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Missed Classic 45: Infidel - Introduction (1983)

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Written by Joe Pranevich



Although I had originally planned to play only the Zork games, I somehow find myself eleven games into playing the entire Infocom canon. I still doubt I’ll be able to finish all of them before we get to Return to Zork, but I hope I will have at least hit the high points. And that’s why I’m sitting down to play Infidel, the first game on the list that I was completely unaware of. Every other game so far I’ve at least started and abandoned twenty or more years ago. This one, and many of the games that are coming up, are completely unknown to me. That is exciting but also a bit intimidating as I do not know what to expect or whether Infocom will continue to retain a high level of quality as we get closer to their inevitable decline and shut down.

I also want to take this time to announce that next week (the week of the 19th) will be a special “Zork Marathon Anniversary” week! Time flies but I’ve been playing Infocom (and pre-Infocom) games for an entire year now. To celebrate, we’ll try to finish Infidel and end with a 1983 wrap-up, including the first three Zork books, plus a special non-Zork bonus post. It’ll be fun and hopefully put me in the right mindset for Sorcerer and Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes.

Infidel is Mike Berlyn’s fourth adventure game overall and his second with Infocom after Suspended. This is also Mr. Berlyn’s first game created entirely while at Infocom; according to some design notes that were shared with me by Jason Scott (of Get Lamp fame), he had sketched out much of that game prior to joining the crew from Wheeler St. I do not have to much more to add about this part of Mr. Berlyn’s career at Infocom, but we will continue to track him through Cutthroats (1984) and potentially a brief look at non-adventure Fooblitzky (1985). I am excited to see how Mike’s science fiction / dystopian writing chops will translate to a game that seems quite far from his strengths.

Dr. Livingston, I presume?

Just as with the other games, there are a few “feelies” included as part of the manual including a fake magazine, a short diary, a letter, a map, and a page of “hieroglyphs”. I’ll come to each in turn, but having just read the diary, I am led to an inescapable conclusion: the protagonist is a major ass. Actually, that is probably an understatement but I am hoping to keep my posts family-friendly. Our "hero" appears to be the junior partner in an archeology firm and lives in constant jealousy of his senior partner. He desperately wants an opportunity to prove himself so when a potential client, Miss Ellingsworth, arrives with news about a lost pyramid that her father once searched for, he jumps on it without telling his partner. Around 1920, her father was given a pottery sherd with strange “hieroglyphs” that he somehow managed to decipher. Based on what he learned, he launched an underfunded and ill-fated expedition to locate the pyramid. The trip was a failure and Miss Ellingsworth’s father died, but not before finding a limestone block containing similar “hieroglyphs”. She wants us to find her father’s pyramid and prove that he wasn’t a complete failure. To that end, she provides us all of her father’s notes including his basic hieroglyphics dictionary and the block. I keep almost writing “I” or “us” here because I usually find myself in the head of the character, but this time I am not sure how well I can relate to his specific brand of ambitious pettiness.


Her father’s notes and basic dictionary.

I pause for a second to look over the notes that she provided, also included as “feelies”. The “hieroglyphs” here aren’t Egyptian or much of anything else, they are pure ASCII-art. That is pretty cool since it means we’ll probably encounter some in the game itself. We are also helpfully given an initial “dictionary” of words that Mr. Ellingsworth managed to decipher in 1920. Exactly how this was done isn’t stated, especially as he had only the stone and a small potsherd to work with. (Incidentally, the letter says a pottery “shard” but the technical term is “sherd” or “potsherd”. This is my history-geek coming out for a moment, sorry.) We don’t get a rubbing of the sherd itself so we have no idea what it says that points the way to a pyramid, but I spend a moment to decode the rubbing with the attached key:

“The queen and all queen treasures.”

Never mind that real Egyptian is more complex than a one-to-one word replacement, but I can’t help but notice that the dictionary has symbols that don’t appear on the stone. My guess is that this is a form of copy-protection and we’ll have something else we need to decode before too long. A more obvious form of copy protection is the enclosed map:


“X” marks the spot, of course. 

The map gives the latitude and longitude coordinates for where the jade block was found, presumably where I’ll need to start looking for the actual pyramid. Starcross used a similar idea for copy protection, although in that game there were several possible locations of the alien ship instead of just one.

With this in hand, our character admits in his diary that he just wants the “glory” of finding the new pyramid and to show-up his partner for all his supposed mistreatments. He doesn’t bother to tell anyone that he is leaving, he just gets a visa and books a trip to Egypt. Oh, but if you think he’s an ass now, just wait. It gets worse. He hires a group of Egyptian laborers to help with the excavation, but on the way to the site their “navigation box” (a GPS? Maybe a Loran?) falls off the jeep and they radio back to Cairo for another. Some of the food that they brought was spoiled and the laborers are unhappy. Rather than wait for the navigation box to come or return back to the city for more supplies, he forces the men to dig in the desert everyday for three weeks without a clear idea of where they should be looking. And when his guide got angry for their fool’s errand, he hit him. After a fourth week with no progress, no leads, and no GPS, “our” character forces the workers to continue digging during a religious holiday. No one is happy but he closes out his diary saying that one of the workers just came by to drop off some kumiss (a drink made from fermented milk) and it looks like all is forgiven. He settles down to write a letter to his benefactor.


The final page of the undelivered letter.

The letter is… trippy. It starts with a formal and optimistic account of their challenges in Egypt, but before long it meanders into unsettled rants as the handwriting gets worse and worse. I thought at first that this was our character descending into madness but only after re-reading the journal and the letter now, it’s clear that the kumiss was drugged and we’re seeing (in real time!) the drug affecting his system. As his final lines twist off the page, our character slips into unconsciousness as we start to play the game.

