#
Game Reviews H

These reviews are in alphabetical order according to the name of the game reviewed. The index also has a few extra features. First and foremost of these is the instant gratification feature. If you see the SPAG button:

Then you can click on it to retrieve the file from ftp.ifarchive.org, or to go to that file's directory on the archive (in the case of competition games).

The email addresses used are those submitted with the review, so naturally some of them may be out of date. All email addresses are spamblocked -- replace the name of our magazine with the traditional 'at' sign.

##

##

##

##

##

##

##

##

##

##

##

##

##

##

##

##

##

    Table of Contents
    Halothane
    Hamlet
    Heist
    Heroes
    Heroine's Mantle
    The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
    The Hobbit
    Hobbit -- The True Story
    Holy Grail: see Jim MacBrayne games
    Hollywood Hijinx
    Horror30.zip
    The Horror of Rylvania
    House
    House of the Stalker
    Human Resources Stories
    Humbug
    Hunter, In Darkness

    Halothane
    From: Duncan Stevens <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #19 -- January 14, 2000

    NAME: Halothane
    AUTHOR: Ravi Philip Rajkumar, a.k.a. Quentin.D.Thompson
    E-MAIL: stupid_q SP@G my-deja.com
    DATE: 1999
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition99/inform/halo/halo.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    Story-oriented IF, games that emphasize story over problem-solving as
    such, is on the rise; after years of the narrative taking a back seat to
    the crossword, in Graham Nelson's terms, the tables are finally getting
    turned. Problem is, not everyone has a handle on how to involve the
    player in the story when the hook is the story itself rather than the
    puzzles required to move the story along, and if Halothane is any
    indication, the result can be wildly uneven; it's entertaining and
    intriguing in parts, but the twists in the storyline don't really affect
    the play of the game, and the effect is rather distancing.

    Figuring out what's going on in Halothane is quite a task. At the
    outset, you're an author who, it seems, decides to dispose of a
    half-completed novel; from there, the game forces you to interact with
    the characters and events depicted in your own novel and draws you into
    a "parallel dimension" (in a way that reminded me of Neverending Story),
    where you confront the consequences of your actions. That's a bare-bones
    analysis, mind you, and it disregards quite a few scenes that don't fit
    into the scheme in any obvious way. There are also some optional scenes
    with some optional puzzles, and it's quite likely you'll finish the game
    with fewer than the possible number of points, and without figuring out
    who all the characters are and how or whether their various stories are
    resolved. In short, it's a bit of a mess.

    There's nothing wrong with complicated games; games that require the
    player to think in order to pull the pieces together after the fact are
    welcome, and somewhat unusual for IF. But the structure of
    Halothane--the player marches through the various linear segments, and
    more than likely has no idea what is going on initially--means that most
    of the piecing together is done by memory, since the fragments whose
    true significance might be apparent later on are no longer available
    when the game makes them understandable. (I.e., the player has to replay
    to fully understand most of the first half of the game, which doesn't
    win Halothane any points from me.) There is a character who appears
    early on and attempts to explain the various connections, but she only
    recognizes a few conversation topics, sadly. The game also tends to do
    information dumps--the player doesn't make discoveries so much as do
    elementary things that lead, in unforeseeable ways, to long, complicated
    revelations, and the effect is akin to wandering around and picking up
    pages of a story. (It's appropriate that the game at one point has you
    tied up in the back of a car listening to people in the front seat talk,
    since it's not a bad description of the course of the game as a
    whole--the story goes on, at a rapid pace, and the player mostly goes
    along for the ride.)

    To be fair, the story is a pretty good one, and the writing is terrific,
    good enough that the player can easily forgive the linear structure; the
    plot may be getting shouted at him, but at least it's a fun plot, and
    well told. There are numerous IF references scattered around, many of
    them very funny (including a hilarious dig at Muse), and even those
    parts of the story that are insufficiently developed are intriguing
    enough that the player (at least, this player) wishes that the author
    had given them more space. Perhaps the best example of this comes late
    in the game, in a peculiar scene involving a mayor who has apparently
    seized power through unscrupulous means. You set things right, but in a
    way that leaves so many questions unanswered that the player is unlikely
    to understand how he or she solved the relevant puzzle. It's a shame,
    because the setting is disturbing and evocative, enough that a
    good-sized game could easily have been built on that premise alone--but
    here's it's just one out of eleven or more chapters, and the player
    blows through it too quickly to really catch on.

    Halothane, as noted, is more story IF than puzzle IF, which makes the
    incursions of puzzle-oriented moments rather jarring; it takes the
    player a while to figure out that puzzle mode rather than story mode is
    on, and it doesn't help that some of the puzzles are a bit obscure and
    require some major intuitive leaps. More importantly, they're about as
    artificial as puzzles can be-- they feel like they're there to slow down
    the pace of the game a bit--which is unfortunate, because Halothane
    tells its story reasonably well, and the pace doesn't particularly need
    a chance. Even if the story flows by so quickly that it's not all that
    personally involving, in the way that good IF can be, it's a good
    mind-bender--and the puzzles don't do anything to draw the player into
    the story; they simply break up the flow. In short, Halothane would have
    been better served to diminish its few puzzle elements and play up the
    story more--for one thing, by giving the player more time in the various
    scenes to poke around and explore, rather than getting whisked to
    somewhere else as soon as the obvious task is done.

    Hmmm--this review seems to have become rather negative. Halothane does,
    in the end, work passably well, due mostly to the quality of the
    writing--and while the plot is rather underdeveloped, and throws in
    references to things that have supposedly happened in the past in lieu
    of actually developing the story (there I go again), the plot devices
    are quite effective in science-fictiony kinds of ways. The author has an
    eye for arresting images--a corpse in a wardrobe, a lake of blood--which
    makes the settings vivid even when the plot is fuzzy. And it's always
    nice to find a game that's technically well enough put together that
    bugs aren't a distraction, not at all a given in Comp '99--and Halothane
    succeeds admirably in that respect. (It even implements most of its
    scenery.)

    The lesson here, then, is that it's possible to have a player enjoy a
    story even when he or she doesn't identify in any meaningful way with
    the PC; a work of IF can still be enjoyable even when the interactivity
    aspect is minimal. Such a story needs to have a plot that is interesting
    enough that the player wants to see more of it, and is willing to put up
    with the lack of interactivity because guiding the story to its
    conclusion is enough. Plots that call for emotional identification with
    the PC or another character are not good candidates, in other words,
    because empathy isn't fostered when the player can't interact much with
    the story; stories that turn on ingenious authorial inventions or
    breaking down the wall between author and creation--like Halothane--have
    a better chance of involving the player even without benefit of
    interactivity. There are some works, of course, where different people
    perceive the level of interactivity differently; witness Photopia. But
    if the player is unlikely to get drawn into interacting with the
    environment (and instead is more likely just to look at it), the story
    produced needs to be a certain kind of story.

    Halothane is an imperfect effort, in short, but it's thoroughly done
    with plenty of wit sprinkled in. I wouldn't call it the most memorable
    game of the competition, but I did give it an 8.

    Directory with Inform .z5 file and walkthrough

    Hamlet
    From: Andrea Crain <acrain SP@G idea-inc.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #36 -- March 16, 2004

    NAME: The Most Lamentable and Excellent Text Adventure of Hamlet, Prince
          of Denmark
    AUTHOR: Robin Johnson
    EMAIL: rj SP@G robinjohnson.f9.co.uk
    DATE: November 2003
    PARSER: Nondescript
    SUPPORTS: Web browser with JavaScript
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: http://www.robinjohnson.f9.co.uk/adventure/hamlet.html
    VERSION: The page says last bug fix was 1/25/04

    This game is written with Nondescript, a JavaScript game engine the
    author wrote himself. Lots of people tend to shy away from games not
    written in one of the big IF languages, but have no fear that playing
    Hamlet will leave you battling the engine instead of the game proper.
    This is a really well implemented piece of JavaScript. A couple of
    conveniences are missing that you might be used to -- you can't pick up
    or drop more than one item at a time, for example. Also, NPC's seem
    pretty shallow, and are rooted to one spot most of the time. However,
    things you can do work consistently, and you can use abbreviations the
    way you'd expect.

    Some Internet friends and I found this game, and we hadn't played any IF
    in awhile. I hadn't played anything since an abortive stab at Enhanced
    in 1995, in fact, and before that my IF experience was limited to
    Infocom games on a mid-80s Macintosh. The game's interface was fairly
    natural to pick up, and it got me interested in playing a lot of new IF
    games, which is what I've been doing for the past week or so. Now I know
    that I should be able to pick up two things at once, but when I played
    this game, I didn't, so the lack didn't bother me. That and the fact
    that you don't need to download anything and, since the game runs on any
    JavaScript enabled browser, make me think it's a good game to show to IF
    neophytes to suck them into your shadowy IF world.

    The game itself is a fun, silly adventure. You are ordering around
    Hamlet, and his mission is clear -- kill his usurping uncle. You don't
    need to have read Hamlet recently to finish the game, although I had,
    and it helped in a couple of spots, particularly with regard to the
    curtain in Gertrude's room. There are also characters from other plays
    thrown in for good measure.

    Some of the puzzles were so easy that I didn't even know they were
    there. For example, a ghostly mist stops you from going downstairs if
    you haven't gotten your mission from the ghost yet. Since that seemed
    like the only thing to do first off, I never encountered the mist. Other
    puzzles, one in particular, are fiendish. In fact, the hint system
    gloats that the puzzle in question is the obligatory incredibly
    difficult puzzle that must be included in any IF game. Unfortunately, I
    didn't know I had a puzzle before me when I got to that point. Well, I
    was at a loss for what to do next, and the game obviously wasn't over,
    so I knew there must be something I was missing. But there were no
    clues, as far as I saw, that a certain room existed, so how was I to
    know that I needed to get into it? I even looked in a direction that
    should have given me some inkling, but it didn't. Maybe that was just my
    failing as a game player, but once I looked at the hint page (available
    as a link below the JavaScript window) I started to get the picture.

    Anyway, this game was fun to play, fiendish puzzle aside. The
    environment was described well and, since I didn't notice there was a
    save feature until late in the festivities (it's implemented with
    cookies), I replayed from the start so many times I could probably
    navigate the whole map blindfolded if I were dropped there in real life.
    The humor was engaging, and the easy puzzles you start out with make you
    feel triumphant, hooking you in and making you want to finish. It's well
    worth playing. I'd give it an 8 out of 10.

    Heist
    From: Valentine Kopteltsev <uux SP@G mail.ru>
    Review appeared in SPAG #41 -- July 15, 2005

    TITLE: Heist
    AUTHOR: Andy Phillips
    EMAIL: pmyladp SP@G pmn1.maths.nottingham.ac.uk
    DATE: 1997
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/heist.z8

    In the last few years, a lot of talk could be heard about IF "growing
    petty" (which effectively means, text adventures becoming shorter).
    Well, there certainly are objective factors calling forth the numerical
    superiority of shorter works -- after all, a simple arithmetic
    calculation shows that in the period of time it takes an average author
    to write a hundred-room game, the same author can create about five
    games of equal quality with only twenty rooms each. (In fact, the real
    statistics could turn out even less favourable for longer games, because
    the beta-testing work usually increases at a rate outstripping growth).
    Of course, there're also a number of subjective factors that make this
    quantitative imbalance even harsher, but this isn't the proper place for
    discussing them; I'd just like to mention that, as usual, several
    opinions about the optimal size for a modern text adventure exist. My
    personal point of view on that matter can be best expressed with a
    paraphrase of a saying popular in Russia: More IF games, good and
    different! Of course, if we had three or four Curses!-sized works
    released each quarter it'd probably be a bit too much, but if they
    vanished from the IF scene completely, a certain vacuum would be left
    behind.

    Andy Phillips seems to be one of the people who don't want the latter to
    happen, and who don't just restrict themselves to idle talk but take
    active measures to prevent it. Heist certainly can be considered a
    contribution to the struggle against the extinction of IF giants.

