don't think they were meant to. The colorful cast of characters - often not an Infocom strong suit - are some of the most memorable yet. Exploring Festeron the first time around was fun, despite the time limit hanging over your head, and the return to its wicked nighttime counterpart Witchville was an odd but effective mix of whimsy and horror, made better for the twisted familiarity of your first trip through it.

But its puzzle design isn't the best. All actions taken to finish the game are either completely obvious, or obscure and unmotivated. Nothing indicates that you can buy tickets from Miss Voss, or that a pair of discarded 3D glasses is on the floor of the theater, or that one of the paintings in the gallery can be moved. This is meant as an introductory game, and there are some beginner's guardrails, like explicit warnings on when you should save, and second chances to retrieve lost items, but it's inconsistent. Right away in the first chapter, you have to think to search the fountain at the center of town for a gold coin. This isn't signposted, and you absolutely must have it later on, and if you don't get it before delivering the letter, the one thing you're under strict instructions to do and to do so quickly, you've locked yourself out of victory. By nightfall, it's gone. This seems arbitrarily cruel for a beginner-friendly game!

Then there's Wishbringer itself, whose magic is often mentioned as a means to provide beginners with alternate solutions to difficult puzzles. Hogwash, I say - in retrospect, darkness is the only legitimate example of this, and even that has limitations!

My assessment of the wishes from most to least useful:

• Darkness - Sneak past certain characters. Notably the troll, but you need to sneak past him anyway long before you raid the grues' refrigerator (this itself a ridiculous puzzle that magic will not help you to solve) for the milk needed to do this. You can also sneak past Violet's dog in darkness, but you'll need to make the return trip the more conventional way.
• Rain washes the fog away from the dangerous trail, but if you do this, then you've already destroyed the snake-in-a-can joke needed for the troll. And you're locked into the alternate solution of bribing him with the gold coin, then coming back later and wishing for darkness to scare him off, and also wishing for luck so that your coin doesn't fall into the river. It's much easier and obvious enough to just give him the rattlesnake-in-a-can joke and avoid all that nonsense, not to mention the burden you spare your inventory limit from not carrying a bunch of magical crap that you don't need.
• Luck also delays the ghosts in the cemetery from spiriting you away (they'll steal your things instead and then spirit you away, so just stay out), and delays Violet's dog from killing you (but she still won't let you pass, so you'll need to learn her command anyway).
• Freedom - which you can't even wish for unless you took the time during your day errand to steal candy from the police station - lets you escape from jail, which is easy enough (and required) to do normally. It can also unshackle you in the torture chamber, but if Mr. Crisp is watching he'll just re-shackle you, and if not then it's trivial to take his key and free yourself.
  
• Advice hardly ever tells you anything you didn't already know.
  
• Foresight gives you a glimpse of the ending, but this tells you nothing useful.
• Flight takes you back to the magic shop, but you do not want to do this before finding Chaos, whose magic teleports you there anyway.

 

Overall I enjoyed Wishbringer, and can certainly recommend it as a gentler, more accessible counterpart to the Enchanter trilogy, but still can't help but feel a little unsatisfied.

My Trizbort map:

 

Game 395: Wishbringer

Read the manual here:

https://www.mocagh.org/loadpage.php?getgame=wishbringer

 

Get Frotz (if native Windows execution is your wish) here:
http://www.davidkinder.co.uk/frotz.html

 

Rebelstar Raiders will continue next week, but today, we return to interactive fiction.

 

1985 is a lean year for Infocom adventures, and a troubling time for the company, with only three releases (two of which I will be playing) compared to the five of 1984 and the five in 1983 before that. They had been busy with their ill-fated Cornerstone database software, along with their "Z-Machine v4," a 128KB upgrade to the aging v3 engine which, thanks to the memory requirement, could not replace it, but coexisted alongside it for years, for bigger games that had to run on bigger computers.

Wishbringer, the first release of the year (and the first by Steve Meretzky), is one of those smaller v3 games, targeting older 48KB-64KB computers such as the Commodore 64, Atari, and Apple ][+ and //e models. Marketed as a beginner's interactive fiction, though not necessarily a children's one, it became one of their five best sellers, earning a 1988 re-release under the "Solid Gold" label.

The manual begins with a Grimm-style fairy tale about a peasant-born girl, Morning Star, kidnapped by a wicked queen and raised as her daughter. As she came of age and suitors from across the land come to seek her hand, the queen sends them all off on various grue-filled quests, never to return, and the poor princess, doomed to spinsterhood, shrivels away into dust. Nothing remains but her heart and lifetime of unfulfilled wishes, which metamorphosed over the centuries into a gemstone - Wishbringer.

We're told that Wishbringer's magic can grant whoever possesses it seven wishes, but only specific ones, under certain requirements.

• Rain, but you must have an open umbrella.
• Advice, but you must have a sea shell.
• Flight, but you must have a broom.
• Darkness, but you must drink grue's milk.
• Vision, but you must wear glasses.
• Luck, but you must have a horseshoe.
• Freedom, but you must eat candy.

 

Also included in the box is a sealed envelope - a replica of a letter that our protagonist will be tasked to deliver - a map of the area, and Wishbringer itself.

Like many Infocom games, Wishbringer begins in media res, only to be a dream.

"Behind you!" cries the Princess. "It's a trap!"

Too late. The drawbridge crashes shut against the tower wall. You turn to face your enemy, and find yourself staring into the open maw of Thermofax.

Only your Magick sword can save you now. You swing it high, speak the Word and stand unhurt as the blade absorbs the searing dragon-breath.

The reptile bellows with rage and flaps its wings to fan the fire in its belly. You are advancing, sword poised to strike, when a familiar voice shatters the daydream and stays your mighty hand...