First, I want to get something out of the way: I know that there is a twist ending to the game. Someone mentioned it in a comment a few weeks ago, but I don’t actually know what the twist is. Knowing Mr. Berlyn’s sci-fi background in both his books and his games to date, I’m going to guess that this will be the classic “sci-fi Egyptian” plotline ala Stargate and that the “twist” will be us flying off into space or something. I hope I’m wrong, but since I know there is a twist, how could I not try to guess it? Maybe M. Night Shyamalan played this as a 13-year old and was inspired by its brilliant twist-plotting to pattern his career off of it?




The plane, boss, the plane!

We wake up in a cot in a tent. There’s a supply chest, but it’s been padlocked and I don’t have the key. We can hear an airplane above, probably delivering the long-awaited navigation box. Of course, it would arrive a day too late! I head outside and look around, but it’s pretty clear that “we” are not quite right in the head. I examine a nearby excavation hole and get this response:

> examine holeNever mind that -- Here’s a better problem: You dig a hole 52 feet by 20 feet by .105 yards. It takes you 5 hours, 11 minutes, and 2 seconds. You sweat off 30 grams of water per hour. And your best friend just ran off with the rent money. Now: How much sand is in the hole you dug?

I don’t know that I like this at all. I mean, it’s funny in a way but it further removes “us” from being the protagonist of the game. I am barely over playing a jerk, but a jerk who is hallucinating might be a bridge too far. From a game design standpoint, I do not think it’s a good idea for immersion. That said, I think you are supposed to think that the answer is 12.13 cubic yards of sand but it’s a riddle: the answer is: there is no sand in the hole you just dug. It’s a hole, stupid!

As I explore the camp site, the airplane far overhead drops off a package with a parachute. We have no difficulty opening the crate and pulling out the navigation box. It has only a single button which, when pressed, tells me my latitude and longitude. Right now, I am at 24° 11’ 7’’ N, 32° 12’ 37’’ E. Ah yes, non-decimal latitude and longitude used to be a thing. The nice thing about living in the future is that we can actually check out this stuff, pulling up images from Google Maps in seconds when a tiny company in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the 1980s may have struggled with the same.


That doesn’t look quite right...

Sorry for the little diversion, but I could not help myself but to check. It seems that the site in the game is on the wrong side of the Nile, approximately 45 miles west of Aswan. I do not know much about ancient Egypt, but Aswan is the location of the “First Cataract”, a natural boundary that made river travel upstream impassible. This became something of a natural border for Upper Egypt throughout a long period of history, although the ancient Egyptians would eventually progress past this barrier and conquer much further up the Nile. I hope someone more versed in Egyptian history can provide some context. In any event, while there was temple-building this far south, all of the pyramids that we think of when we think of Ancient Egypt were much further north. (Incidentally, “El Menhir”, the name of the staging town in the manual, does not appear to be a real place. Aswan would have been an ideal staging-ground for this expedition with a population over 200k in the 1980s and plenty of infrastructure. While I am at it, I could also complain that “menhirs” are Western European and that similar Egyptian monuments are called “obelisks”, but I give that one a pass since I suspect it’s intended to be a reference to Zork II.)

I explore the rest of the camp and pick up whatever I can find:
  • By the communal fire pit, I find a matchbook and an empty package of cigarettes. The pack has shiny foil which might come in handy somehow.
  • In the supply tent, I find a left-behind axe and shovel.
  • In the workers’ tent, I discover a knapsack containing a canteen and a rope. There’s also a note from the workers saying, essentially, that they hope I am dead and if I am not that they hope I die before I make it back to civilization. Nice! They also locked up the things that I treasure in my trunk but kept the key. 
  • To the west of the camp is the Nile river and crocodiles, but I can also fill the canteen. 
  • Surrounding the camp in all directions except west is endless desert. Not much to see or collect, although I can use the navigation box in each location to find out its position.
While I am exploring, I start to get hungry and thirsty. Darn. This makes the third game in a row to have a hunger and thirst mechanic and this is one of the things I like least about these games. I drink some of the water from the canteen and look around for some food, but there’s none in the camp.


The Nile river, near where this game takes place.

I give up on finding the key and eventually try the “direct” approach: I take an axe to the lock. Surprisingly, that works! There’s some dried beef in there which I eat eagerly but I’ll need to find more food as the game progresses. I also find the material from the packaging including the jade cube, the map, and an inspection sticker. I put everything in the knapsack. I should comment on that because it’s a new feature: it seems that I can only carry a few things in-hand, but I have a much larger inventory capacity in the sack. Every time I put the sack down, it opens up to see my stuff. I always just assumed that I had a backpack or something playing Zork but this makes it explicit. Perhaps annoying explicit, but explicit. (Filling the canteen, for example, takes far too many commands: First, drop the knapsack, get the canteen, open it, fill it, close it, replace it in the knapsack, and then wear it. That’s six commands to do one simple task.)

With nothing else I can find in the camp, I head out to search for the location on my map: 24° 11’ 3” N, 32° 12’ 43” E. In each location, I push the button and I have no problem finding the location just to the east of our campsite. I dig there several times with the shovel to reveal the top point of a long lost pyramid! There’s some hieroglyphics there and a small square depression.


Our first in-game hieroglyphics!

Using the basic dictionary that was provided with the game, it says “Through this entrance sits the entrance to”. That doesn’t seem complete… but then I remember the cube which says “the queen and all queen treasures.” They go together! I pop in the cube and the top of the pyramid opens up, allowing me to enter.

I descend into the pyramid below, finding myself in the Chamber of Ra, a temple at the top of the pyramid with four staircases down, one in each direction. There’s also an altar here as well as a bronze torch and a jar of a strange liquid. I quickly work out that I can dip the torch in the liquid to coat it, then light it with a patch. That gets me a nice light source for further explorations! I immediately head off the the north… and die. The stairs were too steep and I fall and kill myself. That’s… a bit of an anti-climax. With that however, I’m going to end this first session. I found the pyramid and can start to explore.


Our greatest challenge lies ahead-- and downward.