    At this point, I'd like to take the bull by the horns, and call the game
    by its proper name: it's a puzzlefest. Those of you who don't feel like
    spending the next period of time (quite an extended one -- the
    walkthrough for Heist includes over 1000(!) moves) hearing about logical
    problems can stop reading right now -- the rest of this review is
    dedicated entirely to puzzles. Of course, the game has a story, and a
    setting, but it really isn't what it is about. ;)

    Well, the opening section of Heist could probably be as off-putting as
    the beginning of this review. From the very start, the author
    demonstrates he's not inclined to any compromises -- once the player has
    decided to take her brain to the gym, she has to sweat her guts out from
    the very start. No warming-up exercises are provided for; the prologue
    is at least as hard as the rest of this work.

    In some respects, it's even harder: you see, as you progress, you begin
    to get accustomed to the author's design style, and start to know what
    to expect of him. The early stages of just *any* game, on the contrary,
    have chances (at least, theoretically) to take the player by surprise.
    Heist doesn't quite miss these opportunities.

    The first thing the player needs to get accustomed here is, uh, let's
    call it adventure game logic. What do I mean by that? Now, suppose your
    relative is going to die, and wants you to visit his place after his
    death. (BTW, this also represents the first problem to solve in Heist).
    On the other hand, he intends to make getting there some sort of
    challenge (for whatever reason), so that he doesn't just send you the
    key by mail. There are several ways to accomplish that, but in real
    life, something like travelling to India to kill a tiger whose stripe
    pattern matches that of your relative's door-mat, reading the
    combination tattooed on the beast's stomach, then returning and using
    the combination on the safe in your relative's office to open it and
    discover there the key sought for hardly would come to anyone's mind,
    although it can't be contended that this action sequence has no logic at
    all. What is more, even a "lite edition" of this solution based on a
    visit to the local zoo, or even on catching a like-coloured cat on the
    nearby garbage heap wouldn't be much of an option, either; however, it
    probably would fit reasonably well into a text adventure. While this
    very example isn't adopted from Heist, the game often uses similar
    approaches to puzzle creation, and heavily relies on the assumption that
    people will fiddle with certain things/visit certain places not because
    there's any indication it's going to help them, but just because it's
    possible.

    There are a couple more things one needs to get used to, regarding
    technical aspects of game creation. The first of them is illustrated
    best by yet another abstract example. Let's imagine that in some text
    adventure, the player gets to an abandoned airfield, finding there a
    wreck of a plane. So, (s)he types "X PLANE", and sees the following
    lines:

       This aircraft hardly will ever fly again: the hull is all rusty, and
       the covering of the wings has rotted through here and there,
       revealing the underlying ribs. The undercarriage, its posts twisted
       and bent, rests on two flat-tyred wheels. The cowl is missing, as are
       a few other, more essential motor parts. From where you're standing,
       you can't look inside the pilot's cockpit, but its shattered hood and
       a bundle of wires sticking out of it quite unambiguously hint at the
       fact marauders already have been there. A glance at the empennage
       brings you to two important conclusions: 1. judging by the rests of
       the markings, the airplane once belonged to the Royal Ligutanian Air
       Force, and 2. even if all its other parts were intact, this machine
       still wouldn't be able to take off.

    Further on, our player randomly tries out, say, "X WINGS", "X COCKPIT",
    and "X EMPENNAGE", each time getting the same description. I think 99%
    would give up after that, rightfully deciding the aircraft was
    implemented as a single object, and stop examining its parts. How could
    they possibly know that, if they happened (by chance or by persistence)
    to enter "X WHEELS", they'd be rewarded with an entirely different
    response:

       You never thought of the reasons why the airplane had been left here
       to rot away, but as you look at the wheels you realize that at least
       one of them was sabotage: protruding from the left tyre is a sturdy
       steel needle (needless to say, it appears to be crucial for your
       further progress).

    Such situations are very common in Heist, so that inspecting every
    single element of a multi-part object is a good idea. To be fair, it's
    to be said the whole is by far not as draconian as it might have been,
    because the game does its best in limiting the scope of objects the
    player can interact with by using the standard "That's not something you
    need to refer to..." response. Still, not being aware of this
    particularity could be pretty confusing.

    The other feature requiring getting used to is a strange minimalism of
    some descriptions (as with the previous issue, examples are scattered
    all over the game). For instance, somewhere in the middle of the story,
    I found a remote control unit, which claimed to have "three simple
    buttons", yet gave no hint about how I could distinguish between them. I
    tried "X BUTTONS", but was told that I couldn't see any such thing.
    Pressing the remote control didn't earn me any information about the
    buttons' unique characteristics either (it merely replied with "Nothing
    obvious happens"). As it turned out, this cul-de-sac could be overcome
    by typing "PRESS BUTTON" (note the singular) and learning the
    distinctive features for the buttons from the standard disambiguation
    response -- "Which do you mean, ...". OK, this method worked, but don't
    tell me it's a good game design style!

    Normally, I'd dismiss something like that as slopwork; however, it's
    hardly applicable in this case, because Heist clearly isn't sloppy.
    Thus, I tend to see these features as some sort of the author's
    conceptual design choices I'm just failing to understand.

    After the prologue, the game splits up into a number of sub-games -- a
    decision amiable for both the author and the players. The author has
    obviously spared a lot of coding work, especially considering the fact
    that the player's inventory can't be transferred between the game parts;
    the players have received an additional chance to complete at least a
    major section of Heist on their own (while solving the entire game
    without help from outside probably also is possible, it'd certainly
    require more time and efforts most people could afford to spend on a
    text adventure). And, of course, there are puzzles, puzzles, puzzles.
    Puzzles abound. Most of them are decent, original and fun to solve,
    although they make massive use not only of adventure game logic, but
    also of adventure game conventions (you know, things like the player
    becoming able to pick up an object that previously had been too heavy
    for him to carry after (s)he swung the dumb-bells a few times). One of
    the puzzles seems to be loaned from Zork II, but I think the reason for
    it lies in the author just being unfamiliar with the immortal
    masterpiece by Infocom; since there's enough proof in Heist of Mr.
    Phillips' creativity regarding puzzle design, I can't blame him for that
    -- not having played Zork certainly isn't the worst crime in the world
    (actually, it's no crime at all).

    And this is pretty much all that can be said about this game. It's not
    without faults, but true puzzle-lovers will forgive all of them:
    occasional typos (admitted, their rate is kept quite low, especially
    considering how huge the whole thing is), a few wording problems, and a
    couple non-fatal bugs. As to those who aren't true puzzle-lovers, they
    shouldn't play this game, anyway.

    As to me, I'm completely happy with Heist, and I hope games of this kind
    (and size) will be kept being released. At times, it's great to have
    something you could put your brains to work onto, and to do so (with my
    inclination to bad puns, you could bet I was going to say it!) without
    haste.

    The SNATS (Scores Not Affecting The Scoreboard):

    PLOT: OK for a puzzle-oriented game; otherwise, I'd rate it lower (1.2)
    ATMOSPHERE: See PLOT, although a few places are really atmospheric (1.3)
    WRITING: Even and solid (1.2)
    GAMEPLAY: Well, puzzlefest. An entertaining puzzlefest, though (1.4)
    BONUSES: The amount of work that obviously has gone into a work so huge
             automatically deserves at least... (1.2)
    TOTAL: 6.3

    CHARACTERS: Well-implemented and not annoying - what else can be
                required of a NPC in that kind of game? (1.2)
    PUZZLES: Lots of 'em, a vast majority being decent, original and fun to
             solve (1.4)
    DIFFICULTY: The game is obviously intended to keep the player busy for a
                very, very long time (10 out of 10)

    Zcode .z8 file

    Bundle with PC executable

    Stepwise solution

    Heroes
    From: Eytan Zweig <eytanzw SP@G yahoo.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #27 -- January 4, 2002

    TITLE: Heroes
    AUTHOR: Sean Barrett
    EMAIL: buzzard SP@G nothings.org
    DATE: Oct 1st 2001
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Z-Machine interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2001/inform/heroes/heroes.z5
    VERSION: Release 1

    "Heroes" is a game with a gimmick, which is obvious the moment you start
    it up -- you have a choice of playing the game as one of five very
    different characters. The characters are standard fantasy fare, though
    two of them (the dragon and the king) are not often cast as the
    protagonist in fantasy games. The setting and goal for each character is
    the same -- the stories are mutually incompatible, since everyone is
    doing the same thing, though in vastly different ways. And in each of
    the stories, you get a small hint of the backstory, which leads you
    towards discovering what is really going on. In order to reach the final
    scene of the game, you must play through each of the characters.

    There is much that is good about "Heroes" -- much that is very good.
    Each location has a totally different description for each character,
    based on their unique outlook, all well-written. And not only the
    scenery but also the game objects are different -- guards that know the
    adventurer by name are just a nameless obstacle to everyone else; a
    crate that the thief can climb on goes totally unnoticed by the
    enchanter. Also, the setting is of a perfect size - a large enough
    collection of areas to be interesting and not feel too cramped, small
    enough so that no one can get lost. While they are not of uniform
    quality (more or this below), the different stories are mostly
    interesting -- especially the well-rounded adventurer and the
    destructive dragon. And the programming is very good as well -- I didn't
    notice a single bug, and a second version is out now to fix those that
    were found.

    However, despite all that, "Heroes" is far from a perfect game. Some of
    the stories aren't as interesting as the others -- the Enchanter is
    rather easy, his spells conveniently suited for the task; there was no
    place where I really had to think about how to proceed. Of course,
    easiness isn't bad, but compared to the other stories, it felt
    contrived. The king was confusing, with too many random things happening
    at each spot. A worse problem derived from the recycling of locations --
    especially the shop, which combined so many functions it seemed totally
    contrived. Also, some of the obstacles felt TOO easy -- once you finish
    the game you realize that some of these are motivated, but some are not
    -- would a magic shop's defenses really be so easy to overcome by a use
    of simple spells? Also, several logical solutions to some of the
    problems simply weren't implemented, but this was a minor problem, since
    once one solution failed it was usually quite clear what would work; no
    guess-the-verb puzzles here.

    But the main problem of "Heroes" isn't any of these relatively minor
    nitpicks -- the main problem, just like the game's main strength, is
    derived from the overall structure. With five characters all doing the
    same thing in the same locations, the game simply becomes boring after a
    while. I found myself resorting to a walkthrough for the last three
    characters -- not because I couldn't solve the game myself, but because
    I couldn't be bothered. I wanted to see how certain things worked out,
    but I had had enough of the setting and the story by that point. Also,
    the backstory that is slowly revealed didn't work very well -- a lot of
    it is left unsaid, and it is not always clear what is meant by what is
    said. This is worst for the dragon, as it is not at all clear how he got
    involved in these actions (was he too an adventurer once? If so, how
    come he knows so little about humans?). And the finale is very
    unsatisfying, partially explaining what's going on, but at the same time
    opening many more questions that should be explained. Anyone who goes
    through the entire scenario five times deserves more.

    But don't let my criticism fool you into thinking it's a bad game. It's
    a good game, but one that over-reaches -- if it wouldn't have tried to
    make the player go through all five possibilities, but instead just
    offered them as alternates, it would have worked much better. And I'd
    advise anyone who tries it to take it that way -- play the game in your
    one or two favorite flavors, ignoring the rest. That way, you'll be
    playing a solid, enjoyable game, that someone worked extra-hard on to
    provide additional paths to, but you don't need to work extra hard just
    to see them.

    I only played this game after the comp was over, but if I had played it
    in time, I would have given it an 8.

    From: Duncan Stevens <dnrb SP@G starpower.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #27 -- January 4, 2002

    Sean Barrett's Heroes is a nicely done implementation of a clever and
    long-awaited idea -- multiple PCs within the same game, between which the
    player can switch at will. As proof of concept, it works just fine; as a
    game, it works slightly less well, as the game makes some unfortunate
    choices that obscure its most interesting features.

    The game bills itself "a most traditional CRPG experience," ironic on
    several levels. For one thing, the game has no RPG features besides the
    multiple player roles; it’s true that the setting and general plot
    appear to be very RPG and stock fantasy -- a dragon's gem, a nasty
    warlord-type fellow, a quasi-medieval milieu, large dollops of magic,
    and other such familiar elements -- but the multiple-PC angle adds a
    good deal. For example, progress for some of the character depends on
    knowledge that the other characters have -- sometimes in minor ways, as
    in it’s hard to know where you’re going when you’re one of the
    characters unless you already know the landscape, and sometimes in more
    major ways. Some characters have an obvious motivation to go to a
    certain place; others have no such motivation, but the player’s
    knowledge that useful objects (for that character) are there replaces
    that motivation. That’s interesting in itself, though I’m not sure I
    call it a triumph of game design, as the game does tell you (in the
    walkthrough) that you can play the parts in any order. (It mentions that
    some roles may help you understand the others, yes, but that’s not much
    help.)