WISHBRINGER
Interactive Fantasy for Beginners
Copyright (C)1985 Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved.
Wishbringer is a trademark of Infocom, Inc.
Release 68 / Serial Number 850501

Hilltop
You're on a hilltop overlooking the seaside village of Festeron.

To the south stands the Festeron Post Office. It's a little brick building with a neatly-trimmed lawn. The Post Office door stands invitingly open.

Roads run down the hill to the east and west. There's a signpost nearby.

Somebody inside the Post Office is calling you.

 

The obvious thing to do is to go south, and for now I do.

Post Office
This is the lobby of the Festeron Post Office. The walls are lined with small, private mailboxes and wanted posters. A service counter runs along the entire length of the room.

Your boss, Mr. Crisp, is behind the service counter reading other people's postcards.

Mr. Crisp hides the postcards away as you enter. "Where have you been?" he barks angrily. "Daydreaming again, eh? I've been looking everywhere for you!"

(Your score just went up by 1 point! Your total score is 1 out of 100.)

What next?
>z
Time passes.

Mr. Crisp reaches under the service counter and pulls out a mysterious envelope. "We just got this Special Delivery," he snarls, tossing it onto the service counter. "I want you to drop it off right away. That means NOW!"

What next?
>get envelope
Taken.

(Your score just went up by 5 points! Your total score is 6 out of 100.)

Mr. Crisp drums his fingers on the service counter impatiently. "Quit stalling, chowderbrain! The Magick Shoppe closes at five o'clock!"


 

No time for that right now, though - even though the game comes with a map, I've got some Trizborting to do!

The time limit eventually cuts my adventure short, but I'm able to map out a good chunk of Festeron before five. The game does not accept intercardinal directions, for which I am thankful.

• East from the hilltop overlooking the signpost, a small but very nasty poodle outside a cottage prevents me from heading in any direction other than right back the way I came.
• West from the hilltop is a small, spooky cemetery area, which the narrator warns us to take caution exploring.
• Within the cemetery, a creepy gravedigger inquires about the letter. I ignored him, and he disappeared through a gate off to the north, locking it behind him. An umbrella, one of the wishing items, is found here, leaning against a recently-placed tombstone.
  
• A bone lies in an open grave. I grabbed it and fed it to the poodle, allowing me to pass into Festeron's suburbs.
• Approaching the central rotary, surrounding a park, Miss Voss, the town librarian gave me a note addressed to Mr. Crisp. A church sits on the corner of the north side.
  
• Further northward, past the rotary, a bridge leads to the base of a cliff.
• Eastward from the bridge is a decorative lighthouse, where a pelican sits perched, watching intently.
• South from the lighthouse is a tidal pool where a conch shell, another of the wishing items, sits half-buried in the sand.
• Further south is the wharf area, which is directly east from the rotary. A movie theater and video arcade are seen from the corner, and a large mailbox is seen in the center. On the east end, a seahorse, caught and abandoned by the fishermen, gasps for breath.

 

My round-trip through Festerton brought me back to the cottage, where the poodle had finished its snack and wouldn't allow me to return, and I had no choice but to face Mr. Crisp's wrath.

"There you are, dummy!"

You wince as Mr. Crisp strides into view and grabs you by the front of your uniform.

"You good-for-nothing numbskull!" he bellows in your face. "I wanted you to deliver that envelope BEFORE five o'clock! Now the Magick Shoppe is closed... and you're FIRED!"


 

Restarting, I continued exploring, this time being more adventurous in my interactions.

• Trying to open the envelope and read is not allowed yet.
• Offering it to the gravedigger causes him to remark that he buried the addressee years ago.
• Miss Voss's note also cannot be opened. Nor can it be given to Mr. Crisp just yet - the poodle blocks your return home.
• There is a police station on the west side of the rotary. Here, Sergeant MacGuffin naps, and a chocolate bar sits on his desk. Waste any time here, and Mr. Crisp chides you through the police radio.
  
• The church on the rotary's north side is open. There is a lit candle on the wall - not take-able - and a mouse can be seen skitting across the floor every now and then.
• The mailbox by the west rotary has nothing inside, and clangs itself shut when opened.
  
• West of the bridge is the river outlet and lake, from which the other side of the cemetery's locked gate is seen. A hill can be climbed here, where a horseshoe sits on a stump.
• The seahorse on the wharf can be thrown back into the bay to save its life, but there's no immediately obvious benefit.
• Only one machine in the arcade is operable, titled "LEATHER GODDESSES OF PHOBOS!" But playing requires a token.
  
• Heading upwards from the cliff leads to a twisting trail, where wrong steps kill you. The correct path leads to the magic shoppe.
  

 

Confident that I've seen everything I can while meandering, I restarted and made sure to grab everything and do everything before heading up the dangerous trail, arriving a few minutes before 4:00pm.

I handed the letter to the half-blind old woman who ran the shop, who asked me to read it to her. At this point, we are meant to open the envelope included in the game box.

 

The old woman is motionless as you read. Glancing up, you see tears of anger forming; but she turns away as your eyes meet.

"Kidnapped," she whispers after a long silence. She paces aimlessly around the room, deep in thought.

"Many seek to gain the Stone of Dreams," she mutters, mostly to herself. "Yet few can imagine the price. For years I have fought to conceal it from the Evil One and others like her. My youth, my home and family, all were forfeited for its protection. And now," her voice breaking with emotion, "now it claims my only companion."

Impulsively, the woman snatches away the letter and envelope and crumbles them in her trembling hands. "No one is strong enough to guard Wishbringer alone." 

The old woman makes an effort to compose herself.

"Thank you for coming all this way for me," she says, reaching up to a shelf full of cheap gags. "I know I'm not supposed to tip you, but take this little trinket anyway."

The woman holds out a small metal can for you to take.

>get can
Taken.


"It's getting Dark outside," the old woman remarks, and you can almost hear the capital D. "Maybe you should be getting back to town."