Inventory: knapsack, ancient map, inspection sticker, matchbook, cigarette pack, canteen (with water), rope, broken lock, shovel, pickaxe, navigation box, torch (lit)
Time played: 50 min


Thus far, other than the jarring opening and backstory, I am enjoying the adventure. The game’s mastery of Egyptian geography is suspect and it doesn’t feel like it takes place in the 1980s, but we’ll see what happens once I actually get into the pyramid exploration.

Don’t forget that this is an introductory post so you can guess a score. Mike’s first Infocom game was Suspended which scored 31 points. Future Mike Berlyn games we have already covered include the 1986 re-release of Oo-Topos (37 points), Tass Times in Tonetown (47 points) and Altered Destiny (38 points). He also had a smaller role in Les Manley (30 points). Keep in mind that the latter games were graphical and this one is text-only, albeit with some ASCII-art.

The Dagger of Amon Ra - Night at the Museum

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By Deimar

Laura’s Journal Entry #2: "So my boss has asked me to investigate the burglary of the dagger of Amon Ra from the Leyendecker museum by attending to a fundraising party there tonight, masquerading as a social events reporter. To be honest, I think I would have gotten a really good article about the upper class shenanigans with plenty of shady deals, femme fatales, impersonators and more. However, this whole thing about a murder has focused me again in the problem at hand, discovering where is the dagger of Amon Ra.”

Act 2 begins with Laura at night in front of the museum, which is now open and guarded by a german who is one svastika away of ending this walkthrough by means of Godwin’s law. He is apparently the chief of security but right now there is not much that can be extracted from him. We just have to give him our press pass (which he keeps for some strange reason) and he lets us in. This makes a clock appear in the upper left corner of the screen signaling that it is 7PM. Oh my god, I just got shivers from thinking about Colonel’s Bequest. I really hope I won’t miss key information due to simply walking into a room and making the clock advance.

I am going to be very sad if after so many stereotypes there is not a bullfighter somewhere in the game...

The real party starts inside the museum. As we enter we can see a big bust of Rameses II and several tables with refreshments. There is a group of men surrounding a blonde woman which seem interesting. Specially because our friend Ziggy is there. What is a crook doing in an upper class party? And who is all these people? Time to socialize!! The woman introduces herself as Yvette Delacroix.





By any chance, do you have some cheese? Did you have a flat with views to the Eiffel tower?

Then we have the pompous british guy from the introduction. He presents himself as Dr. Pippin Carter, the archeologist who discovered the dagger in Egypt.

Go figure. It seems like a VIP is just someone who says “important” a lot...

Then we have Rameses Najeer...

I don’t even know where this accent is supposed to be from…

And finally Dr. Archibald Carrington III, the current president of the museum who we also know from the introduction, as he is the owner of the corpse-filled trunk.

Ah, Colonel Sanders, how nice of you to provide the food for tonight’s gala...

As a compulsive adventure gamer, my strategy here is simple. I will just keep spamming all topics in the notebook and see what I can get from them. I didn’t complain too much about the interface in the previous post but I’m going to do it now. Feel free to jump this paragraph. And probably a few more. Talking is ridiculous in this game. First, you have to start every topic by clicking on the person you are talking to. All fine but for the little detail that Laura tends to position herself in front of said person, making you walk away or pixel hunt for the spot where you can click on to keep the conversation going. Then, in the notebook you have to select the topic and then select the exit icon in the menu (or right click to get to it and then left click). During the first act this wasn’t too much of a bother but here you are only talking with everybody about everything and it gets tiring. Also, the topics do not change but if you ask someone something you already asked her, she just dismisses you. So any information you don’t record the first time it’s lost.

Another thing I should have mentioned in the previous post regarding the interface is that Laura walks extremely slow. The animation is very nice but so slow I just couldn’t get anywhere without cranking up the speed to the maximum.

In any case, asking these people about the topics at our disposal is only mildly interesting. Ziggy claims to be the brother of a Broadway producer and to know who stole the dagger, but he is saying nothing. However, he does get suspiciously defensive when asked about the countess, so maybe there is something here.

Yep, definitely nothing to do with you..

Yvette warns Laura about the very same countess also. Apparently she knew her late husband and he told her that he was afraid. Now, the countess seems to be after Dr. Carrington’s money. A black widow maybe? In any case, we get some backstory from her. She used to work in the speakeasy as a hostess but now she works for Dr. Carrington but she doesn’t say what she actually does, only that someday she will become the president. Somehow in this conversation I realize that there is a new name, a Wolf Heimlich, that appears in the notebook. How that got there is a mistery to me, but he is apparently the german we found at the entrance.

Dr. Carter is as interesting as he looks. Which is nothing at all. But he does drop that he and Dr. Carrington met a few years back but he doesn’t seem to recognise him and has changed so much that Dr. Carper almost didn’t either. There might be an impersonator here tonight, so maybe he killed the true Dr. Carrington and that’s the corpse in the trunk. Apparently, he didn’t even know they were traveling in the same ship.

When asked about Dr. Carter, Mr. Najeer reacts with fury, as he is Egyptian and not very fond of tomb robbers. For some strange reason, it is the fourth person that knows Steve Dorian, the stevedore at the docks, which surprises me as the guy shouldn’t be that well-connected. The interrogation of Dr. Carrington didn’t bring anything new to the table, so time to move to the right and see…

Another part of the museum hall with more guests. Yay, more exposition!. There are several couples here but they are all decoration. The only one important enough here to have a name and a portrait is an old very well dressed lady, the countes… sorry… COUNTESS Lavinia Waldorf-Carlton.

I am surprised such big egos all fit together in this “small” museum...

At first, she denies knowing Dr. Carrington but after being presses she finally admits to having met him at the docks alleging that their families have a relationship since of the war of the roses. Being a war fought almost 500 years before the current year, I find that very unlikely. Maybe she is “in” in the murder also, although their motives are unclear at the moment. As a black widow, with her last husband having died this very same year, this could be a plot to get the good doctor’s money. Or it could have something to do with the burglary, but I think there should be easier ways of stealing something from a museum other than killing its president and impersonate him.