    The plot involves a certain object that you want to steal, except that
    there are no less than five of you -- four of you appear to be erstwhile
    members of a band whose exact purpose (besides general heroism) is fuzzy
    but which apparently was the bête noire of the warlord presently in
    power. As such, my first assumption was that the five PCs are working
    together, which, it turns out, is not the case -- they’re all working
    toward the same goal, but they’re not trying to help each other. In
    fact, only one of them can be considered to exist, in the game’s
    timeline -- it’s not as if you can come across an object as character 1,
    using your special skills, and surreptitiously pass it to character 2,
    who has the power to use it. (If that aspect were realized, it really
    would be CRPG-esque, or at least closer.) Perhaps no one expected this
    but me, but I spent quite a while wondering when my various compatriots
    would show up. At any rate, you see essentially the same scenery five
    times, through five different pairs of eyes, each of which sees what
    matters most to it and characterizes the setting in ways that might be
    expected of that particular character.

    The plot sounds, and in many respects is, pure conventional fantasy;
    three of the characters are an adventurer, an enchanter, and a thief,
    who do pretty much what you’d expect. The only elements saving the main
    story from utter conventionality are the "royalty" character, who
    accomplishes his or her goal by ordering underlings around, and the
    "dragon" character, who achieves the desired result much more directly
    than its human counterparts. (Suffice it to say that "smash" and "burn"
    are key verbs.) The royal character is followed around by a mob of
    hangers-on who produce dialogue like this (apparently created by a
    random patter generator akin to that of Jacks Or Better...): "Baronet
    Pom says to Knight Thannishessolf, 'Did you hear? Lady Lalla was with
    Lady Reloppimmib behind the throne in the palace, and they were having a
    disagreement with Baronet Jurzad!'" This sort of thing palls after a
    while, but it did keep me amused -- and the notion of accomplishing an
    adventurer’s objective by stomping around with a huge entourage is
    pretty funny in itself. The dragon is even funnier -- it speaks in first
    person plural, past tense, which makes it sound oddly grandiloquent, and
    whenever a human shows up, you get something like this: "We heard
    shrieks from a man-thing, ‘Wuthe-elistha-migodisa-drakin.
    Dran-dran-dran.’" The dragon has an entertainingly contemptuous view of
    human affairs -- it remarks about a garden, for instance, that "we
    perceived fresh plants in a location inappropriate to their origins,
    with insufficient bare earth." The writing, here and elsewhere, sustains
    the game and retains the interest of a player who might not necessarily
    care to keep plowing through a stock fantasy game.

    What’s odd, then, is that Heroes isn’t really conventional fantasy at
    all -- at least, there’s a twist that pulls it out of the realm of the
    archetypal fantasy quest -- and yet the game hides its creativity under
    a bushel basket, so to speak. Not only is it not apparent until the end
    that something more might be going on, it’s far from clear even then;
    the clues are so evanescent that the player could easily dismiss them as
    just an attempt to be vaguely enigmatic. (For my own part, I’m not sure
    I would have been able to put it all together without some helpful ifMUD
    input.) This layeredness is not, of course, a bad thing, and it worked
    in another Comp01 entry, Jon Ingold’s All Roads -- but there the
    meta-puzzle of the game was right on the surface, and the player
    couldn’t very well ignore if he or she wanted to gain even the most
    superficial understanding of the game. Here, superficial understandings
    are in ample supply, and the prodding to probe deeper is a touch too
    gentle. (If nothing else, however, it became apparent why the
    collaboration I was expecting didn’t happen, as there are nudges in the
    direction of the larger plot at the end of each chapter.) The deeper
    problem, obviously, is that apparent stock fantasy is a turnoff for many
    players, and even the multiple-PCs hook isn’t necessarily enough to
    overcome that; if the tugs at your consciousness, so to speak, hinting
    that you may be missing something were a little more pronounced, the
    fantasy-haters among us might be given pause.

    The other problem is that the puzzles themselves, quite apart from the
    framing puzzle, are pretty difficult and require some obscure
    connections (or connections that are only supplied to the other
    characters, multiplying by five the usual poke-around-and-pick-up-clues
    problem). Not only is it occasionally not apparent why you want to do
    something, it’s not apparent how to do it either -- and while puzzles
    are usually bearable if you have either the why or the how, having
    neither makes things rough. Adding to the difficulty is an ample supply
    of red herrings--some are irrelevant to everything, and most simply
    aren’t relevant to any particular character, but with so many apparently
    useful objects to choose from, getting inside the author’s head is often
    a challenge.

    Technically and artistically, Heroes succeeds admirably; the few bugs in
    the competition release appear to have been cleaned up, and the
    POV-shift is nicely done. The game does commit some design sins, but I
    appreciated the artistry of the multiple perspectives and the layered
    plot sufficiently that I gave it an 8 in this year’s competition.

    From: Francesco Bova <fbova SP@G mts.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #33 -- June 25, 2003

    At first glance, Heroes appears to be another typical D&D-influenced IF
    game, with perhaps a few novel ideas scattered throughout. For starters,
    you begin your quest by choosing between five different D&D staples as
    the player character. You can choose among the following: a dragon, an
    enchanter, an adventurer, a thief, and a member of the royal family. You
    then work your way through some puzzles in an attempt to acquire the
    fabled Dragon Gem and upon your quest's completion, you replay the same
    scenario but this time with one of the other characters. You then repeat
    this process until you've won with each character. So, Heroes is typical
    standard fantasy to be sure, with the interesting twist of multiple and
    diverse playing experiences. However, what you'll soon realize after
    completing each player-character's perspective is that there is a
    macro-story present here that encompasses all five characters and some
    subtleties in each of their stories. For those not paying careful
    attention to the storyline, the game's final epilogue (which is
    triggered once all 5 player character perspectives are completed) will
    come as a shock and be next to unexplainable. Come to think of it, you
    might still feel that way even if you followed closely. Still, the
    macro-story that has to be inferred is an interesting and novel concept,
    and for the most part, a success.

    The subtleties in each of the stories about the true nature of the
    game's chief antagonist are, for the most part, beautifully woven
    together if a bit obscure. The big picture in Heroes is a complex one
    and probably won't be easily inferred by many except the most
    perceptive. The weaving of the story is not direct or blatant. Instead,
    interesting facts and tidbits are sprinkled throughout each character's
    prologue and epilogue; the interactions they have with other NPCs; and
    the various scenery, room, and object descriptions that change with each
    new player viewpoint.

    The landscape, although fairly small, is beautifully rendered,
    specifically because each of the characters' games takes place in the
    exact same setting (i.e., same locations, same items to be found, etc.)
    but with each character's personality coming through in the scenery
    descriptions of their relevant story. For an example, try viewing the
    garden in the town's square as each character for some unique
    perspectives. Each individual game will also bring different objects and
    structures to the forefront of each player's perception. For example,
    there is a crate leaning up against a building near the entrance to the
    city, but it is only visible in the scene's description by the thief
    (which is understandable as he'd be used to lurking in the shadows), and
    the adventurer (which is also understandable as he's a roughshod
    mercenary-type who would notice it). The same crate is not in the
    dragon's description of the same room (because it is understandably
    insignificant to him) nor the enchanter's (as he views things on a
    metaphysical and magical level) nor the royalty character's (as the
    crate is also insignificant to him, albeit for significantly different
    reasons than the dragon). Although not in the room's description
    however, the enchanter and royalty character can still interact with the
    crate and I thought was interesting. Essentially the crate was still in
    scope, and if you remembered that it was there from a previous
    character's experience you could still attempt to manipulate it. It was
    a nice way to maintain mimesis because obviously a crate or any other
    object shouldn't just disappear when it's not essential to a specific
    player's storyline.

    In terms of each character, I found the writing style fairly distinct.
    The enchanter, for example, notices the magical chemistry and ley lines
    present in his surroundings, while the dragon perceives things in a way
    completely foreign to the other characters. However, there was a big
    difference between characters in terms of how relevant their individual
    stories were to the story as a whole and their relative levels of
    playability. The following is a critique of each character and their
    respective degrees of influence on the story and levels of playability:

    DRAGON
    The dragon is a lot of fun to play with because the geography
    descriptions change dramatically with his viewpoint. He's got very
    straightforward goals, with some interesting puzzles. Storywise, he
    fleshes out the relevance of the Dragon Gem, but doesn't do much to add
    to the mystery of the chief antagonist's motivations.

    ENCHANTER
    The enchanter is a great character and has a great story all around. I
    found I didn't learn much about the overall story in this section, but I
    did learn a great deal about the world the game takes place in, and
    about the magic that forms such and integral part of it. The puzzles are
    wonderful and most are solved with Enchanter-style spells, some of which
    you start with and some of which you acquire throughout the game. The
    end game of this story is the strongest of the five (there's a great
    sequence of puzzles to conclude this section) and provides some insight
    into the chief antagonist's motivation. This section is, all around, a
    logical and entertaining section.

    ADVENTURER
    The adventurer is a fairly dull character and story in my opinion. He
    didn't really bring much to the table story-wise and his claiming of the
    gem is pretty straightforward and mundane. Not much is added to the
    story as a whole either during his prologue or epilogue and the puzzles
    here are solved more often through brute force and trial and error
    rather than by elegant puzzle design. There is some bonus information
    generated by one NPC that fills in some missing gaps in the story, but
    approaching him with the relevant conversation topic is neither
    intuitive nor reasonable, in my opinion. A bit of a filler chapter,
    overall.

    THIEF
    The thief is an interesting character whose relevance to the story as a
    whole is significant. The gamplay aspect however suffers a bit from some
    guess-the-syntax and some actions that require more guesswork than is
    strictly necessary. The thief has an interesting cache of thieving
    tools, but not all of them have to be used to complete the section. This
    fact saw me spend a bit too much time wondering what they should be used
    for. Otherwise, I sped through this section rather quickly except for
    one bottleneck that was caused by having no real indicator of how to
    proceed. An interesting story, and the epilogue in particular was quite
    relevant.

    ROYALTY
    The royalty character is another integral character, story-wise, to the
    entire plot. However, the gameplay aspect suffers more with this
    character than with any other. For starters, there are some serious
    problems in this section with guess-the-syntax. For example, ordering
    NPCs in a certain way yielded a desired result but ordering the same NPC
    in another way albeit with the same intent, yielded nothing of interest.
    I struggled with this section for quite a while, convinced that I was on
    the wrong path while really, I had the right idea but was getting bogged
    down in the grammar. Also, receiving the default responses "There is no
    reply" and "I know not of which you speak", while ordering around and
    questioning various NPCs got to be a bit frustrating. I'm the king
    dammit! You'd better reply.

    Other bits of annoyance came from the king/queen's substantial
    entourage. This section of the game spits out randomly created gossiping
    noble NPCs that crop up in whatever location you happen to be in. They
    were amusing at first, but eventually became tiresome as their constant
    babbling actually got in the way of my reading the text. The author
    thankfully parsed some applicable royalty-type verbs to get rid of the
    bothersome NPCs such as dismiss, arrest, and execute (execute in
    particular was quite unintentionally funny, as the executed corpse
    remained in the room of its execution), but as soon as you got rid of
    one NPC, another one unfortunately took its place, so the glee was short
    lived.

    Also, because you're a royal, you don't do anything for yourself. This
    includes various sundry tasks such as picking up objects, turning dials,
    or pulling levers. You unfortunately have to order other people to do
    it. This convention maintained mimesis perhaps, but boy was it tedious
    to have to ask an NPC to pick something up, and then ask him to give it
    to you. A more fluid method, I would think, would have been to just type
    in the command and have the closest NPC do whatever it is you asked.