The old woman hobbles over to the Magick Shoppe door and opens it. A concealed bell tinkles merrily.

"Keep a sharp eye out for my cat, won't you?" She speaks the words slowly and distinctly. "Bring her to me if you find her. She's black as night from head to tail, except for one little white spot... right HERE."

The old woman touches the middle of your forehead with her finger. The light outside dims suddenly, like a cloud passing over the sun.

The old woman takes away her finger. Your forehead is tingling.

"The Stone of Dreams can help you in your search. I cannot reveal the place where I have hidden it, for the Evil One would see your thoughts and take the treasure for herself. You must discover it alone, and rely on legends to instruct you in its mysteries."

As she speaks, the old woman gently leads you through the door of the Magick Shoppe. She pauses before closing the door.

"Return the cat to me, and Wishbringer shall be yours.

"Her name is Chaos."

A concealed bell tinkles merrily.

 

Cliff Edge
You're standing high on a rocky cliff, at the top of a steep trail leading downward.

The surrounding landscape has disappeared under a thick blanket of evening fog. All the familiar buildings and landmarks are completely hidden; only the summit of Post Office Hill is high enough to pierce the cloud, rising like a lonely island in a sea of mist...

... an island with a tower on it.

There's a TOWER where the Post Office used to be! The massive outline is hard to make out against the twilight sky. But the longer you stare, the clearer and more frightening it becomes.


 

The can contains a rattlesnake joke... and Wishbringer, concealed by a false bottom. But as I retrieved it, the fog quickly rose from the valley, concealing the safe path down the cliff.

 

My inventory:

• Wishbringer
• A squashed can
• Violet note

 

Magic stuff:

• Conch shell
• Horseshoe
• Umbrella

 

My Trizbort map (so far):

 

Suspect: Won!

The first thing I discovered, on re-searching the house, the crime scene in particular, was that in Veronica's mask, a single dark hair was caught in the silver mesh. Only the women show their hair at the party, but Veronica's is blonde, Linda's red, and Alicia's, as I suspected might be, dark. The detective would analyze this when asked, showing that it matches Alicia's, and had been pulled out, not cut. This evidence, along with suspicion cast on Cochrane from showing the incomplete P&S document in the office and his threatening note, took the detective's heat off me, and he'd spend the rest of the night and morning mulling over things in the ballroom as the party died down.

Asking him to arrest Alicia causes an acquittal, and not too subtly hints that you're on the right track but failed to discover/prove a motive. Curiously, in the epilogue, the detective solves the case and makes the correct arrest despite the double jeopardy clause - is Alicia innocent after all, or is this just a scripting oversight?

Further evidence-based interrogations:

• Michael is totally uncooperative. On showing him the page he tore out of the trust folder, with his name on it, he protests "I have no idea what this has to do with me."
• When showing Ostmann the P&S agreement, he confirms its authenticity, that Veronica wished to move further upcountry to more suitable land for raising horses, and adds that she surprised him by insisting on putting off the signing until after finishing some business.
• Marston says the same concerning the agreement. When confronted about the trust folder, he remorselessly admits to fleecing the Ashcroft estate, threatening a libel suit should you print anything.
• Cochrane all but cackles at Ostmann's misfortune, certain that Michael will sell now. He confirms the business card warning is his own, delivered under the door at 7:45, but denies any malicious intent. For now I believe him.
• Alicia only responds to being presented with her own overcoat and hair sample, and only with righteous indignation.
• The detective happily accepts the trust folder and missing page as evidence, but isn't impressed with Alicia's wet overcoat. He will not fingerprint the lariat, bullet, or fairy mask when asked to, bizarrely stating that it wouldn't reveal anything.

 

The fact that the command to fingerprint items is even recognized, strange as it may be that he can't be bothered with the actual murder weapon, told me this ought to be useful somewhere. This wouldn't have occurred to me at all if the command had worked on the lariat and bullet but revealed no prints but my own. When I asked him to fingerprint Veronica's broken glass, the results were productive indeed.

...partial prints were recovered from a dry area. These were compared with prints of Veronica Ashcroft taken by Sergeant Duffy at the beginning of his investigation. It is our conclusion that the prints on the glass are not those of Veronica Ashcroft."

 

Ah ha! Things are taking shape - before 9:00, Michael killed Veronica with my lariat, taken from the closet, and ransacked the room, taking the accountant's papers. Either he or Alicia pickpocketed a costume bullet to plant as evidence. "Veronica," seen at 9:00, was really Alicia, either wearing Veronica's costume or a nearly identical one. At 9:02, she spills her drink, retreats to the office, plants her mask by Veronica's body, and gets out, ditching the costume for her coat and whichever pieces of the harem costume couldn't be worn under the fairy queen gown. Then she shows up soaking wet at 9:18.

A few things still don't make sense to me, though, but I suspect these are nitpicks unimportant to the mystery's solution:

• Veronica must have been killed after the party started, but why was she in her office and not hosting the party?
• Alicia, I assume, must have arrived at the house before the party started, but how could she have avoided being seen by anyone? And her coat must have been on the premises or else she'd be wet from the rain, but where could she have kept it, unseen and retrievable?
  
• Alicia can be seen in disguise on her way to the office by 9:09pm. The rain slows at 9:10. What time did she leave the house and get her coat soaking wet?
• How could Michael have ensured nobody saw Veronica's body too early, especially with Asher sitting right there outside the office?
• Why did Michael leave the P&S alone while ransacking everything else?
  
• Why did Veronica put off the signing of the agreement?

 

I still needed some more proof, though. At this point, asking the detective to arrest Michael and Alicia works, and the detective says the evidence is almost enough for a conviction, but not quite, as Alicia wasn't present until after the murder.