Having nothing else to do here, I leave the room by a door to the right, which takes me to the museum shop. Here I notice for the first time that you can get two different descriptions of something. First by using the “look” icon, and the second one by using the magnifying glasses on the item. Although interesting, this doesn’t lead me anywhere, as there is nothing too remarkable here but for a collection of fake daggers of Amon Ra.

As I left the shop it dawned on me that it is kind of strange that you get such a close up of a random dagger in the shop. It could be simply so that I note that fake daggers have the “Made in Pittsburgh” (of all places) inscription but my gut was telling me to look at each of them individually. And voilah, as soon as I started from the far end of the row of daggers, there was one without the inscription.

7.30 and it’s already finished. Time to spent the rest of the night drinking by myself!

Case closed. Laura, you are a genious. Let’s wrap up, call the police and let them process fingerprints and the like. What? Nothing is happening? Why? I just discovered the real dagger among the fake ones. Why hasn’t the game ended yet? Seems unfair. The only thing that happens is that the clock now announces it is 7.30 PM and that Mr. Heimlich enters the room and kicks us out. My joy is now officially killed. By a na… german, no less.

Nothing seems to have change in the hall so I continue my exploration. In the first room when we entered the museum there is a gate leading north, but when I try to enter the room I am kicked out by Mr. Heimlich again. Who seems to have teleportation powers. Must be nice for a security guard. Wondering how the dagger could have been stolen with such a mighty superhero as its guardian.

Going left from the main hall we reach the other end of the room, where more members of the cast are awaiting presentation. First we have Dr. Ptahsheptut "Tut" Smith, the egyptian guy from the introduction. And he is not very interesting, as he just talks and talks about recovering Egypt’s legacy from the museum and threatens Dr. Carter when mentioned.

Now, all together: IMHOTEP! IMNH… erm… SHOULD BE IN EGYPT!! SHOULD BE IN EGYPT!!

The woman he is talking to is Dr. Olympia Mykos. A greek curator at the museum with a weird fixation on death things, death in general and scars. But otherwise she doesn’t say that much.

Oh, no, bitch. You keep away from my Dorian

The third man in this party is none other than detective O’Reily. By this point, I have been told by many guests that the good detective is a master drunk, another stereotype checked, by even by that description I am surprised he was invited to a fund raiser party. This should be the ideal opportunity to get some information from him, but he is as helpful as he was at the station, so no dice.

And how could I trust a drunk detective that wears more eye-liner than I do?

And… there I was, kind of stuck. I had talked with everyone, all the doors were now closed and there was nothing else I could do. Well, take a glass from one of the tables, but beside that, nothing to do. It was by pure accident that I moved behind a table next to the group with Yvette and the others and discovered that you can actually listen to their conversations.

And Laura is super discreet about it

Not that the conversation is that interesting, as it is just Dr. Carter being a peacock about how he discovered the dagger, but the conversation ends when Yvette decides to leave the group, probably bored to death. Immediately after, we can listen to the conversation the four are having. About Yvette and how everyone of them would shag her. Cool, I guess.

Let me sum up how the rest of the act goes. Laura gets close to a group, listen to their conversation and then the people moves around, forming new groups in any of the three screens. These are the conversations I managed to listen to:
  • Yvette and O’Reily: Yvette wants to shag O’Reily. Badly. 
  • O’Reily and Tut: Interrogation about the burglary. Nothing interesting I think. 
  • Najeer and the countess: The countess affirms that the dagger was stolen by a group of Egyptian worshippers of Ra. Seems nonsense to be honest, but this is a Sierra game after all. 
  • Ziggy and the countess: They talk about some kind of deal but as Laura is immediately spotted, they quickly shut up. 
  • Ziggy and Yvette: Ziggy claims to know Yvette… intimately. But she plays the “I don’t know what you are talking about” card. 
  • Yvette and Dr. Carrington: Sexual innuendo. Boy is this girl being sold as a sex bomb. 
  • O’Reily and Ziggy: O’Reily being O’Reily with Ziggy. But he can defend himself. 

And tonight, playing the role of Fifi, Yvette Delacroix. What’s with these games and french women?

Here I made a stop to ask Ziggy about Yvette and I got a new response. Apparently she was a streetworker before getting this job. I try to ask other people about new topics I didn’t have the chance to talk about but to no avail. Let’s continue our peeping tour:
  • Yvette, Tut and Najeer: More sexual innuendo. I’m betting Yvette shags no less than four members of the male cast. Probably also at least one of the female ones. 
  • Yvette, Dr. Myklos and the countess: Now, this one is more interesting. Apparently the countess married the late president of the museum just one month after meeting him in an offshore casino, and the poor fellow lasted only two months after that. He probably suspected something as the countess states that there is a problem with the inheritance because the poor man died in the process of changing his will. 
  • Yvette and Dr. Carter: Guess what? 

Although we now have an appointment. At 3AM (who works so late the night after a party?) in Yvette’s office. Wherever that is.
  • Dr. Carter and Tut: “The dagger should be at Egypt”, “The dagger belongs to me”, blablabla you know the drill. The only interesting tidbit is that the dagger was stolen but there are no signs of the robbery. As if the case was simply opened and the dagger taken. An inside job? 
  • Yvette and Dorian… Wait? What? Dorian? I can hardly understand the crook and the detective being here, but the stevedore? Man, this club sucks. No upper east side party this is. And guess what? This is another opportunity for Yvette to throw some more innuendo around. 

I am guessing your union card was enough for the chief of security...

Well, well, well. Mr. Dorian has some explaining to do. At least he is obviously out of place, because with the tuxedo he is wearing some working boots. He approaches Laura and takes her outside to talk. And here I was thinking it had been a while since the last time I saved and I was being taken outside, where no prying eyes could see us and none around could hear a woman’s scream in the middle of the night… But all in vain. Dorian just wants to explain who he really is…

Is that mistletoe?