    One final piece that had me guessing for a while came while trying to
    acquire one of the game's central objects (an object, in fact, that is
    featured prominently in each storyline). The problem arose when I tried
    to acquire the aforementioned object in a fashion similar to one of the
    other characters. For the most part, the game created good reasoning as
    to why each character had to interact differently with this object to
    acquire it. Incidentally, this aspect of the game was one of my
    favorites, because essentially each character had to interact with the
    object on a different level which typically related well to their
    substantially different backgrounds. With the king however, these same
    rules didn't apply. Following the exact same steps as a previous
    character I was sure I would eventually acquire the object the same way,
    but the process yielded no results and even worse, no rationale as to
    why my efforts weren't successful.

    So, overall, this section was a bit of a drag to slog through although
    the prologue and epilogue, as well as some smaller bits within this
    section, were very important to the story as a whole and integral to
    having a shot at understanding what the final prologue meant.

    All in all, I loved this game. I'm a little biased, I suppose, because I
    love the fantasy genre to begin with, but even the most contemporary IF
    player will find something to enjoy here. After having completed Heroes,
    it occurred to me that the writing and subtle hints reminded me a lot of
    another fantasy series penned by one of today's great static fiction
    writers, Robert Jordan. His Wheel of Time series (at least the early
    novels) were brilliant because they incorporated subtle hints amongst
    the different books that, when combined, could be used to infer the
    solution to some of the many mysteries present in the series. Heroes,
    again, follows a similar style although obviously, on a much smaller
    level. If you don't think you've figured out what's going on after one
    playthrough, I would encourage you to play it again. Following that,
    visit the author's website at
    http://nothings.org/games/if/heroes/story.html and read his take on all
    the innuendo and intrigue. (Warning: major spoiler at this link.)

    Zipped archive with .z5 zcode file and solution (updated version)

    Directory with .z5 zcode file and solutions (competition version)

    Heroine's Mantle
    From: Jimmy Maher <jimmy.maher SP@G verizon.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #34 -- September 24, 2003

    TITLE: Heroine's Mantle
    AUTHOR: Andy Phillips
    EMAIL: aphillips SP@G ma.man.ac.uk
    DATE: December 2000
    PARSER: Inform
    SUPPORTS: Zcode interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/Heroine.z8
    VERSION: Release 3

    Sometimes I think people in our little community take this new literary
    form of ours just a little too seriously, and games occasionally suffer
    for it. A case in point is Heroine's Mantle, an ambitious gem by Andy
    Phillips that came and went with far too little fanfare.

    Heroine is either a comic book or (bizarre as it may sound) a first
    person shooter adapted into IF... or perhaps it is both. The player
    takes the role of one Lisa Flint, a young lady about to be transformed
    into the Crusader, whereupon she will devote her life to fighting for
    Good (TM) and Justice! After a prelude, the game is played out over
    seven chapters, each of them as large as the typical Competition game.
    In each, Lisa must thwart the evil scheme of a different villain. These
    villains are one of the highlights of the game, as each is larger than
    life and possessed of unique powers of their own. Take the Toymaker:

       "What did you used to play with as a child, Lisa? Colouring books?
       Lego? Dolls? Plasticine? There was one little boy who enjoyed
       building his own toys: razored yoyos, acidic crayons, explosive
       balloons-- yes, a real problem child. He still hasn't grown up yet,
       despite reaching physical adulthood ten years ago."

    Stan Lee himself would be proud! I may have been influenced by having
    played No One Lives Forever and Freedom Force at around the same time,
    but this game's episodic structure (each chapter featuring a "boss" to
    kill) reminded me of a more mainstream action-oriented game, and its
    general sense of good humor and fun reminded me of both of those
    (wonderful) titles as well. Some of the puzzles are unusual for IF,
    being more action-oriented than the standard cerebral affairs. Lisa has
    some very potent powers, and you will have to make use of all of them
    (often in very creative ways) to solve the game. Be warned that a lot of
    saving and restoring will be required (especially to work your way
    through the intricate final battle sequences which climax each chapter),
    but the game is generally solvable for anyone willing to spend a bit of
    time and mental energy, and working out the correct next move in these
    action sequences especially is great fun. I had to turn to a walkthrough
    for a couple of somewhat dodgy puzzles, but solved 99% of the game on my
    own.

    I should mention that there are some suggestive scenes involving Lisa
    and Mistletoe, a villain who kills her victims by, ahem, "seducing" them
    to death. These scenes are hardly explicit though, and I found them to
    be completely innocent fun.

    Indeed, fun is the adjective I find myself using over and over to
    describe this game. Yes, the moral universe it presents is black and
    white to an almost comical (pun intended) degree, but sometimes that's
    perfectly okay with me. Andy Phillips' writing is occasionally a bit
    awkward, but his prose is energetic and generally effective. At times
    you can almost see the "BASH! BANG! POW!" captions surrounding the scene
    in your mind's eye.

    Heroine's Mantle is huge, challenging, exciting and ambitious. The more
    literary and experimental works from authors like Short and Plotkin are
    fascinating, yes, but sometimes everyone feels like a good comic book...
    if they know what is good for them. When that time comes, Heroine's
    Mantle will fill the bill admirably.

    Zcode .z8 file

    Solution

    The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
    From: Graeme Cree <72630.304 SP@G compuserve.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #5 -- April 19, 1995

      NAME:  The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
      AUTHORS:  Douglas Adams             GAMEPLAY:  Infocom Standard
                & Steve Meretzky          PLOT:  Very Good
      EMAIL:  ?                           ATMOSPHERE:  Outstanding
      AVAILABILITY:                       WRITING:  Outstanding
      PUZZLES:  Excellent                 SUPPORTS:  Infocom Ports
      CHARACTERS:  Very Good              DIFFICULTY:  Standard

            [Possible minor spoilers, folks. -GKW]

         The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was Infocom's first game based
    on a novel (Shogun was the second), and is certainly their most famous
    product.  As such, it faced heavy expectations both from the text game
    crowd and from fans of the book (I saved this game until I had played
    all of Infocom's 34 other text games, hoping to guarantee finishing
    with a winner).  Fortunately, the game meets most expectations.
         For those who don't know, you begin the game as Arthur Dent, a
    typical Englishman whose home is about to be demolished to make way for
    a new highway.  Soon afterward, the earth itself is destroyed to make
    way for a new interstellar spacelane, and you must escape the holocaust
    with your alien friend Ford Prefect; first to a Vogon warship, and then
    to the Heart of Gold, run by Ford's friend Zaphod Beeblebrox.  Once
    there, your goal becomes to land safely on the lost planet of
    Magrathea.  To do this, you must search various corners of reality
    (changing identities a few times along the way) to acquire several
    different pieces of fluff, which when used properly will produce an
    item that will give you the clairvoyance necessary to open the hatch
    and set foot on the planet.
         The writing is some of Infocom's very best, which is fortunate
    because the game itself is a little too short (only The Witness and
    Seastalker have fewer locations).  The atmosphere produced is almost
    exactly like that of the book, even if specific details of the plot are
    often changed.  The puzzles (including the legendary Babel Fish puzzle)
    are based on a brand of "consistent illogic" that is rather reminiscent
    of Lewis Carroll, and make the game one of those few that many will
    some day play again even after having solved it once.  Hitchhiker's is
    one of the more literate text games on the market, as you will often
    have to pay more attention to how things are worded than you might in
    other games.
         There are a few things that may aggravate purists.  As in
    Sorcerer, there is an action which must be taken at the beginning in
    order to win the game.  If you don't do it, you may play for quite some
    time before realizing that victory is impossible.  [Not quite so.  You have
    another opportunity later in the game to take this action. -GKW] Perhaps the
    biggest disappointment is the absence of the promised sequel.  The story does
    not really end, it merely pauses and gives you a "to be continued"
    message just as you set foot on Magrathea.  Though the sequel was
    promised many times (such as in the New Zork Times, and in the crystal
    ball in Beyond Zork), it never materialized.  Since Infocom no longer
    has the rights to Hitchhiker's, it is unlikely that it ever will.  (For
    those of you keeping track, the sequels promised by Infocom/Activision
    that have not yet come out are:  Hitchhikers 2, Journey 2, Leather
    Goddesses 3, and Simon the Sorcerer 2).
         Despite this, Hitchhiker's plusses massively outweigh the negatives,
    and the game remains one of the great classics of interactive fiction.

    Solution (Text)

    The Hobbit
    From: David Jones <drj SP@G pobox.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #38 -- September 28, 2004

    TITLE: The Hobbit
    AUTHOR: Veronika Megler, Philip Mitchell
    EMAIL: ?
    DATE: 1983
    PARSER: Inglish
    SUPPORTS: Spectrum Emulator
    AVAILABILITY: IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/spectrum/melbourn.zip
    VERSION: 1.2

    What am I doing reviewing The Hobbit? No idea. I first played it fairly
    close to when it came out in 1983 on my old faithful ZX Spectrum. At the
    time it was a major release and was probably state of the art, boasting
    a parser, NPCs that did their own things and which you could command,
    and graphics. It has significant nostalgia value for me. Make sure you
    play the 1.2 version (it has a little 1.2 on the loading screen at the
    top left). The earlier version is buggy (sometimes hilariously,
    sometimes just frustratingly) and not possible to complete. I'm playing
    it on an emulator (which makes typing a whole lot easier).

    The Hobbit is graphical and I am playing with graphics on (mostly
    because I don't remember how to switch them off). For its time, the
    graphics weren't bad. Now they're just extremely simple. In a nice
    touch, one of the graphics changes as night turns to day. Not all the
    locations are blessed with pictures, and disappointingly Rivendell,
    surely one of the most alluring places in Middle Earth, has no picture.

    The game carries on in real time if you sit around and do nothing.
    Sometimes with terminal results, which frustrates my efforts to draw a
    map as I go. The NPCs also wander about on their own, with Gandalf
    popping in and out and Thorin sitting down and singing about gold.

    The parser is surprisingly competent, understanding GET SWORD AND ROPE
    and KILL THORIN WITH SWORD. But then, it also "understands" SWORD DROP
    AND ROPE so perhaps "parser" is a term too generous. Still, it's an
    accomplished effort for its time and even in modern times is bearable.
    Although X and Z are not implemented, words can be abbreviated (I assume
    to the shortest unique prefix). So EXAMINE WARG can be abbreviated to EX
    WAR. It tries to be a little helpful, if you have the key then "UNLOCK
    DOOR" works but "OPEN DOOR" does not. There are some annoying verb
    problems: in one place SMASH works but HIT does not. The parser
    sometimes has problems with disambiguation, THROW SWORD AT GOBLIN
    eliciting the response "WHICH TING?".

    Talking to NPCs can be achieved with commands like SAY TO GANDALF "GIVE
    ME MAP" (and a lot of the time, he will.) There's neither ASK nor TELL.
    As mentioned, the NPCs wander about of their own "will" and will
    sometimes do helpful things for you, like open a door which you could
    have opened yourself. They also sometimes do not so helpful things, like
    take objects from your possession. The NPCs can carry objects and seem
    to be able to do most of the things that you can, so there's clearly a
    high level of symmetry in the world model. For example, SAY TO THORIN
    "READ MAP" elicits the response: "Thorin examines the curious map. There
    seem to be some symbols on it but Thorin cannot read them." It can be
    quite amusing to play around with this stuff (you can get Thorin to
    carry you for example) but there's rarely any point. Frustratingly, when
    do you need to interact with an NPC, and you do need to in order to
    complete the game, they can be a little bit stubborn.

    Many NPCs from the book are here: Gandalf and Thorin (but not the other
    companions), the trolls, lots of goblins, Elrond, Gollum, Dale, the
    dragon.

    Room descriptions are brief, and object descriptions are even briefer.
    The first time you enter a location its picture will be drawn if it has
    one. It will also be drawn every time you subsequently LOOK which, since
    it takes more than a few seconds to draw the picture, can be a bit
    annoying. It will also be drawn every time you get captured (which will
    probably happen a lot) -- this is outstandingly annoying. Don't expect
    to be able to examine everything because you won't be able to. Most of
    the time you can only interact with the objects essential to the game.
    For the convenience of the game designer, the distances between adjacent
    locations on the map are often wildly different. You step straight out
    of your house into the lonelands -- there is no Hobbiton or Shire -- and
    from there another step to a clearing with trolls in. It's a bit
    bizarre. Sometimes "objects" in locations are not mentioned on
    subsequent visits unless you LOOK (for example a web.) Also, the
    description of a location when you first visit it and the (briefer)
    description on subsequent visits is different, and sometimes
    sufficiently different to be confusing.