I've got to digress again. How does he know when the murder happened? The body isn't discovered until after 10:00, well after Alicia showed up. And if he does know precisely when, thanks to the detective's magic portable crime lab or whatever, then shouldn't he know it happened before "Veronica's" last sighting, therefore blowing up Michael's alibi?

Anyway, I was pretty sure that the solution to Alicia's alibi involved her wet coat, even though this seemed unsatisfying. Just because her coat was wet doesn't prove she had been here before it stopped raining - maybe a car splashed her driving through a puddle? Maybe it got soaked getting into her car at home?

Unable to figure out how to work with the limitations of Infocom's parser communicate this to the detective, I looked at a walkthrough for the first and only  time, which confirmed my thoughts. The solution is to first observe the rain slowing, and then tell detective about the weather; a conversational verbiage which hadn't occurred to me given the mechanical nature of commands that typically pass as valid in these games.

 

The game was pretty much over, but just for completion sake, I used trial and error to determine precisely what evidence is required to convict Michael and Alicia:

• Show the detective Alicia's coat to cast doubt on her alibi.
  
• Tell the detective about the weather, having observed it earlier, to establish Alicia's opportunity.
• Fingerprint the glass to establish Alicia's means.
• Get the investment sheet from the fire to establish Michael's motive.

 

The rest of the clues are required too, just because:

• Alicia's hair analysis
  
• The trust folder from Michael's BMW
• The manila folder in the office
• Cochrane's business card, for some reason
  

 

If you have all of the evidence from the first list but fail to produce even one of the items the second, the detective will tell you that you don't have enough evidence, but provide no other hints. Get all the evidence, and you can have him arrest both.

Sergeant Duffy seems to read your thoughts, as he appears with Michael and Alicia in handcuffs. "Let's not have any trouble, now," says Sergeant Duffy, in his unique way. They head for the driveway, where a police car waits with engine purring.

Congratulations! Your testimony as star witness for the prosecution secures the conviction of Michael for the first degree murder of his wife, and of Alicia as his accomplice. Not only are they sent to prison with the proverbial key thrown away, but Colonel Marston is convicted in a parallel case of embezzlement and grand theft for his role in the milking of the family Trust.

Best of all, your syndicated twelve-part story of the tangled plot and its aftermath wins the Pulitzer Prize, and the book is number one on the bestseller lists for 42 weeks! (Not to mention the movie and book club sales.)

 

A further epilogue explains the who and how, but nothing I didn't already know.

GAB rating: Good, but it could have been better, and though I enjoyed the game, the conclusion still left me dissatisfied, and I fear I must dwell on Suspect's shortcomings more than its merits.

I really like the concept of Infocom's mystery games, and have to be impressed with how well realized the concept works in an engine meant for a game about treasure hunting and puzzle solving. Zork, like Adventure before it, was about exploring static and mostly hermetic puzzle rooms in search of treasure. All three Infocom mysteries have natural locations to explore, close integration between gameplay and plot, and multiple characters who walk around the place and react to ingame events, to you, and to each other.

But each game has its problems. The first, Deadline, is easily the best of them in terms of the actual mystery. The sequence of events is well thought out, evidence is tricky but logical, and puzzling out what happened is challenging. The critical path, though, feels arbitrary, obscure, and narrow, requiring very unintuitive actions to secure a conviction even if you've more or less figured the mystery out. The Witness is much more reasonable to solve, and even offers multiple solutions, but goes too far in correcting Deadline's faults and becomes rather trivial to solve (and personally annoys me by designating the less complete solution to be the correct one).

Suspect's difficulty falls between Deadline and Witness, as indicated on the box, but I felt it was still too easy, and the mystery is less mechanically interesting and more poorly thought out than either predecessor. Interrogating the wide array of suspects and hearing what they have to say about each other and the evidence is good fun, but turned out to be unnecessary to the solution. All you have to do is find all of the pieces of incriminati, two of them attained by the now tired convention of hiding behind an object while a suspicious character does something they don't want you to see - and present them to the detective. Consequently, it doesn't do that much with the angle of playing a framed everyman instead of a detective, and given that the detective will do whatever you ask him to, you might as well had just been playing as a detective again.

I wish that Lebling had thought out a precise pre media res timeline and committed to it better, because what's presented here is fuzzy and inconsistent. I'd have done more to ensure that Alicia can't be followed at the start, as it creates a big plot hole if you do. Even though ingame events will delay you for a few minutes, you can still follow her as far as the front hall and go into the office minutes later. It's even possible to get to the office before she does, causing Veronica's body to magically materialize one turn later. Maybe Alicia should have just been removed once she walks out of sight, and then have the southern office door locked from the inside, both delaying you and suggesting an escape route from the north door, and adding some evidence of this escape and costume change, which you'd need to find and puzzle out for yourself.

Suspect's shortcomings, unlike Deadline and Witness, didn't hurt my enjoyment so much as it made me wish for what might have been - I don't think Infocom ever truly returned to this formula even in their later mystery-themed games - and I still recommend it as their best categorical effort.

Also, can I just say, this might just be Infocom's ugliest cover art of all time.

Game 341: Suspect

Read the manual here:

https://www.mocagh.org/loadpage.php?getgame=suspect

 

Get Frotz (if native Windows execution is your wish) here:
http://www.davidkinder.co.uk/frotz.html

 

I've noticed that outside of the Zork trilogy, Infocom often did not have their implementors stay in their element. Case in point, Suspect, the third mystery-styled adventure, continues a three game trend of never assigning the same designer twice. This time, after veteran designer Marc Blank's Deadline, and newcomer Stu Galley's Witness, Blank's collaborator on Zork & Enchanter Dave Lebling takes the digital quill.

This time, we're no detective, but a nosy journalist covering the biggest high society Halloween shindig of the season. This means no magic portable crime lab, no help from Sergeant Duffy, and, as the box tells us, no help or sympathy from the upper crust guests when a socialite gets deaded and the evidence points at you.