He is… STEVE DORIAN. Yeah, big reveal. He is a hard-working stevedore by day, and a crime fighter by night, patrolling the streets of New York, not allowing any criminal escape the sight of… TUXEDO MASK!!. Or maybe he is just a stevedore by day and a aspiring artists by night. Cool story, bro. And you say that you have spent all your saving renting a tuxedo to meet Laura here and that’s why you are wearing boots? Because you had no more money to rent some shoes? My girl Laura and I can smell fishy from a mile away. We won’t fall for this love-interest wannabe with dubious intentions. Right, Laura? Laura? What are you doing?

Must be mistletoe. Definitely.

At least someone is having fun at the party. When we get inside again, there is none of the important characters around anymore, but the gate north of the main hall is now accessible. Not very interesting, but accessible. This is an exhibition about dinosaurs but there is nothing we can do here. Trying to go left from this room leads to another encounter with the teleporting security chief, so we are obliged to go right. This leads to another room with more dinosaurs and nothing to do.

There are two exits from this room: north and left. Going north leads to a dead end that has two interesting things. The first one is a friking talking tyrannosaurus rex. It doesn’t say anything remotely useful but it is impressive for 1926 nonetheless. The other is a dinosaur bone exposed in the open without a case. You know, a precious 65 million years or more old bone that could be taken by any kleptomaniac aspiring reporter that happens to visit the museum after closing hours.

I expected this. Was disappointed.

Exiting left leads to a medieval exhibit with armours and tapices. I notice two things here. The first one is that Laura can hide behind a tapice. I wait a while hidden but nothing seems to happen so I guess that will be useful later on. The other is that I can close the door I came from and bar it. There will be blood. Or at least a chase scene.

Going south from here we reach the hall of life mask, human faces. A girl could be no one here. But a girl has shivers remembering how boring that part of the books is so a girl prefers to leave as quickly as possible. Going back and north of the medieval exhibit takes us to a hallway with a very old door which barely reads employees only and that is closed. So I kept going north to reach the egyptian exhibit.

The room contains a mummy, a model of one of the pyramids, several murals and the case where the dagger was stolen from. I decided to investigate the case but as soon as you touch it, Laura drops the case and it shatters. Well, at least I had examined it with the magnifying glasses before, although there were no fingerprints nor signs of forced entry, as Tut stated.

Never wiser words were spoken

Going left leads to the end of the exhibit with some sarcophaguses and… wait… is that blood on the floor? There is an ankh with the initials “P.S.” covered in blood in the floor. Tut can be seen in several screenshot wearing an ankh, and those are his initials so I am pretty sure this is his. Next to it, there is a footprint of a high-heeled woman shoe. That should be Yvette’s, but there was no description of each women’s shoes so who knows.

With the blood being so close to the coffins, there is just one thing left to do. Opening the rightmost coffin shows me what I was looking for. A corpse. Although not the one I expected. But first, let’s take a look at laura’s reaction, who by this point in her short life has already seen more gruesome deaths than Jack the Ripper in his whole career.

Her hair even grew longer. That’s true dedication to the acting

But to be honest, the corpse’s expression is even better

Holy dagger, Batman! Someone killed the penguin!

Dr. Carter has kicked the bucket. Good riddance I say. We can now examine the body, so time to put our detective skills to the test. It seems like he died from a stab to the chest. Ok, let’s pack it, I cracked the case. Na, just kidding, but there is not that much else to do here. It seems like the dagger is one of the fakes, as it has the inscription. The only useful thing I could find was a notebook in his pocket. Although the last sheet has been torn, there are traces in the previous one, so I guess I will have to find a pencil. Shouldn’t be difficult for a reporter. Apart from that, there is nothing more.

And with that we advance the clock to 8.15 PM. O’Reily takes his sweet time but finally arrives at the scene of the crime, asks Laura if he has seen the murderer and lets us go. Seriously, how did this man make it to detective?. In any case, this wraps up this chapter.

I feel like I have to apologize for this long post. I am trying to cover any potential clue and what I find could be interesting in the future so you can follow my train of thought, but this chapter has just been an exposition bomb and at this point I am still kind of confused about who is who and what is that they do, at least their public faces. I also feel like I must be missing something again, as I have the feeling I have just been trolling around with no real purpose and no agency, hitting the key points by merely luck. In any case, just let me know if you think I should be brief with the descriptions of the dialogue and the potential clues. See you next time, when we try to uncover who killed Dr. Carter, who robbed the dagger and who Yvette is going to hunt next.

Session Time: 1h 30m
Total Time: 3h 40m

Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There’s a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read it here before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no points will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. Please...try not to spoil any part of the game for me...unless I really obviously need the help...or I specifically request assistance. In this instance, I've not made any requests for assistance. Thanks!

Lure of the Temptress: Save the Girl . . . BE the Girl!

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by Alex


Since gender-bending is all the rage these days (though David Bowie was doing it forty years ago), have I got the post for you.

But first, let’s take stock of where Diermot is in his quest to rid Turnvale of the wicked sorceress Selena:
  • Captured while on mission with the king 
  • Escaped from prison
  • Discovered rebellion lead by Luthern the blacksmith 
  • Learned that the Goewin, the apothecary, had been kidnapped 
  • Found Grub, fellow leader of the resistance 
  • Learned that the magician Taidgh had been arrested, but that something in his house may help 

So essentially the first main quest of the game (that is, after escaping from the dungeons), is to rescue Goewin, whom we learned is being held at the Town Hall.

Which is guarded by a Skorl I cannot get past.