    The writing is brief, basic, and flawless in spelling and grammar. The
    opening lines, "You are in a comfortable tunnel like hall / To the east
    there is the round green door", are fairly typical of the writing
    throughout the whole game, not even attempting to emulate Tolkien's
    style (thankfully). The brief style was almost certainly forced on the
    authors by the constraints of the machines at the time (The ZX Spectrum
    has only 48 Kilobytes of RAM). The story follows the book roughly, and
    takes in the major locations and encounters described in the book, but
    none of the drama and wonder of the book is captured in the game. The
    encounter with Gollum, the spiders, the dragon are all reduced to rather
    boring events.

    The puzzles are, I think, hard. It's a little hard for me to judge the
    difficulty now, because I solved the game (with one reference to a
    walkthrough) about 20 years ago now (eek!), so when I was replaying it
    for the review I was able to draw on those memories. Several of the
    puzzles are non-obvious, and several of them are time based. Some of the
    puzzles require an element of chance (or at least perseverance). The
    game gives no feedback for attempts that are "almost right". One or two
    of the puzzles would be more difficult without having read the book.
    Some of the puzzles can be avoided or substituted, so the game exhibits
    multiple solutions (although no particular puzzle does). It's quite easy
    to die, often without warning. It's possible to enter unwinnable states,
    sometimes through your own actions, but sometimes simply because the
    random behaviour of the NPCs conspires to kill off some crucial
    character or leave you stranded in a dungeon with no-one to help you
    escape. The game is mean, unfair, and unpredictable. There is no UNDO,
    but if you're playing on an emulator then emulator snapshots are a fine
    substitute.

    There are _two_ mazes: the mountains, and the goblin caves. Thankfully,
    in each of them each location has a unique description (its exits). This
    makes the mountains not so bad to map, but the goblin caves are not only
    vast (22 locations), but the wandering goblins will capture you
    returning you to their dungeon. That, coupled with the fact that whilst
    you're drawing your map the game will insert WAITs (giving the goblins
    more opportunity to wander round and capture you), makes this segment
    really really annoying. A bug (or a useful misfeature at any rate) means
    you can kill the goblins, which is the only thing that makes the whole
    experience (painfully) bearable. Still, no one would stand for it today.
    The rest of the, quite large, map is laid out a bit confusingly, which
    makes navigation stumbling and awkward.

    Overall I can't really recommend The Hobbit except for historical
    interest. It requires a lot of patience and random inspiration to solve
    (even with a walkthrough!) and doesn't offer much in reward. None of the
    puzzles have any outstanding "Aha!" moments; one of the puzzles might
    have were it not for the fact that it's in the book. None of the
    situations are interesting or inspiring.

    Spectrum disk image, along with several other Melbourne House games

    Stepwise solution

    Hobbit -- The True Story/The Terror of Mecha Godzilla -- The True Story
    From: Stas Starkov <stas_ SP@G mail.rb.ru>
    Review appeared in SPAG #26 -- September 26, 2001

    [As always with Mr. Starkov's reviews, I've heavily edited this prose
    (and that in his review of "The Weapon", below) in an attempt to hammer
    it into sensible English. Mistakes may have been made in this process;
    comprehend at your own risk. --Paul]

    NAME: Hobbit - The True Story
    AUTHOR: Fredrik Ramsberg and Johan Berntsson
    EMAIL: d91frera SP@G und.ida.liu.se (Ramsberg -- no address provided for
           Berntsson)
    DATE: Monday 19 April 1993
    PARSER: Very strange and not very good
    SUPPORTS: DOS
    AVAILABILITY: Shareware -- $10, but I think it's a joke
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/pc/hobbit.zip

    NAME: The Terror of Mecha Godzilla - The True Story
    AUTHOR: Fredrik Ramsberg
    EMAIL: d91frera SP@G und.ida.liu.se
    DATE: Monday 4 October 1993
    PARSER: Very strange and not very good
    SUPPORTS: DOS
    AVAILABILITY: Shareware -- $10, but I think it's a joke
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/pc/mecha.zip

    First of all, the reviewed games are written as MS-DOS 5.0 batch files,
    and require some fiddling with your computer. (That doesn't mean that
    you need to hit the computer with a hammer.) Personally, I was not able
    to run these games in a DOS box under Windows 9x. But I have not tried
    hard -- for me it's faster to reboot the computer into DOS mode. I think
    you'll probably need to do the same. Another problem that I encountered
    _before_ I started the game is that the ZIP files are archived with
    rather old archiver (I think -- pkzip 1.x) and my archiver (7-ZIP, if
    you want to know) was not able to unpack all the files from the
    archives. Then I used WinZip and everything was well. But, hell, these
    are real puzzles in real life. Sometimes I like to solve these sorts of
    puzzles, but not very often. :-)

    As the authors claim, these two games were written in 1993, using a very
    strange language called Adventure Maker, which compiled the games to
    batch files. As a player, I sometimes like to switch from games written
    in a good authoring system to games written in another system, one that
    is not so good. It's fun to compare old computer technologies with
    modern ones.

    Well, the games' "parsers" are not very powerful, but it's amazing that
    you can type commands at just a DOS command prompt! Yes, after loading a
    "restart.bat", you can play in raw DOS. It's so bizarre that you don't
    need an interpreter to play these games, and that you can run any
    program, then quit from that program and continue to play the game. That
    _is_ fun. But quite strange fun. On the other hand, there are no UNDO,
    SAVE, or OOPS commands. If you've made a wrong move (as is especially
    likely in "Godzilla") you must start from the beginning. But that
    doesn't hurt, because the games are so small, and so linear.

    The games themselves are not very strong. I think they were probably
    written in one or two days each -- they're short and not very polished,
    but fun. Why are they fun? Because they use a somewhat offbeat sense of
    humor and because their scenery is very familiar. The first game,
    "Hobbit", is about the hobbit Bilbo Baggins, and the second, "Godzilla",
    is about Godzilla in Tokyo. If you've never heard these words before,
    you must have been living on the moon for the last fifty years. Of
    course, these games are parodies.

    "Hobbit" is a story about a hobbit who wants to kill a dragon and loot
    its gold. For the "untrue" story of this hobbit, you can read the book
    "The Hobbit" by J. R. R. Tolkien. But even more than it parodies the
    book, this game parodies Melbourne House's game with the very familiar
    name "The Hobbit". People who have played Melbourne House's game will
    notice that the solutions to some of the puzzles in this game are almost
    identical. Continuing the list of influences: I think the authors of
    this game have probably read the book "Bored Of the Rings" by Henry R.
    Berd and Douglas K. Kenny, (excuse me if I somehow changed the names --
    I have only a Russian translation) [The authors of "Bored Of The Rings"
    are Henry N. Beard and Douglas C. Kenney. --Paul] which is itself a
    parody on J. R. R. Tolkien's work. There is nothing groundbreaking in
    this book, but there are a lot of funny moments, especially if you only
    read a few pages each day. Next -- I do (barely) remember that once I
    had read a solution to some game (whose title I don't remember at all)
    for the ZX Spectrum, a game that, as far as I can tell from the dull
    reflection of its solution, utilized the same approach to humor.

    The humor in this game is strange, but I like it. A small example, if
    you try to show a map to Thorin when you aren't carrying it:

       Thorin eyes you suspiciously. "Don't try any tricks, boy. We both
       know that there is no map here, now don't we?" he asks. He doesn't
       seem too sure about it himself.

    The implementation of the game is bad, but so what! A seasoned
    adventurer such as yourself will find a way through the rubble of bad
    code. If not, maybe the hints for Melbourne House's "Hobbit" will help.
    And if that doesn't work, "disassemble" this game -- it's not very hard.
    :-)

    The NPCs in the game are strange. For example, Thorin:

       Thorin, your old friend, is no longer the proud dwarf he once was.
       All the drugs have turned him into a drooling good-for-nothing idiot.
       The only reason that he has come along is to get more treasures for
       drugs, as always.

    Gandalf is a dumb magician who is inventing a new spell of a rather
    shady nature (and I recommend you explore that subject). Elrond -- a
    megalomaniac who wants to rule the entire world. Smaug -- a fat lazy
    dragon.

    If you put yourself in Bilbo's place, you'll notice that the surrounding
    world is very cruel and evil. Your good old "friends" despise you. It's
    terrible to live as a hobbit in such a world.

    "Godzilla" is not as good, nor as funny, as "Hobbit". It is longer, and
    has several "guess the word" problems that make it quite difficult. This
    game does have some violent moments (for example, a moment with a huge
    tank and a poor doggy), but if you remember the Japanese (and one
    American) movies about Godzilla, you will understand why the author
    includes those moments. (If you still don't understand, I'll tell you --
    because those movies are so disgustingly pathetic and simultaneously
    have so much aggression that, after viewing them, you yourself want to
    kill several monsters or just animals. :-)

    "Godzilla" has a more "advanced" version of the parser. Because of that,
    the batch files are harder to read (yes, read the source code to get
    hints to the game), but that didn't stop me. To tell the truth, I tried
    six or seven times to finish this game before starting to read through
    the batch files

    Overall, if you have a little extra time to kill, try "Hobbit". If you
    like it, try "Godzilla", but do not try them in the reverse order. And
    be prepared for bugs, but again, these games are so short that the bugs
    should be no problem.

    And did you notice that both games were released on a Monday? Odd.

    Glulx port of Hobbit

    Hobbit MS-DOS batch files

    Godzilla MS-DOS batch files

    Hollywood Hijinx
    From: Emily Short <emshort SP@G mindspring.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #34 -- September 24, 2003

    TITLE: Hollywood Hijinx
    AUTHOR: Dave Anderson/Liz Cyr-Jones
    E-MAIL: Unknown
    DATE: January, 1987
    PARSER: Infocom Standard
    SUPPORTS: ZCODE interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Commercial
    URL: http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~pete/Infocom/hijinx.html
    VERSION: Release 37

    Hollywood Hijinx is a late-period Infocom game, with a cheerfully kitsch
    theme and a premise of unabashed treasure hunting. You stand to inherit
    a fortune if you are able to discover an assortment of bizarre B-movie
    props in a very strange Hollywood mansion -- so off you go to hunt. It
    contains even more than the usual number of references to Infocom, and
    at no point does it seem to take itself terribly seriously.

    There are a few features of the game that irritated me. I might as well
    get those over with at once. The most severe is the time limit that
    prevents you from succeeding unless you have completed all the puzzles
    within an arbitrary number of moves. This is pretty much impossible to
    do the first time around, so I had to play until I'd earned about half
    the points, then start the game over. The game's other design sins are
    comparatively minor: several smaller-scale timed puzzles that seemed a
    bit unfair, and one puzzle that couldn't reasonably be solved except by
    discovering something and then restoring an earlier state. Coupled with
    the inability to UNDO moves, this was somewhat annoying. There's also an
    inventory limit that gets in the way at times, but since the treasure
    objects are not themselves useful for anything, one can safely drop them
    somewhere and keep one's collection of objects to a reasonable size.
    Finally, one or two puzzles seemed disappointingly trivial, with the
    solution consisting more or less of walking through a series of obvious
    actions.

    On the other hand, there are a couple of neat set-piece puzzles that
    show the attention to detail at which Infocom excelled: amusing and
    colorful responses to wrong answers as well as right ones, systems that
    you can learn how to work, red-herring partial solutions that seem right
    at first but then turn out to be wrong. If those are overdone, they can
    be infuriating, but I thought that Hollywood Hijinx hit just the right
    level of complexity on several of these. There is also one quite elegant
    puzzle that relies on solution-by-intuition, depending on your memory of
    how an earlier puzzle was solved and your ability to translate that
    information to a new context.

    This game also contains a massive maze. Most mazes in IF are designed to
    irritate the player by making him go to a lot of trouble to figure out a
    mapping, and are (relatively) harmless once successfully mapped. This
    maze, on the other hand, is probably nigh impossible without the map --
    indeed, the game warns you before you go inside that you shouldn't even
    make a try for it. Even when you do have the map in hand, it takes a
    minute to figure out a good route: in other words, the challenge of this
    particular maze is like the challenge of mapping out a maze on paper,
    and not very similar to playing through other IF mazes. It can still be
    a bit exasperating to play through, especially if you lose your place as
    you navigate and have to go back to a saved position and start over.