Feelies in the box, a crucial element to the mystery in prior games, are a bit more frugal here. No dossiers, lab reports, photos, or statements this time - after all, the crime is scheduled to occur ingame, but it's disappointing that there's so little opportunity to do any pre-sleuthing before booting up the game. Included are:

• An informally-written memo from the editor-in-chief who recommends making a story of the festivities, suggesting an angle of old money families seeking respite from expanding suburbia.
• A two-page "Maryland Rambler" article, referenced in the memo, regarding the ongoing yuppification of ultra-wealthy Montgomery County, MD, how the local blue bloods are rapidly selling off their huge and extremely valuable plots of land to the incoming D.C. upstarts to be used as single-family house plots instead of ranches and fox hunting grounds, often to the great benefit of elite real-estatier William Cochrane.
• Also from Maryland Rambler, a brief article on the opulent Halloween bash at Ashcroft Farm, to be hosted by Ashcroft heiress Veronica Ashcroft-Wellman. Talk of the sweeping changes to Montgomery Country are certain to be on the minds of the hundreds of visiting dignitaries, and Colonel Robert Marston, family trustee, is quoted here saying that Veronica sees a threat to the Ashcroft way of light, but will have many sympathetic ears for the night.
• A rental receipt for one cowboy costume from "Costumes Unlimited."
• William Cochrane's business card, with a threatening note to Veronica scribbled on the reverse.
• Lastly, the game instructions, taking the form of a firmly tongue-in-cheek guide to murder party etiquette, advising the well-bred murderer or murderess on everything from the importance of accepting invitations with hand-written letters in the third person (a phone call, after all, rudely leaves no physical evidence) to how to command dignity and respect in maximum security.
  

It's Halloween night. Veronica Ashcroft and her mania for Halloween parties are putting new twists on a 110-year-old tradition. It isn't a very nice night for a party. The rain has been pelting down since early morning, but the weather hasn't deterred many guests. The ballroom at Ashcroft Farm is filled with oddly costumed visitors. The rather ridiculous western outfit you are wearing was the only thing you could find at the costumer's on such short notice, but it's out of place only for its relative sobriety and taste in this crowd.


 

Suspect opens in the packed Ashcroft ballroom at 9:00pm, where costumed partygoers dine, wine, dance, and gossip as an orchestra plays. Recognizable characters here include:

• Johnson, the bartender, busy and wearing a domino mask.
• Samuel Ostmann, unmentioned in the materials, as a vampire.
• Michael Wellman as a sheik
• Veronica Ashcroft-Williams as a fairy queen

 

Other characters encountered elsewhere:

• Colonel Marston, as an African explorer
• William Cochrane, as an astronaut
• Linda Meade, as a ballerina
  
• An unidentified werewolf
• Alicia Barron, as a harem girl
• Smythe, the butler, as a gorilla
• Senator Asher, as a harlequin
  
• A suspicious doberman
  

 

Michael gestures to join him and Veronica, but that's not how I ever start a game. I went exploring and Trizborting, keeping tabs on the script for any out-of-timeline clues.

The mansion and its grounds, consisting of at at least 55 interconnected rooms (not counting the upstairs rooms which are cordoned off and off limits to guests), is much larger than Witness and feels much larger than Deadline's.

• The enormous ballroom, consisting of nine separate areas on a 3x3 grid, is central to the mansion, and has guests constantly entering, walking about, and leaving.
• To the north is the dining room and kitchen, and the back door and porch, from where you can walk around the house to the garden and patio.
• East of the ballroom, large French doors lead to the patio and pond.
• A long hall west of the ballroom has the dining room at the north end, a coat closet in the middle, and a library at the south end.
• The hall continues east to the pond, and has a bathroom and sun room.
• The front hall, south of the ballroom, connects a living room, morning room, and entry hall. Further south is the front porch and driveway, which gives access to the east and west sides of the house.
• West of the front hall, another hall goes from the garden, where the doberman stands guard, to a corner. Accessible from this hall are the garage, Veronica's office and media room, and another closet.
• The corner continues west, and has another bathroom, linen closet, and a sitting room.
  

 

It took me a few sessions to map out the house, but Veronica got murdered each time, and could be found dead in her office, strangled with a costume lariat.

A general timeline of night events:

• 9:02 - Veronica, while drunkenly talking about her upcoming horse show, spills her drink on her gown, and throws the glass onto the floor.
• 9:09 - Cochrane emerges from the east bathroom and goes to the ballroom.
  
• 9:15 - Veronica can be found dead in her office by now. It isn't possible to reach the office any earlier; if you attempting to follow her closely, you will bump into Smythe and be delayed just long enough to miss her by a few minutes.
• 9:18 - Alicia arrives, late, rings the doorbell, and Smythe answers and takes her coat. Alicia goes to the ballroom. 
• 9:21-9:23 - Linda and the werewolf leave the sitting room for the ballroom, stopping at the sun room on the way.
  
• 9:22 - Cochrane leaves the ballroom for the east bathroom again, and returns.
• 9:30 - Alicia and Michael dance together.
• 9:31-9:49 - Smythe sweeps up Veronica's broken glass and dumps it in the kitchen trash.
  
• 9:32 - Senator Asher, in the media room, leaves for the living room.
  
• 9:45 - Colonel Marston, in the living room, leaves for the ballroom.
• 9:47 - Asher leaves for the sitting room.
  
• 9:49 - Band breaks.
• 9:52-9:54 - Cochrane, Marston, and Michael argue about horse sales at the bar.
• 10:00 - Cochrane, Marston, and Michael leave the ballroom for the office.
  
• 10:08 - Cochrane, Marston, and Michael arrive at the office and discover Veronica's body. Michael calls the police, with Cochrane's reluctant agreement.
  