There were some other quests in between the points listed above, but the point is—and this is why I’m reiterating them—I actually find myself enjoying Lure of the Temptress’ approach to puzzles. My earlier complaints notwithstanding (and it looks like I’m not the only one experiencing pathfinding issues, though this seems to be more of an issue related to the ScummVM emulator), now that I have more time with the game under my belt, understand the interface and what the developers were trying to do . . . I kind of like it. Commenter Ruy San, who also enjoyed it, described the game as“a nice middlepoint between Sierra and Lucasarts,” and I have to say his assessment is spot on . . . and seems to be intentional on the part of the developers.

But back to the pathfinding . . . look at this screenshot! It’s insane.



Okay, enough background. Here’s how I managed to rescue Goewin from the clutches of Selena. But let me tell you, there was much flailing around at first before the pieces fell into place.

Like I mentioned at the end of the last post, I went around asking everyone about Taidgh. No one had any useful information, and although Grub had given Diermot a lockpick, he apparently had no skills. So in addition to talking to everyone, I tried using every inventory object on every character. The only thing that worked is that Luthern drank the potent liquor in Diermot’s flask that Nellie had given him in thanks for returning her jewel, which was actually made out of paste.

Yeah . . . I just typed that sentence. You have to love adventure games.




Dang, Luthern! You need to get out more!

So now Diermot has an empty flask. I find I can fill it with water from the well at the castle wall, but something bugs me about this. I reload just in case I dead-ended myself. Maybe I need to give the liquor to Luthern later . . . or maybe I need to use it for something else. Still, an empty flask would be helpful, seeing as how the bottle Diermot had shattered in his escape from the dungeons.

Maybe I’m overthinking this. Adventure games will do that to you.

Among other things, I did manage to sneak into the monastery or whatever it is on Blackfriars’ Row by hanging out near the door until one of the monks opened it up. I was . . . underwhelmed.


Every once in a while a monk comes in and tells you that Diermot is interrupting his meditation and that he doesn’t belong there. The only thing I can interact with is the book and, well . . .


I have to say, that’s a pretty funny little gag.

Interesting, but I’m no closer to getting into Taidgh’s house.

So I think back to the manual which was, remember, written by Ratpouch. Something in there tickles my memory . . . in explaining the game’s approach to giving other characters complex commands, Ratpouch uses “giving Ratpouch the sewerage and making him drink the sewerage” as an example. A gross one, but it made me think of the sewerage coming out of the drain Diermot and Ratpouch escaped from. Maybe I need the sewerage?

Bereft of any other ideas, I head back to the drain where Diermot and Ratpouch first embarked on their journey through Turnvale, and guess who I found stuck like a dumb-dumb between screens?


That’s right! Mr. Ratpouch himself!

As an aside, what the hell is a rat pouch? A pouch made of rats? A pouch in which one carries rats? Did Ratpouch get his name by . . . gulp . . . eating rats? Like his stomach is the “rat pouch”?

I . . . need to stop thinking about this so much.

So regarding this issue, commenter Laukku mentioned that he faced a similar issue with Ratpouch getting hung up in the tavern, but that he would find me eventually. Again, this appears to be an emulator issue. BUT, as you can see from the screenshot above, finding the little guy gave me an idea: Diermot might not be handy with a lockpick, but perhaps Ratpouch is!

I “Give” Ratpouch the lockpick, which he accepts. I then “Tell” him to “go to The Market Place” and “Unlock” the “Door.”







And he does! Ratpouch actually gets there before Diermot, so the door is already unlocked, but I want to see it for myself so I reload, find Ratpouch, give him the lockpick and tell him to go to The Market Place, and wait. When I’m there, I give the command to unlock the door.


Alright! Taidgh’s home is open!



Inside is an Alchemist’s apparatus with an oil burner, as described in the diary, and a tap. I futz around with things, but . . .

Oh no . . .
Not again!

That’s right: Although adventure gamers are, to paraphrase commenter Voltgloss’ words, all about OPENING doors, not CLOSING them, the simple solution here is to, once Diermot is in the house, close the damn door! Now I can see what’s going on with the apparatus.


I light the oil burner with the tinderbox, and, although the in-game description makes no mention whatsoever of there actually BEING anything in the burner, a strange mixture starts making its way through the tubing to come out into the flask at the other end of the apparatus.


This end is where the tap is, allowing Diermot to empty the mixture—presumably the potion that let Taidgth change his shape into that of Selena as described in the diary—and save Gowein!

This is really cool puzzle design, actually, and I especially enjoy how the obvious answer—bribing the guard—isn’t what needs to be done. Let’s guzzle this potion and . . .

Oh, wait . . .

The flask is . . . full.

And Diermot can’t just . . . drink the liquor himself or, you know, dump it on the ground.

I have to go and . . . give it to Luthern so he can swig it down.

Bottoms up, Luthern.

Remember what I said about good puzzle design? I have to put an asterisk there, because this is really silly. It’s not quite approaching Sierra levels of moon logic (to be fair, that should be Roberta Williams levels of moon logic), but it’s toeing the line.

I mean, who in their right mind would think that for someone who desperately needs an empty flask to save someone from the clutches of an evil sorceress and her brutal Skorl minions, and who already has a full flask, that the only way to empty said flask would be to give it to a very thirsty (and sweaty) blacksmith.

I mean, it’s just


Anyway, off I went to feed Luthern’s alcohol habit, bring the empty flask back, get a few drops of the red potion, guzzle it down, and voila!


Diermot has a perfect disguise!

The citizens of Turnvale have some . . . interesting reactions.




But the only important thing is that Diermot can get into the Town Hall.




With just a few words to the Skorl, Goewin is free, cleared of all charges per Diermot-as-Selena’s decree.

So here’s where Lure of the Temptress drops the ball in, say, a way that a Quest for Glory game would not. I go back to Luthern, but Diermot makes no mention of the fact that he just rescued Goewin. It’s not a big deal, but it’s a bit silly.

Goewin goes back to her shop as though she hadn’t just escaped a terrible fate. And Diermot is still under the guise of Selena, so Goewin is less-than helpful.