    If I've talked mostly about the puzzles, it's because puzzles are most
    of what's worth talking about. The prose style is nothing stunning, and
    most of the scenery is sparsely implemented; there are plenty of items
    that don't exist at all, and plenty of others that garner a
    nothing-special sort of response. Considering the era in which the game
    was written, this is not very surprising. Many of the location
    descriptions do offer amusing reminiscences about past events in the
    house, which is a nice touch, and gives character to some rooms that
    would otherwise seem very spare indeed.

    As for the plot, it is fairly contrived, and, as in many Infocom games,
    most of the actual story occurs either in the prologue or at the very
    end. Still, putting the treasure-hunt agenda so blatantly in the
    foreground does, at least, remove any difficulty in explaining why the
    house is in such a strange condition. If things are implausibly
    scattered around, that's because someone put them there for exactly this
    purpose. Moreover, the central Hollywood-esque focus, and the emphasis
    on your history with Uncle Buddy, Aunt Hildegarde, and Cousin Herman,
    provides a nice thematic unity to the whole thing.

    The game also has a very satisfying easter egg; after the game was over,
    I realized that there was one obvious action I'd never taken, and taking
    it proved to work out exactly as I might have hoped.

    It took me only three or four hours to finish Hollywood Hijinx, even
    with the unavoidable replay of the early parts of the game. I referred
    to hints only a couple of times. In one case, I needed them because the
    action in question didn't seem obviously possible, given the
    descriptions of the rooms; in another, the solution wasn't something I
    would've thought of ever in a million years. For the most part, however,
    I felt that they were fair. For me this game didn't provide as much
    sense of adventure as Plundered Hearts, or offer the atmospheric
    richness of Wishbringer or Deadline, but it is still an entertaining,
    solid game of the old school.

    From: R. N. Dominick <rnd SP@G bookmice.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #34 -- September 24, 2003

    Oh, hey, look, it's just after midnight. Two minutes into September
    15th. Maybe I'd better think about going to bed...

    September 15th... hmm... that sounds familiar, for some reason.

    Oh, yeah. I volunteered to review that old Infocom game for the next
    issue of SPAG. The review's due on September 15th. Well, um, that gives
    me about twelve hours to solve the game before Paul O'Brian sends an
    oh-so-polite inquiry asking what happened... oh... oh, boy...

    That puts me in exactly the same situation as the nameless protagonist
    of Infocom's Hollywood Hijinx. As the nephew of infamous B-movie
    producer Buddy Burbank, you stand to inherit Uncle Buddy's movie
    business and fantastic Hollywood estate -- if you can prove you're
    clever enough to handle it by finding the ten mementos from Buddy's
    career hidden throughout the estate in twelve hours.

    Released in 1987, Hollywood Hijinx seems to be a deliberate throwback to
    the desolate treasure hunt period. There are no NPCs or animate
    creatures in the game (until the end-game, which is a timed sequence
    seemingly designed to hide the fact that the NPCs are pretty much
    cardboard ciphers). The puzzles are mostly of the clever mechanical
    type. The atmosphere is very jokey, and both Hollywood and Infocom
    in-jokes abound.

    There are throwbacks other than the atmosphere, however. (One annoyance
    is just a convenience that hadn't been implemented yet -- 'x' doesn't
    work, but damn if I didn't type it eleventy million times anyhow.)

    The game contains a maze. A *huge* maze. A huge sprawling maze it would
    take forever to map and even then you wouldn't know where you had to do
    what you had to do to get any value out of the maze. Luckily, you're
    given a map; unluckily, this doesn't provide any sort of automatic maze
    negotiation. Even after you've gotten the 'treasure' hidden at the
    center of the maze, you have to manually navigate your way back out. It
    takes more than 100 moves to complete the maze section of the game,
    meaning even with the map you spend an inordinate amount of time on it.

    Time? Yes, the game is timed. Even though the status line is the
    standard turns/score format, each and every move you perform in the game
    costs 1 minute of time -- even 'look' and 'inventory'. You only have 12
    hours -- 720 turns -- to complete the game. This puts an exasperating
    focus on optimizing the solution to a puzzle after you solve it. The
    game requires you to save rather more often than I'm used to because of
    this; if you're not careful, restarting will be required.

    It is also very possible to waste resources required to progress
    elsewhere in the game or to go to a location too soon or with the wrong
    items and have to backtrack via 'restore' to fix your error. After
    getting trapped like this three or four times, I was daunted by the
    proposition of replaying part of the game yet again and turned to a
    walkthrough for what turned out to be the last three treasures and forty
    points.

    (One blessing, at least, is that you don't have to tromp around and
    deliver the treasures anywhere; just having had them in inventory at one
    time is enough for the game to progress.)

    At the end of it all, nothing in Hollywood Hijinx stands out all that
    much. The one stand-out treasure-retrieval puzzle (which involves atomic
    mutant mayhem in a scale model of downtown Tokyo) is marred by two
    instances of the "wasted resource" problem (if you fail, or if you do
    something too soon, it's 'restore' for you, buster, or you cannot win).

    I think the real problem is that even in 1987, Infocom had progressed
    far beyond the basic dry puzzle hunt this game provices. Already
    released before this game were much better puzzle-fests (Spellbreaker),
    much funnier games (Leather Goddesses) and -- much more imporantly --
    advances in mood, setting and dramatics (A Mind Forever Voyaging and
    Trinity) that outclassed this game and type of game completely. Other
    releases the same year included the truly different (Nord and Bert
    Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It), the genre-busting (Plundered Hearts)
    and the systemically different (Border Zone). Namechecking so many other
    excellent games may not be quite fair, but those games set expectations
    that Hijinx just couldn't meet.

    ...

    Phew. There we go. 10 hours and 55 minutes. (Only five of those were
    spent playing the game and writing this review -- I had to sleep
    sometime!)

    Text version of Invisiclues

    Zcode version of Invisiclues

    SLAG source code for zcode version of Invisiclues

    Solution (packaged with other Infocom hints/walkthroughs)

    Things to try

    Stepwise solution

    Another stepwise solution

    Yet another solution

    Patch to create a "gamma" version, as Infocom distributed to external testers

    Included sample transcript

    Yes, it's another solution, this time in THL format

    Horror30.zip
    From: Graeme Cree <72630.304 SP@G compuserve.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #5 -- April 19, 1995

      NAME:  Horror30.zip                   GAMEPLAY:  Generic
      AUTHOR:  John Olsen                   PLOT:  Not Bad
      EMAIL:  ?                             ATMOSPHERE:  Varies
      AVAILABILITY:  S20_IBM_IF Archive            WRITING:  Minimal
      PUZZLES:  Good                        SUPPORTS:  MS-DOS
      CHARACTERS:  None living              DIFFICULTY:  Below average

         Horror30.zip is a trilogy of games by John Olsen (author of
    magic.zip, another trilogy reviewed in SPAG 3).  The package includes
    NIGHT OF THE WALKING DEAD, FRANKENSTEIN'S LEGACY, and THE SEA PHANTOM.
    These three games were each written by Mr. Olsen using his own interpreter,
    and none is larger than 38K.
         In NIGHT OF THE WALKING DEAD, you are trying to find your Aunt
    Bedilia's grave to recover a locket buried with her in order to
    prove your identity (how graverobbing proves this is unclear) and claim
    your inheritance. FRANKENSTEIN'S LEGACY is reminiscent of the sample
    transcript for THE LURKING HORROR.  You arrive at Victor Frankenstein's
    house, instructed by him to find the monster and bring it to life.  In
    THE SEA PHANTOM, you arrive at the coastal mansion of the late Captain
    Thorne.  Once every 10 years his old ship appears offshore. It is your
    job to put his spirit to rest and recover his treasure.
         All three are interactive short stories having from 20 to 40
    locations each.  They are not especially difficult, but have a couple
    of arbitrary puzzles.  This combined with the poor parser may make them
    a little aggravating if you don't immediately guess what the author is
    thinking. S.O.P. for an arbitrary puzzle is to keep trying whatever you
    can think of until you hit on the right thing, but these games have
    have only 1 or 2 generic "failure" messages, and after a bit it may get
    maddening to keep reading "You can't," or "You see nothing special."
    Especially since you get the "You can't" message for just about
    anything that isn't useful, even actions that you obviously COULD do
    (i.e. "Throw dagger" ).  The parser can also be misleading at times.  In
    one of the games you encounter a locked object.  There is no key, you
    must use some other means of opening it. But if you try to pick the
    lock or unlock it with the wrong key you are told that you need the
    right key (implying that such exists).  Another problem is that if the
    parser doesn't know what you're talking about, it will sometimes give
    you an answer that looks like it does.  In one game, I tried to do the
    right action, using the wrong words.  The message led me to believe
    that the ACTION had failed rather than the command, and I spent two
    days stuck, believing that I had already tried and rejected the correct
    thing.
         This is not to be too hard on Mr. Olsen.  Considering that he's
    written these games from scratch without AGT, TADS, Inform, et al, he's
    done rather a good job.  But if we compare his games to ones made using
    public compilers, then they suffer, even though it may be unfair to
    make the comparison in the first place.
         The atmosphere varies from horror to unintentionally comic.  NIGHT
    OF THE WALKING DEAD at times seems more like Night of the Zombie
    Keystone Cops.  You will often be running along with some item that you
    need, only to be hit over the head and have it stolen just when you get
    to where you would have used it.  You must then chase down the creature
    that took it and drag him off to the crematorium to prevent him from
    doing it to you again. FRANKENSTEIN'S LEGACY's lack of graphic
    description is at times comic also. If you order the game to cut open a
    dead body, you are told "OK."  That's it, just "OK."  If you then take
    an organ out of the body and examine it, you are told simply "You see
    nothing special."
         Although this review has focused primarily on negatives, these are
    not at all bad games, and all three are well worth spending an
    afternoon playing. However, I would advise having a walkthrough handy
    before you start, and use it if you get stuck for more than, say, half an
    hour.  These games are short stories and as such their pacing demands
    that the plot keep moving.  If you get stuck by an arbitrary puzzle, a
    bad parser, or a guess-the-word problem, they become very unrewarding.
    If you don't, you will probably have rather a pleasant gaming experience.

    PC Executable (.zip)

    Solution (.zip)

    Horror of Rylvania
    From: Audrey A. DeLisle <rad SP@G crl.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #1 -- May 15, 1994

     NAME: Horror of Rylvania                        PARSER: Excellent (TADS)
     AUTHOR: D.A. Leary                              PLOT: Excellent
     EMAIL: ???                                      ATMOSPHERE: Eerie
     AVAILABILITY:  IF Archive (Demo) C20                   WRITING: Excellent
     PUZZLES: -                                      SUPPORTS: TADS ports
     CHARACTERS: Fair                                DIFFICULTY: Some Trickiness

            Horror of Rylvania (Adventions by D.A.Leary) tells of the horror you
    find on your trip to Rylvania with your friend, Carolyn.  You become
    a vampire and must search for the 'cure.'  There are two sections that
    are maze-like, but small and not hard.  In general, this is not a
    hard game, but every game has its tricky places.  It is somewhat linear,
    but not limited like some games.  I enjoyed playing it.  The atmosphere
    was well created to be eerie, but not disgusting.

    From: Valentine Kopteltsev <uux SP@G mailru.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #30 -- September 20, 2002 -- as part of a Review Package

    Rylvania is reviewed here, because it's been (like the Unnkulian
    games) published by Adventions, has been written by the "father" of
    the Unnkulian universe, and contains several references to Unnkulia.
    However, it has little else to do with Unnkulia; it's a horror story.
    And it left me with mixed feelings.

    On one hand, the plot and the atmosphere were great (despite the
    Unnkulian references -- they really seemed out of place there). On the
    other hand... But let's begin from the start.