• 10:09 - Band returns from break. 
• 10:10-10:16 - Michael leaves the office and goes to the garage, taking a roundabout route, and gets huffy if followed. He returns to the ballroom after this.
• 10:14-10:16 - Marston and Cochrane leave the office for the ballroom.
  
• 10:21-10:31 - Marston tells us (if we were not present), Smythe, and Alicia, who responds with horror and elation, in that order, that Veronica was strangled and her office ransacked. Ostmann either hears this from Marston or Alicia.
• 10:31-10:44 - A police car approaches and the doorbell rings. Smythe answers, and takes the detective, accompanied by Sgt. Duffy, to the office, where they examine the scene.
  
• 10:44 - Michael goes back to the garage, and once again gets angry if followed, and returns to the ballroom afterward.
• 10:45 - Marston leaves the ballroom for the library.
  
• 10:48-10:50 - Ostmann and Cochrane argue.
• 10:50 - Band breaks.
• 10:52 - Michael, if he wasn't followed to the garage, meets Marston in the library and kicks you out if you are there so they can discusss something in private. They both leave soon after and go to the ballroom.
  
• 10:52-10:58 - Marston goes to the fireplace and surrepticiously yet obviously burns something.
• 11:09 - Band returns from break.
• 11:19 - Michael goes to the garage for a third time.
• 11:21 - An ambulance arrives and removes Veronica's body. The detective and Duffy leave and wander the house.
  
• 11:40 - Detained by Sgt. Duffy and arrested.
  

In the epilogue, you are acquitted by a hung jury, even though your lariat was the murder weapon and a bullet from your costume was found by the body. The detective and Duffy consequently solve the case, but you're encouraged to try again.

 

The first immediately suspicious thing is that Senator Asher is found in the media room, adjacent to Veronica's office minutes after her death. That he wears a clown suit and watches CNN is suspicious too, but doesn't really link him to the murder.

In Veronica's office, everything's been opened and spilled all over the room, except for one mysteriously pristine manila envelope inside her desk containing an unsigned purchase and sale agreement for Ashcroft Farm, to Ostmann Properties. Cochrane's business card with the threatening note is found in the trash. Veronica's body, when moved, reveals a bullet, and at this point, counting the bullets in your own costume shows one is missing. You can't count them at any time before this - I tried.

Michael's business in the garage is obviously something you need to observe, and by hiding behind one of the cars, I could observe him popping the BMW's trunk. After he left, I opened it with a crowbar found here, and discovered a stack of financial papers, including an accountant's letter suggesting that Ashcroft trustee Colonel Marston had been investing the family fortune into Southeast Planning Corporation, his own private firm. One sheet at the back is torn off. I could not figure out how to interrogate Michael or Marston about this.

By hiding behind the library chair, you can listen to Michael and Marston's conversation. All that occurs is that Michael passes a piece of paper to Marston, which I assume to be the same as what he burns. It can be retrieved from the fireplace before it burns, and on it, lists both men as equal investors in Southeast Planning Corporation.

By interrogating the various characters, I learned a bit more about who everyone was, and their interpersonal relations.

• Michael, Veronica's husband, is new money, and liked by most but not all of the guests.
  
• Samuel Ostmann is Cochrane's mutually hated business rival in real estate and mostly constructs town houses and office buildings. He regards Veronica highly and Michael as pathetic. Marston admires him but thinks he is out of place here.
• Jack Johnson was hired through a friend of Veronica's and wants to be a lawyer.
• Colonel Marston, manager of the Ashcroft trust, is thought to be fogyish and paternalistic by multiple guests. He considers Michael to be easier to work with than Veronica.
  
• Bill Cochrane, the main driving force in local surburban expansion, has been drinking heavily. Michael calls him a crook, and Ostmann concurs. He is evidently frustrated that Veronica won't sell out to him, but thinks Michael might.
• Smythe has worked for the family since Veronica's parents generation. He can't be spoken to.
  
• The werewolf is Richard, Veronica's brother. Michael dislikes him, Ostmann calls him a parasite, and Marston calls him a manchild. Cochrane, Alicia, and Asher think him a pitiable wimp. He won't speak to you apart from growls until the murder is discovered, and admits he hates Veronica but would have killed her long ago if he could.
  
• Linda Meade, Richard's girlfriend, also isn't liked much by Michael or Marston, who think she is riff-raff that doesn't belong in the Ashcroft family, and she resents Veronica and Michael for how they treat her and Richard. She further accuses Marston of holding out on Richard's share of the inheritance.
  
• Alicia is a riding friend of Veronica and visits often. She thinks Veronica treats Michael poorly, and doesn't seem very approving of Richard dating Linda. Inviting a newspaper reporter to the party was her idea.
  
• Asher is a junior senator and is supported by Veronica and Michael, who hope he will be president one day. None of the guests have anything negative to say about him. Cochrane mentions that he used to date Veronica.

 

I'm calling it now - Alicia and Michael are having an affair. I won't yet go as far as to say one or both bumped Veronica out of the way and that Michael's clandestine business with Marston is for securing their future, or that Alicia got me invited as a patsy, but it wouldn't shock me if this weren't far from the truth.

As far as opportunity goes, Michael himself has an alibi - he is in the ballroom the entire time. So is Ostmann and Johnson. Smythe and Cochrane can also be seen prior to 9:15pm. This leaves Asher, Linda, Richard, and Alicia, though the question of how Alicia could have gotten out of the office unseen and to the circular driveway in only three minutes has no obvious answer. Her coat is soaking wet, and the rain slowed at 9:10, but that doesn't prove anything except that she had been outside somewhere before then.

As for means, whoever killed her was counting on Veronica being in the office at 9:15. My only explanation is that Veronica's spill was a ruse to leave the ballroom for the office for some reason, possibly having to do with the P&S, and the murderer or a confederate knew this would happen. The murderer also either stole or relied on someone stealing my lariat and bullet, but that could have been anyone, having presumably happened some time before the game began at 9:00.