Interestingly, Goewin’s voice makes Diermot’s enchantment shimmer. I had been wondering how to get rid of this disguise. As Diermot can’t talk to Goewin again here, I just walked off-screen and then back into the shop, and it wore off in a poof.

Diermot gets to talk to Goewin now, and falls madly, irreparably in love.



But the first quest is over! Goewin is safe! Let’s see what Luthern has for us next!



Yeah . . . Luthern’s great plans for ridding Turnvale of Selena is to strike symbolic gestures. Scrawling “Selena out!” on the Town Hall sign is what got Goewin arrested and Wulf arrested and tortured to death in the first place. It’s pretty funny, actually, that this is Luthern’s method of resistance, keeping with the game’s relatively light tone. I also like how Luthern discusses this with Diermot with a Skorl right there, as you can see in the screenshot.

Anyway, this opens a new dialogue option when Diermot talks to the various inhabitants of Turnvale: How do we get rid of Selena? And who happens to walk on by but Mallin? And he has another request of Diermot: to return a book to Morkus.


When Diermot asks why Mallin can’t bring it himself, Mallin responds, “I’m being watched! You can’t trust anyone in Turnvale.”

Sounds ominous. Morkus, if you recall, was the guy who sold Goewin out to Selena in the first place. But I don’t know if I can trust Mallin either . . . not that the book is particularly incriminating right now, written in an elegant but indecipherable language.

Anyway, this is the first step in Diermot’s second quest: get rid of Selena. We’ll see how this goes, and if Ratpouch will be of any help yet again.

Inventory: Broken glass, knife, tinderbox, flask of water, book, diary, 6 groats

Session Time: 1 hour, 30 minutes
Total Time: 3 hours, 55 minutes

Missed Classic: Infidel - Walk Like an Egyptian

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Written by Joe Pranevich



It’s our special Zork Marathon Anniversary Week! We’re giving the regular reviewers the week off so that we can quickly sprint to the end of Infocom’s 1983. I had a dim hope that I might be able to start Sorcerer too, but that will likely be a bit much. With luck, we’ll get Infidel defeated before doing a special 1983 wrap-up and then a bonus post. It should be fun and I’ll just hope there are no unexpected distractions that blow-up the schedule.

Last week, I started Infidel and crossed the first major hurdle by discovering the location of a long lost pyramid. This was after my character pissed off his work crew so much that they left him for dead in the desert heat, but let’s put that in the past. Immediately after entering the pyramid, I fell to my death down a set of particularly steep stairs. We’re just getting started and I am looking forward to seeing how the game progresses. Since I died last time going north, I start this week by igniting my torch and heading east.

A maze? Or something else?

The east staircase from the “Chamber of Ra” leads me wrapped around to the eastern edge of a cube-shaped room. I explore around and find several similar rooms. I initially suspect it is a maze, but I’m not sure since there are only eight rooms and all the exits appear to be straightforward. On the west side, we have another stairwell back up to the top of the pyramid so that accounts for two of the four exits already. Exploring the whole place, I find some hieroglyphics in the center room that I cannot read; it ends with “to <something> to the Queen” which isn’t helpful. Since the ASCII art is multi-line, I don’t have an easy way to cut and paste them here for your perusal.

The center room on the southern edge has something more helpful: a three-by-three array of bricks labeled with increasing numbers of dots like “<.>”, “<:>”, “<:.>”, etc. Those look to be symbols for numbers! I can take out the bricks and put them back in again, even re-order them, but there are no clues given as I play around. I assume I’ll have to arrange the numbers in a certain way to do something, but I’ll have to explore further before I can work it out. I also noticed that there is no way into the southeast corner of the “cube” and I suspect the panel has something to do with that.


How do you represent these in ASCII?

Back at the Chamber of Ra, there’s only one more way to go: south. That makes the game feel more linear than I was expecting, but that’s not necessarily a problem. Those stairs descend onto a landing, more hieroglyphics, and then open out into a large “Barge Chamber”. The only text I can make out is “queen”, “to”, and “and” so if these are supposed to be clues then I need to figure out a trick soon.

The barge area is several “rooms” across with an Egyptian boat fully encased in the middle. There’s an exit to the north which I ignore for now. I have no idea if this was actual Egyptian practice, but being buried with boats is not completely uncommon in prehistory with Sutton Hoo, a Norse burial, being one of the most famous in the UK. (It was also in the news during 1983; could Mike Berlyn have been inspired by the viking ship to add one here? Who knows!) A quick check of Wikipedia shows that Egyptians also buried people with boats so it might be a common prehistoric practice.


Something like this?

I cross a gangplank to board the barge and find that it’s mast has a symbol on it (“/!\”). The barge has two anterooms, one each to the east and west. In the west, I find a scroll that I cannot read while the east has a ladder down into the still-intact hold of the ship. While down below, I discover that the mast isn’t quite what it appears to be: it can be dislodged, although I have to remove a small shim first. Why would I remove the mast? I have absolutely no idea. When I try to remove the mast, the game helpfully tells me that I need to drop everything first. I do so and die immediately: dropping the torch onto a wooden boat is a bad idea. On my next restore, I realize that I can prop up my torch in a knothole in the wall. Once I do so, I can remove the mast and even carry it around! So much for the game embracing inventory realism. I have no idea why I would carry a mast around, but I am sure it will come in handy before too long.


Of course, our temple is underground.

North of the barge is a long sloping passage that-- we are told-- leads out of the pyramid into another buried structure. I’m not sure how we can know this since one twisty passage looks pretty much like any other, but that’s fine. The new structure appears to be a temple. Just inside is the body of a dead adventurer-- although I have no idea how he got in without the cube. I half expected a Zork reference, but to my relief he is carrying around neither a Elvish sword nor a brass lantern. When I search his body, I do find a ring on his finger which I happily take. I am just about to put it on when I examine it to discover tiny needles on the inside of the band: it’s a poisoned ring! I pocket it for later. (I admit it: I did save my game and put it on just to see what happened. Yes, it does kill you after a few turns.)