    Well, the game starts with you and your friend Carolyn being attacked by
    a pack of wolves during a trip through Rylvania, a small country
    somewhere in the backwoods of Central Europe. Carolyn gets seriously
    wounded, and your first task in the game is to help her. It gripped me
    at once, and I started to follow the plot enthusiastically. This run for
    Carolyn's life went on for twenty or so turns. Then, just as things
    really got rolling, I was resolutely grabbed by the collar, pulled back,
    and told, "Not so fast, my friend. From now on, you've got to do it the
    usual way - explore, pick up things, and enjoy yourself". This sudden
    change alone was baffling enough; to make things worse, it turned out
    that one had to be pretty careful, if not pedantic, in collecting items
    -- the game is split in two parts, with many rooms in the first part no
    longer accessible when you reach the second stage; however, puzzles at
    stage 2 often require objects from stage 1 to be solved, so that you're
    very likely to lock yourself out of victory, and find out something is
    wrong only several hundred turns later (sometimes without a hint what
    item is needed, exactly). Also, be prepared for a couple or more
    restarts; many decisions in the beginning phase of Rylvania depend on
    knowledge you only acquire later in the game. Combined with the fact
    that the game sometimes requires actions that seem completely
    inappropriate in the given situation, it makes a thorough strategic
    pre-planning practically inevitable.

    This degenerating into ADVENTURE is all the more a pity as the
    puzzles don't seem to be the main focus of the game, and as the
    storytelling aspect of the game has got so much potential. I'm not
    saying that the puzzles are bad -- they are very solidly done for the
    most part, but they're... well, unexceptional. I like creative,
    challenging puzzles (though I'm not very good at solving them); here,
    however, I'd rather prefer puzzles that'd be easier, but would fit
    the plot better: as it is, the plot and the puzzles seem to literally
    fight against each other.

    Still, the game's plot (which has several interesting twists), and
    the scary atmosphere make it worth playing (I'm deliberately not
    going into detail here in order not to spoil the fun). However, I
    suggest you keep a walkthrough handy for the first stage of the game:
    this might prevent you from many disappointments.

    SUMMARY:

    PLOT: A high-quality horror story
    ATMOSPHERE: Scary, though Unnkulia references spoil it a bit
    WRITING: Supports the atmosphere
    GAMEPLAY: Requires too much pre-planning
    BONUSES: Nice background
    CHARACTERS: Don't add much
    PUZZLES: Hamper the plot
    DIFFICULTY: The claimed rating of 5 out of 10 seems to be correct

    TADS .gam file, bundled with other Adventions games (.zip)

    TADS .gam file, bundled with other Adventions games (.tar.gz)

    Macbinary Demo (.sea.bin)

    BinHex Demo (.sea.hqx)

    TADS .gam file of Demo (.tar.Z)

    PC Executable Demo (.zip)

    Solution (Text)

    House
    From: Neil Butters <neil.butters SP@G sympatico.ca>
    Review appeared in SPAG #37 -- July 10, 2004

    TITLE: The House
    AUTHOR: Owen Parish
    EMAIL: doubleprism SP@G hotmail.com
    DATE: November (?) 2003
    PARSER: TADS2
    SUPPORTS: TADS2 interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/house.gam
    VERSION: Version 1.0

    The House is a short game that represents Owen Parish's first attempt at
    IF, and it is fairly entertaining, despite its derivative story and some
    technical annoyances. Ostensibly the objective is to get out of a house
    that you woke up in, hungover and disoriented. You have heard disturbing
    rumours about this house and its occupants. Could they be true? If you
    decide to explore the house, other objectives become readily apparent,
    and you uncover goings-on that will be familiar to genre fans. The story
    borrows from Lovecraft and Frankenstein, but it is underdeveloped, and I
    never did get a clear understanding of the House's secrets. This may
    have been because I did not get the full score, but I think it is more
    likely that the ideas never mesh into a coherent story. Some games can
    be satisfying even with an open-ended conclusion (see "All Alone") but
    the House doesn't pull this off successfully. There are a few surprises
    but they also remain underdeveloped. For example, two possibly
    interesting NPCS are introduced but I could not figure out what to do
    with them or how to get any useful information from them. The story
    should have made it more obvious what I was supposed to do with these
    guys. Motivation is one of the glaring problems with the game since it
    is often stressed that you want to get out of the house ASAP and it is
    possible to do so in five moves without getting any points. Why should I
    stick around and explore? The only motivation is curiosity. However, the
    game does reward inquisitive behaviour with rooms crammed full of
    objects that can be fiddled with or examined. There are some nice
    atmospheric touches as well, such as the noisy staircase.

    The gameplay is straightforward for the most part. There are only a few
    points in the game where interaction with the world was difficult. The
    library and the kitchen come to mind, where searching or reading the
    objects, respectively, is awkward. For instance, in the library a
    "search the west books" command will result in "which books do you mean,
    the west books, east books, north books or south books?" that
    necessitates a further "west books" command. In the kitchen, you cannot
    read the notes attached to objects but must read the object instead (ie
    "read cupboard"). These problems could easily be fixed in future
    versions. You have to guess where the exit is in the room you wake up
    in, and the maze does not make any sense (although it is easy to do).
    Most puzzles are easy to figure out. However, as I mentioned, I did not
    get the full score and I am quite sure I missed out on a few things. It
    doesn't really matter though, since you can leave the House at any time
    without doing anything.

    A stay in the House was worthwhile, largely due to the lack of "empty"
    rooms. If you decide to visit don't expect to leave with your curiosity
    satisfied. The House keeps its secrets locked within.

    TADS .gam file

    House of the Stalker
    From: C.E. Forman <ceforman SP@G worldnet.att.net>
    Review appeared in SPAG #10 -- February 4, 1997

    NAME: House of the Stalker
    AUTHOR: Jason Clayton White
    EMAIL: perseid SP@G inxpress.net
    DATE: October 1996
    PARSER: Inform Standard
    SUPPORTS: Inform Ports
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware, IF Archive
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition96/stalker
    VERSION: Version 1.0

    After seeing the title, and considering that Halloween was just around
    the corner at the time, I had really high hopes for this one.
    Unfortunately, there is a great deal of clumsy phrasing, and the
    author seems to be unable to decide what style to go with.  A sort of
    snide, smart-alecky, and sometimes downright insulting personality
    pervades the text, and yet occasionally the game tries to convey a
    feeling of melancholy in your character's life.  The plot is corny,
    suggesting a parody, but I never felt quite certain about the author's
    intent.

    The two styles are often contradictory (in one sentence you're told
    how much you miss your children, in another the game sighs about how
    "those dumb kids never made their bed"), which mars the attempt at
    personality.  The atmosphere never feels particularly creepy, as in
    "Theatre", mainly because the game constantly jokes about the psycho
    who's probably downstairs right now waiting to kill you.  The puzzles
    deal primarily with doing the right thing to the stalker at the right
    time, which means there's a lot of "guess what I'm thinking" to wade
    through.

    Particularly irritating is the fact that, when you try to kill the
    stalker before spraying him, tying him up, etc., you get the customary
    "Violence isn't the answer" message.  (So what IS?  "Please Mr.
    Soulless Psychotic Flesh-Rending Organ-Devouring Killer, can't we just
    learn to co-exist"?)  The stalker himself, I theorize, must have been
    that guy from the music store in "Detective," since he vanishes as
    soon as you kill him.

    "Stalker" feels a lot like one of those AGT games where the author
    didn't implement everything necessary to make the game flow smoothly,
    and indeed a number of glaring signs suggests that this author didn't
    completely have a grasp of Inform.  These include impossible verb
    resolutions, the reference to "a electric screwdriver," and several
    bits lifted directly from other Inform games - the instructions from
    Inform's port of "Adventureland," the compass rose from the Inform
    Programming Page, and the games "Robots" and "Freefall" (though I
    guess that was the point with the last two).  Decreasing the score
    after using the hint system is a clever idea, but unfortunately this
    effect can be bypassed with the quot;UNDOquot; command.

    I don't mean to sound overly harsh, but I think this one could have
    been, and should have been, a LOT scarier (even if done as a parody).

    Directory With Inform .z5 File

    Human Resources Stories
    From: David Ledgard <dledgard SP@G hotmail.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #17 -- May 10, 1999

    NAME: Human Resources Stories
    AUTHOR: Harry M. Hardjono
    DATE: 1998
    PARSER: Multiple-choice (mostly)
    SUPPORTS: Z-code (Infocom/Inform) interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition98/inform/hrs

    A lot of people pooh-poohed this game, just because it wasn't standard
    IF. I think the author was quite brave, trying a different format, and
    applying the genre in a different way. I don't think it deserved to
    come last. The suspension of the save facility was a bit annoying, but
    justified by the game context, I suppose. The game was a lot more
    complicated than most people appreciate, with it calculating a
    different job grade/wage depending on your answers. Also I think, but
    am not sure, the wrong answers changed depending on your previous
    answers. Vive la difference.

    Directory with Inform .z5 file, source code, and readme

    Humbug
    From: Crispin Boylan <viewtronix SP@G easynet.co.uk>
    Review appeared in SPAG #11 -- September 16, 1997

    NAME: Humbug
    AUTHOR: Graham Cluley
    E-MAIL: ???
    DATE: Aug 1991
    PARSER: Above Average
    SUPPORTS: PC
    AVAILABILITY: Public Domain, IF Archive (v.4.8)
    URL: http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/pc/humbug50.zip

    This game has been around for years, and is one of the more popular
    interactive fiction titles in Britain, and was, until recently, a
    shareware title which had to be registered (with the registered
    version you got a solution to the maze which was otherwise unsolvable,
    and you could also save and load games to disk).  Times they are a
    changin' however, and now the game has been released into the public
    domain due to the author not having enough time to sell or support the
    game anymore.  Cluley has actually produced this game without the aid
    of any of the text adventure creation languages, a huge feat for a
    game this size!

    Anyway that's the history out of the way, now to get to the meat of
    this review, the game itself.  It all opens with you, Sidney
    Widdershins, arriving at your senile old grandad's estate for a short
    stay during the Christmas Holidays.  You planned to explore the old
    windmill in the grounds of Attervist Manor, but as you arrive you
    realise that something is amiss, especially when Grandad does not
    appear to be around!  Closer inspection of the house reveals grandad
    sleeping in his armchair, seemingly unwakeable, he has a rather
    interesting document in his possession, a legal document asking for
    grandad to hand over the manor to his new neighbour, Jasper Slake, who
    will take proper care of the manor.  It seems that the old fool
    is broke, and has let the manor fall into a state of disrepair, and
    his mutterings to Jasper of secret treasure hidden in the grounds of
    the manor, and the 'wild woman of the hills' have done nothing to
    prove his mental stability!  Grandad and Slake are bitter enemies,
    only recently, the letter explains, did Grandad plant a scale model of
    the Champs Elysee in Slakes garden!  So, on discovering this news it
    is still unclear as to your mission, do you have to find the treasure?
    or maybe stop Slake? This is one of the best points of the game, you
    are constantly fed with small snippets of the plot, which is
    consistent, and of good quality.

    There is one major feature of this game which makes it stick out from
    the rest, it is completely weird and surreal, you only have to look at
    the NPCs to see this, Kevin, a clockwork shark, built by Grandad as
    his contribution to the war effort; Sven, the viking, whose ship has
    been caught in the manors lake as it froze; and Horace the groundsman,
    who travels round the maze collecting any 'litter' in the form of
    objects, that you may have deposited, he also only talks to
    vegetables!  Some of the NPCs are better than others, but all are
    likeable, apart from the villain, Jasper, of course.  The NPCs, on the
    whole are not too talkative, but then again they really don't need to
    be.

    This game has a maximum score of 2000 points, so you can expect quite
    a few puzzles in this little gem, most of which are quite logical, but
    there are some very hard puzzles which you really have to think about.
    The game also has a bit of organisation needed, you must do the
    puzzles in a certain order or you won't be able to complete others,
    this is a bit annoying, but it is quite obvious, and easy to get
    around.  To get the final few points you have to do a bit of verb
    searching, for example typing 'PRAY', earns the response 'A voice from
    below shouts, "I don't know how you've got the nerve!" ' and earns you
    10 points, but does little else, my top score is 1920, so I still have
    to get those last few!

    There are over 200 objects and 100 locations in this game, so it's
    pretty big, and the locations are varied, and when I say that I mean
    Varied with a capital V, there are such bizzare locations as a alien
    bar, a trip back in time, a fairies den, a junk yard, a bus stop, and
    all of this takes place in the manors cellars!! The parser's
    vocabulary is pretty extensive, but it doesn't stretch to
    multiple commands in the same sentence. Still, I like it.