So far I'm enjoying this, though I can't help but get the sense I've already done most of what there is to do, and solving the game is just a matter of stumbling onto the right bit of evidence and/or finding a way to communicate my findings to the detective. This hasn't been a problem yet, but please, no hints or spoilers, at least not any that aren't ROT13 protected, until I've beaten this game. My next plan is to search the rooms more carefully, and also try showing the evidence to everyone, including the detective, to see what their reactions are.

My Trizbort map (so far):

 

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Won!

Hitchhiker's Guide, in a way, feels like a predecessor to the "time loop" trend that exploded in indie adventure games around the late 2010's and reached critical mass in 2021. Living, reliving, and jumping around the events of earth's destruction, the ensuing havoc suffered by humanity's last survivor, and the events leading up to it, it's up to you to discover the right sequences of actions to manipulate the timeline so that you not just survive but also can complete the game's final set of tasks.

There's diegetic manipulation via improbability drive, and non-diegetic manipulation via conventional saving/loading and restarting. It's just a pity that, with so many ways of locking yourself out of victory in ways that can't be reversed with the improbability drive, "restarting" becomes your de facto method, squandering a lot of potential in the concept.

I restarted and played out the opening acts as I had before, only this time I stopped to feed the dog, as I now knew was required. The next few sequences - escaping earth, getting the Babel Fish, enduring the Vogons, activating the improbability drive, etc., played out normally. Things diverged at the war chamber scenario, where the grateful warlords dropped me off at the Heart of Gold, now miniaturized, and apparently inside someone's brain.

Wandering around, I soon found a particle inscribed with words.

  Sense, Common for:
     Dent, Arthur
   (for replacement,
  order part #31-541)

 

Taking it scored some points and ended the scenario.

I cycled through the rest of the scenarios, still done by repeatedly throwing the switch at the improbability drive until randomly arriving at an uncompleted one, but now faced an additional hazard - randomly materializing inside my own head, to spectacularly fatal results. I could find no way to avoid this except by saving before throwing the improbability switch.

Eventually I completed them all, brewed my tea, saved the ship, got my tea (and my no tea, an action now possible with my auto-logikosectomy), and used the tea to warp into the whale.

I thought that I might be able to use the hitchhiking device to escape with the flowerpot and the rest of my stuff, but it failed. The device's other function called tech support, who uselessly told me it was out of warranty.

Back on the Heart of Gold, I could open the locked room by possessing tea and no tea simultaneously (something I knew about from prior reading long ago), but entering is immediately fatal if you don't drink the tea first. Marvin lives inside, and once the ship lands, can be asked to open the hatch for you. I did, and he asked me to meet him in the access space with the "right" tool.

Turns out this bastard won't tell you what the "right" tool is until you're there, and it will always be something you aren't holding in your limited inventory.

Zaphod's toolbox was on the ship, and I thought I might be able to use it to carry all of the tools, but it was locked, and I couldn't find a way to express my desire to force it open with one of the many tools I gathered in my travels.

I reloaded a much earlier save and found that in Zaphod's scenario, the key to the toolbox was underneath his seat. Inside the toolbox, a magnifying glass and laser-sighted wrench.

After refinishing this scenario, I tested my theory. It turned out to be dead wrong - the game just won't let you carry the toolbox into the crawlspace unless the toolbox is empty.

Turning to a walkthrough yet again, it said I had to collect four pieces of fluff and put them in the flowerpot. Capricious as this might seem, the Guide will actually clue you into this if you think to ask it about fluff, which of course I hadn't until just now.

One ancient legend claims that four pieces of fluff lie scattered around the Galaxy; each forming one-quarter of the seedling of a tree with amazing properties, the sole survivor of the tropical planet Fuzzbol (Footnote 8).

The guide also revealed my problem with the device - I had simply activated it at the wrong time and broken it.

I reloaded a save from near the start to repeat the improbability drive scenarios, this time making sure any fluff encountered came back with me. The first piece, of course, had been in Arthur's pocket the entire time. The rest of them were found in other characters' scenarios:

• Zaphod's scenario, under his seat. By putting the fluff in the toolbox, it will be found there later.
• Ford's scenario, inside his satchel. Arthur is too polite to open it, but as Ford, you can give Arthur the fluff, and then have it once the scenario ends.
• Trillian's scenario, on Arthur's jacket. Putting it in her handbag, which Arthur doesn't mind rummaging through, lets you retrieve it on the Heart of Gold later.

After, once again, working my way back to the inside of the sperm whale, I, once again, found the device broken. By working my way backwards with saves, I found the precise moment it (silently) broke - when the missiles launch.

The walkthrough gave me a solution one last time - bring nothing to the sperm whale, not even your gown. The indescribable "thing" will come with you. Put the flower pot inside the thing - yet another action that absolutely nothing indicates is a possibility except for trying it - and you'll find it on your return to the Heart of Gold.

I'd had just about enough, and thankfully, the end was near. I put the four pieces of fluff into the flowerpot, and a sprout grew. I took it into the ship's sauna, and it bore fruit, which I ate and received a vision of handing Marvin a laser monkey wrench. On planetfall, I got the wrench, asked him to open the hatch, met in the crawlspace, gave it to him, endured one last bit of passive aggressive whining, and finally,

>d
You step onto the landing ramp leading down toward the surface of the legendary lost planet of Magrathea. "Announcement, announcement. This is Eddie (the shipboard computer). Someone is leaving the ship on a strange planet without wrapping up all nice and warm. It'll all end in tears, I just know it..." The voice fades behind you.

Ramp
The wind moans. Dust drifts across the surface of the alien world. Zaphod, Ford, and Trillian appear and urge you forward.

