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	Title: (Games & Books) A Mind Forever Voyaging
	Author: Burt Hochberg
	Source: Games, v11(1)
	Date: January 1987
	Transcription by Steve Derby
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<span style="font-weight: bold; font-family: var(--article-sidebar), Arial, sans-serif;">Leather Goddesses of Phobos</span><br>
By Stephen Meretzky; Infocom, on disk for most 64k computers; $39.95

<hr>

Once again Infocom has come through with an innovative
work of interactive fiction. Although the company's
particular brand of humor has been present to
some degree in all of its games, only twice before —-
in Planetfall and in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy (both by Steven Meretzky) —- has Infocom attempted
science fiction comedy. Leather Goddesses
is, of all things, a science fiction sex comedy.

It's actually a spoof of the kind of superhero science
fiction that was prevalent in comic books of the 1930s.
(For anybody who has never seen one, Infocom has
provided an example in 3-D, along with red-blue
glasses to read it with. And read it you must; it contains
important clues.) The story takes the hero (or heroine—
the program allows the player to be either male or
female) from the restroom of a seedy bar in Upper
Sandusky, Ohio, to the jungles of Venus, the canals of
Mars, a tiny house in Cleveland, and the palace of the
Leather Goddesses on the Martian moon Phobos,
among other locations. Our hero, it seems, is slated to
be the subject of certain unmentionable experiments
which will enable the Goddesses, after invading Earth,
to make humans their sexual playthings. For some
reason, this must be prevented.

As you move about, collecting the various items
you need to defeat the LG of P, you encounter members
of the opposite sex, and what happens then depends
on your willingness to engage in... well, you
know. But the author has cleverly arranged things to
minimize the risk of offending anyone. At any point in
the game you can switch to any of three naughtiness
levels —- "tame" (about as racy as a Betty Crocker
cookbook), "suggestive" (no more so than on TV's
*Moonlighting*), or "lewd" (lewd).

Many of the puzzles you must solve in order to get to
the places you need to get to and obtain the objects
you seek involve wordplay: There's a word search puzzle
(of a particular type that <span style="font-family: var(--article-sidebar), Arial, sans-serif;">GAMES</span> readers will recognize),
a cryptogram, a riddle, and an "odd machine"
whose function is a delight to discover. There's also a
bi-level labyrinth full of nasty
creatures; getting through it will require more than the
map provided.

The level of difficulty is
"Standard" -— tougher than Infocom's "Introductory"
adventures but not as hard as "Advanced" or "Expert."
Leather Goddesses is one of Infocom's finest achievements,
pure pleasure from start to finish.