    This game is very funny, you can't help but laugh at some of the jokes
    that examining some objects brings up, and the whole thing is just so
    surreal!  The atmosphere is very good and you can just imagine being
    there, the writing is on the whole very detailed and descriptive.  As
    a player with a bit of experience (I haven't completed all the Infocom
    games, but I've played through a few) I found this game hard (I
    desparately needed the on-line hints), but very rewarding, just wait
    until you see the ending, it's brilliantly funny, and you'll never
    guess it!!!!  This is a great game, download it now, the public domain
    version is at Graham Cluleys own web page (address above), and is
    version 5, there is a version at ftp.ifarchive.org but it is only a shareware
    version (4.8), without the map solution or save ability.

    [Actually, this is no longer the case. Mr. Cluley has released the full
    version to the archive. See link below. --PO 9/99]

    From: Alex Freeman <Freemanry SP@G aol.com>
    Review appeared in SPAG #24 -- March 24, 2001

    In this game, you are Sidney Widdershins and have been sent to
    Granddad's for the winter holidays. When you arrive there after being
    deposited by a taxi and get in, you find that Granddad is asleep and is
    holding a document. When you read it, you find that Granddad's neighbor,
    Jasper, has offered to buy Granddad's home, Attervist Manor, since
    Granddad is so deeply in debt. Granddad claims that there is hidden
    treasure in the grounds of the manor, but Jasper apparently thinks he is
    nuts. Granddad thinks lowly of Jasper and has written a rude word on the
    document (not shown in the game). However, if Granddad is not nuts and
    if there really is hidden treasure, you could help him get out of debt.

    The atmosphere is unique and quite odd. For instance, there is a Viking
    called Sven whose boat has been caught in the frozen lake nearby the
    manor. There are also a bar, a hacker, and an octopus underneath the
    manor. The game also does not always make sense. For instance, what is
    giant slug doing in the manor? But, eh, who cares? It makes the game
    interesting.

    There are other interesting places you can explore, such as the forest
    maze and the manor back in the Victorian times (via time machine).

    The NPCs are fairly well developed. You can get to know them better by
    asking them questions in the format "ask character about subject".
    Obviously, the characters can't have a special response for everything,
    so when you ask a character about something or someone he doesn't know
    (e.g. asking someone who lives in the Victorian times about someone who
    lives in modern times) the character has a special response to indicate
    that he doesn't know anything about what you've asked. One of my
    favorite responses is the one you get when you ask Horace the gardener
    about something he doesn't know:

       Horace looks suspiciously at me, but remains silent. I am not sure it
       is in his terms of employment to actually communicate with sentient
       life forms. Herbs and vegetables he can cope with, but people give
       him problems.

    Another interesting NPC is Kevin the clockwork shark, who is one of
    Granddad's many inventions and was made by him during WWII. You get this
    description of him upon entering the pantry for the first time:

       I am in the pantry. It is a small, dark room - the only source of
       light being a barred oval window built close to the ceiling in the
       west wall. A definite niff of seaweed wafts around the shelves. Small
       mountains of marzipan and icing sugar are liberally scattered across
       the damp stone floor. There is a movement from behind one of the
       taller mounds of marzipan and a shark totters around on his hind
       fins. The shark smiles benignly at me, "Hello my little sugar-plum."
       The shark paternally pats me on the head with a damp flipper,
       flamboyantly places a small caddy on one of the pantry shelves. The
       shark smiles at me again, and waggles his eyebrows in anticipation of
       my response.

    There are many other NPCs, such as a Victorian grave digger, Alex the
    hacker, Jasper, and, of course, Granddad.

    As you've probably noticed, the writing is quite descriptive. It's also
    quite humorous. In fact, my wildcard points are for the humour in the
    game. You also get funny responses if you try do silly actions. For
    instance, typing DRINK PETROL gives you the response "Heh, heh. I think
    not." You even get 10 points for it! My only complaint about it is that
    it contains a few minor punctuation errors (as you might have noticed).

    The parser is very good. It can understand fairly sophisticated
    sentences and is easy to use, but it doesn't do some fancy stuff like
    recognizing multiple sentences (not that I would type multiple sentences
    if I could but still).

    However, this game has one serious flaw. Most of the puzzles are either
    too easy or too hard. For instance, I find a banana and later I find a
    chimp. Gee, I wonder what to do next. That one is, of course, an example
    of a puzzle that's too easy. A puzzle that is too hard is how you're
    supposed to put out the fire underneath the manor. I don't know how
    anyone is supposed to figure that puzzle out! It is quite illogical. The
    hint system partially solves this problem, and it is quite good, but it
    is no substitute for good puzzles. The only problem with it is if you
    can't solve a puzzle because you haven't solved another puzzle, it won't
    tell you that. Instead it gives a hint or the solution (it depends on
    which you choose) of the puzzle whose solution you have requested. I
    ended up getting solutions to puzzles I probably could have solved on my
    own in this way because I didn't realize that it wasn't the puzzle I was
    currently trying to solve that was the problem but some other one.
    However, don't get me wrong. Not all the puzzles are bad. In fact,
    almost half are quite good. It's just that there should have been more
    good ones.

    I also managed to find one bug in the game. In Humbug, you can EXAMINE
    objects, or you can LOOK at them in order to get descriptions. You can
    abbreviate EXAMINE with x and LOOK with l. I am more used to LOOKing at
    objects than I am to EXAMINing them, so I used the abbreviation l. This
    abbreviation worked on all the objects on which I tried it out EXCEPT
    one. During the game, I decided to look at my hair because I thought
    maybe that would help me solve a puzzle (I won't say how). When I typed
    "l hair", the game didn't seem to understand the command. I later used
    the hint system to get the solution to the puzzle that involved my hair.
    I wondered how I could have solved that puzzle since I figured that I
    couldn't look at my hair. However, when I looked at a written solution
    for Humbug, I found out that you're supposed to type "x hair". The hair,
    apparently, is the only object at which you can't LOOK but still can
    EXAMINE, which isn't supposed to be the case for any of the objects.
    This bug effectively prevented me from solving an important puzzle in
    the game.

    Anyhow, the plot in Humbug is wonderful! I'd say it's the best part of
    the game! You are given bits of the story as the game progresses, and
    there's one major plot twist! The ending is spectacular and was really
    fun to read!

    Overall, Humbug is a good game and is worth playing. Just be prepared
    for some illogical puzzles here and there. It could have been an
    excellent game if the puzzles had been better.

    Atmosphere:     1.8
    Gameplay:       1.5
    Writing:        1.8
    Plot:           2.0
    Humour:         1.6
    Total:          8.7
    Characters:     1.5
    Puzzles:         .8

    PC Executable (.zip)

    Solution (ASCII text)

    Hunter, In Darkness
    From: Duncan Stevens <dns361 SP@G merle.acns.nwu.edu>
    Review appeared in SPAG #19 -- January 14, 2000

    TITLE: Hunter, in Darkness
    AUTHOR: Andrew Plotkin
    E-MAIL: erkyrath SP@G netcom.com
    DATE: 1999
    PARSER: Inform standard
    SUPPORTS: Z-code interpreters
    AVAILABILITY: Freeware (IF Archive)
    URL: ftp://ftp.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/zcode/huntdark.z5
    VERSION: Release 4

    More than one work of IF has revolved around an in-joke of sorts, a
    premise with significance to IF veterans or historians but inscrutable
    to anyone else, and Andrew Plotkin's Hunter, in Darkness is one of them,
    on one level. It sends up the early-'70s BASIC computer game Hunt the
    Wumpus, a pre-Colossal Cave relic that offers the player, with almost no
    description, the following possibilities: killing a Wumpus, getting
    eaten by the Wumpus, getting attacked by bats, or falling into a pit. A
    player familiar with the original can therefore begin Hunter... and note
    in short order that there is a Wumpus, a pit, and some bats involved,
    and consign the thing to the in-joke category.

    Hunter... isn't just an in-joke, though; the real joke that it plays on
    the source material is that it turns one of the most tersely described
    caves possible ("You are in Room 1. Passages lead to Room 2 and Room 3")
    into one of the best-described settings imaginable. Not only is the cave
    vividly rendered, but the PC's experience of it is thoroughly, and
    harrowingly, done; no "cave crawl" in IF has ever taken such a toll on
    the PC over the course of the game. As in the source material, you're
    hunting a Wumpus, but here the player suffers at least as much as the
    Wumpus over the course of the game, and the cave is just as much an
    enemy as the Wumpus itself; finding a safe way down a pit and surviving
    a tight crawl are some of the problems at hand. It's worth noting that
    the caves of the classic cave crawls were largely innocuous; the danger
    in Colossal Cave, Zork, and others came largely from sentient enemies
    scattered around the landscape, not from the geography itself. Here,
    surviving the cave is most of the challenge.

    As with Plotkin's previous works, the writing is skillful; most of the
    five senses are at work throughout the game, and the descriptions often
    reflect a multisensory experience. The beginning of the game sets the
    tone:

       Nearly -- nearly. The animal stink is rank and close. You raise your
       crossbow, try to peer beyond dark, wet stone.

       >smell
       The stink of your prey is all around.

       Something shifts in the darkness ahead, a great silent bulk. Your
       prey.

    As the cave is very nearly a character in its own right, it is
    appropriate that the level of geological detail is high. ("Needles of
    yellow calcite spray from the rocks nearby.") Moreover, the layout of
    the cave as a whole makes sense in ways that most IF caves do not; you
    find standing water when you descend, for instance, and there is running
    water at the base of a canyon. Small details like this help make
    Hunter... such a well-realized setting that it puts most other cave
    crawls to shame; few cave games since Colossal Cave have given geology
    even token acknowledgment, after all.

    As a game, Hunter works quite well. The plot branches and rejoins at
    certain key points, so there is some replay potential, though the paths
    don't, fundamentally, differ all that much (at least, not the ones I
    discovered; I may be wrong). One element of the final confrontation
    feels somewhat contrived, but not inappropriately so, and the solution
    to it is nicely subversive--you pit the elements of the cave against one
    another, in a sense, rather than conquering them yourself. Moreover, the
    course of the story calls into question the hunt itself, since you find
    along the way that you are chasing something with considerable
    intelligence, making the showdown more a battle of wits than an act of
    violence. The puzzles are well-designed and not too hard; they draw on
    understanding and being aware of the cave environment, moreover, rather
    than applying items to problems, which helps them feel part of the story
    rather than artificial barriers.

    The technical aspect of the game is admirable, as one might expect from
    Zarf; particularly good is a maze with randomly generated descriptions
    that can be infinitely large. Some will object to the inclusion of the
    maze at all, of course, but this is one of the more creative mazes in
    IFdom and as such gets a pass from me--no mapping is required, for one
    thing, and the random generation brings to mind real caves, which aren't
    limited to a defined number of rooms. Likewise, the disabling of compass
    directions strikes a blow for verisimilitude, since cave navigation is
    typically too complicated for anyone to preserve a clear sense of
    direction; instead, the game provides "forward," "left," "right," and
    such, and I found I didn't miss my compass at all.

    But the best thing about Hunter... is the setting. It is worth
    remembering exactly how many IF games have been set in caves or some
    equivalent--the answer is "many"--in order to appreciate the way this
    game brings the cave- crawl genre alive. The nature of a complex
    underground cave poses many obstacles, only some of which Hunter
    explores--darkness, water filling a passage, steep climbs--along with
    predators, of course. A little imagination helps the setting come to
    life in a way that makes puzzles for their own sake unnecessary, and
    Hunter... illustrates how much a little creativity can do. By making the
    cave itself the subject of the game rather than the excuse for a grab
    bag of artificial puzzles, Zarf reminds the player that a cave is more
    than an excuse for lazy fantasy storytelling; here, after all, the cave
    not only is the enemy, it wins most of the battles.

    Hunter... is therefore less an update on Hunt the Wumpus than an rebuke
    to the IF that has followed Wumpus but failed in certain significant
    respects to improve on it by giving the setting its due. It's one of the
    most vividly written pieces of IF in recent memory, and I gave it a 9,
    the highest score I gave any entry in this year's competition.

    Inform .z5 file, updated version

    Inform .z5 file, competition version

Go to the previous page of reviews (G)

Go to the next page of reviews (I)