Slowly, nervously, you step downwards, the cold thin air rasping in your lungs. You set one single foot on the ancient dust -- and almost instantly the most incredible adventure starts which you'll have to buy the next game to find out about.

Your score is 400 of a possible 400, in 582 turns.

By the way, there WAS a causal relationship between your taking the toothbrush and the tree collapsing at the very beginning of the game. We apologise for this slight inaccuracy.

GAB rating: Average. Like the novel, this game is a classic. Also like the novel, it's not for everyone, including me. This makes it a tough one to evaluate - it's a well crafted, technically polished game with some truly clever bits and it largely succeeds at what it sets out to do, but too often its greatest success was pissing me off.

Hitchhiker's strengths are prominent - the writing, partly contributed by Douglas Adams himself, is some of Infocom's strongest yet, and when it's not merely cribbing passages from the book, shows plenty of medium awareness. Vivid descriptions make the various locales become alive, the characters like Marvin, Ford, Arthur, and Eddie show personality throughout with economical scripting and dialog (although Zaphod and Trillian, sadly, do not), and most of all, the very parser becomes an impish surrogate for Meretzky and Adams, purposefully misleading you and snarking with sarcastic wit. With only about 30 rooms, most of them part of small self-contained areas, Hitchhiker boldly de-emphasizes the exploration that defined adventures since their namesake (it doesn't even have a lantern!) in favor of a focus on interactions, dynamic events, and puzzles. Conventions of the genre, well established even by 1984, are parodied and subverted, sometimes cleverly, sometimes not, but seldom played straight.

Trope deconstruction is a tricky business, though, especially in a video game. When you spring a "gotcha" moment too obviously, the effect falls flat and it feels forced instead of clever. That isn't a problem here, but when it doesn't spring at all, not even subtly, the player has no way of figuring out they've been had, and frustration ensues. Consequently, some puzzles in Hitchhiker are indeed clever and make you feel clever for figuring out the trick, while others just evaded me completely until I had to look up the solutions, and as I got close to the game's end, this frequently meant being forced to restart large portions of the game again and again while also being annoyed at the solutions' obscurity.

The Heart of Gold, reached about 25% of the way into the game, is where things really fall apart for me. A time traveling non-linear meta-puzzle of seemingly unrelated sequences that tie into each other isn't a bad idea at all, but two aspects made it torturous. First, there's the sheer tedium of performing repetitive actions until you randomly jump into the desired scenario. I got horribly sick of pulling the switch, waiting until smell returns, smelling a shadow, getting killed, waiting until hearing returns, listening, and going back to the bridge to pull the switch again and hoping that this time it gets me somewhere with an uncompleted task. Second, surviving a scenario without completing all of the required actions, most of which you probably won't even deduce are required until you reach the endgame sequences, locks you out of that scenario, forcing you to replay this tedious and lengthy portion (and everything after it) again and again.

Two things could have fixed my gripes - first, just let the player pick a scenario after improbability driving, determined by the sense used. None of this waiting around for a sense to randomly return - that's fine for the Vogon hold and other parts where there's only one location to warp into, but for this midgame portion, let sight bring you to Ford's scenario, hearing bring you to the warship, feeling bring you to Zaphod cruising in his speedboat, smell bring you to the beast's lair, and taste bring you to Trillian sipping wine at a dull party. Then, don't lock out the player from a finished scenario. Let me go back and search time and space for fluff once it dawns in on me that the fluff is important without having to reload and repeat most or all of the game!

Hitchhiker is ambitious, polished, and well made with impressive attention to detail, but overall I didn't like it.

I thought the best aspect of Hitchhiker was the sardonic narration, which isn't easy to convey in a normal playthrough, as so much of it is triggered by going off the critical path and doing things that don't advance your progress, but are recognized by the prompt anyway. So here are some of my favorite parser responses, presented in postscript.


>turn on light
Good start to the day. Pity it's going to be the worst one of your life.

 

>don't wait
Time doesn't pass...




>enjoy poetry
You realise that, although the Vogon poetry is indeed astoundingly bad, worse things happen at sea, and in fact, at school. With an effort for which Hercules himself would have patted you on the back, you grit your teeth and enjoy the stuff.




>carve name on memorial
Whose name? The Beast's name? Your aunt's name? One of the Infinite Unknowable names of Buddha? How about the name of Fred who runs (or rather ran) your local chip shop? At least that's a short name -- you might have time to write it before the Beast eats you.

>carve "fred" on memorial
Concentrate. Learn to distinguish between genuinely helpful suggestions and mere sarcasm.




>talk to g'gugvunt
You are clearly the worst diplomat that ever lived, and are about to become the worst one that ever died. That is an even worse insult in the G'Gugvunt tongue than "look up marvin in guide" is in the Vl'Hurg tongue.

 

Maze
This is part of a spongy gray maze of twisty little synapses, all alike.

 

You look around. You notice the bulldozer properly for the first time. You notice Arthur's house. You notice the workmen. The penny drops. His HOUSE is about to be demolished. You feel like a complete...what's the word?

>idiot
Thank you. An idiot is exactly what you feel like.




>w
Upon entering the room, you are battered by tidal waves of depression. In fact, a lethal dose.

    ****  You have died  ****




>marvin, open hatch
"Humans are so depressingly stupid. Are you aware," he asks, "that this ship is in space, that space is an almost perfect vacuum, and that the hatch is the only thing holding in all the air?"



Your serious allergic reaction to protein loss from matter transference beams becomes a cause celebre amongst various holistic pressure groups in the Galaxy and leads to a total ban on dematerialisation. Within fifty years, space travel is replaced by a keen interest in old furniture restoration and market gardening. In this new, quieter Galaxy, the art of telepathy flourishes as never before, creating a new universal harmony which brings all life together, converts all matter into thought and brings about the rebirth of the entire Universe on a higher and better plane of existence.

However, none of this affects you, because you are dead.