Other than the adventurer’s body and the ring, the whole complete appears to contain only two chalices: a gold one in a western room and a silver one in an eastern one. I try swapping them, putting water in them, and various other things but nothing happens. At this point, I am stuck as I have explored everywhere that I can find. If I’m going to make any further progress on the game, I’m going to have to solve some puzzles.


Not quite the Rosetta Stone...

If this were a Zork game, I’d have a half-dozen rooms marked on my map as places that might need further investigation. In this game, not so much. I have the mysterious cube maze, the deadly northern stairway, and the chalices in the temple and that is pretty much it. Instead, I’m going to have to spend some time dealing with the game’s most unusual puzzle: the hieroglyphics.

I’ve been taking screenshots as I explore and at this point I have several rooms worth of inscriptions plus the scroll from the barge that I cannot read. We know from the simple dictionary that the ASCII-art hieroglyphics are a simple word substitution and, judging from the numbers, at least some of the symbols can be worked out from context. To that end, I set to solve it the way any modern computer professional would: with a spreadsheet. I take each of the messages that I have found so far and put each individual “hieroglyph” in a separate cell. I tie that back to a “vlookup()” on another sheet where I put my guesses. The whole thing takes only a few minutes to set up and a bit longer to transcribe all of the glyphs so far.

Once I have it together, it solves very little. Other than the numbers, which I already guessed at, there are no other terms that I can infer just by having more context. Even so, this may have been enough: I notice for the first time that-- mixed in with text I cannot read-- there are three numbers on the barge scroll! I take that back to the cube room and pull out the cubes with the matching numbers (“one”, “three”, and “five”). That works! When those three bricks are removed, the secret passage opens up leading to the ninth room. My excitement quickly turns to frustration as the newly opened passage is a dead end at a strange plaster (not rock) wall. I transcribe a few more hieroglyphs that are there but this has, at least for now, been a waste of time.


Hail to the sun God! He is the fun god! Ra! Ra! Ra!

Frustrated again, the only potential puzzle that I know of is the northern exit from the Chamber of Ra. The instant death there might just be a cheap trick, but when I look closely at the passage, I am able to see the drop-off. Actually, this just strikes me as stupid now because I can see the ledge and yet my character just happily walks off it when I try to get by. It took me most of an hour of this stupidity to remember that I had a rope in my backpack-- a sad aspect of having this “realistic” inventory system. Once I remembered that, I was inspired to try a few things and I discovered that I could tie the rope to the altar, throw the rope down the hole, and climb (explicitly) down the rope. That gets me through! I am frustrated that anything less resulted in our death, but at least I know now. Is this an indirect reference to the rope puzzle in Dungeon? I am not sure. It could be that all rope puzzles look a bit alike.

Climbing down the rope takes me to a strange puzzle area with a statue in the middle of four hallways, annoyingly northeast, northwest, southeast, and southwest. There is also a “golden cluster” at the base of the statue which I take. At the end of each of the four hallways is a door, halfway open. As I walk towards each, the door closes while the one behind me in the opposite hall opens all the way. It’s a weight puzzle! I try dropping some items at either end, but that doesn’t do the trick. I try pushing the statue and that just causes it to fall and break. Oops! But that is a blessing in disguise as I can now push the statue (and separately carry its severed head) to one end of the hall to enter the door at the opposite end. Repeat that process four times and I can explore each of the four halls. Those all lead to individual rooms dedicated to four Egyptian gods, plus more gem clusters which I take:
  • Northwest - Nephthys - Diamond 
  • Northeast - Selkis - Ruby
  • Southwest - Isis - Emerald
  • Southeast - Neith - Opal
I do not know why these gods would be associated with specific gems but there is also a simple hieroglyph in each room ranging from “@” to “@@@@”. I assume that these are related either to the names of the gods, maybe their position in the Egyptian pantheon?

As I take my loot back up to the Chamber of Ra, I’m at a dead end again. 240 points out of 400 is pretty good, but I am missing something to let me advance further. The plaster wall seems to be my best bet, but where is the puzzle that opens it?


Mapping this game is very tricky.

Some scattered notes:
  • I neglected to mention it, but I am no longer prompted to eat and drink inside the pyramid. That was a feature from outside but for no explained reason, I no longer need to do either. That’s good because returning to the surface to get river water every few turns would get bothersome.
  • In contrast, keeping the torch lit is becoming a problem. It only stays lit for a while before it sputters out. If that happens and I’m away from the top, I die. The trick is to return to the entrance when it starts to get low, extinguish the torch, put more oil on it, and light it with a match. I have 15 matches left so there is an inherent time limit to the game, even without food and water problems. 
  • To prevent running out of matches, I also replayed the whole pyramid sequence faster to get back up to where I am now. One nice touch is that you can’t do the cube room puzzle until you get the scroll; it’s still the same combination, but it doesn’t work until you know it “in game”.
  • The gold chalice is surprisingly heavy while the silver one is light. The latter also has a line on the inside of the cup. Why? I have no idea.
Now, back to beating my head (literally) against a plaster wall.

Inventory: knapsack, ancient map, inspection sticker, matchbook, cigarette pack, canteen (with water), rope, broken lock, shovel, pickaxe, navigation box, torch (lit), mast, jade ring, gold cluster, diamond cluster, jade cluster, emerald cluster (Not all items carried at once and some in knapsack.)

Time played: 3 hr 25 min
Total time: 4 hr 15min

Missed Classic: Infidel - Won! (Lost!?) and Final Rating

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Written by Joe Pranevich



A few days ago, I took my first deep dive into Infidel’s hidden pyramid. Powered by a flaming torch and a sense of narcissistic optimism, I discovered a long-buried burial barge, a hidden underground temple containing two chalices, a cube maze with a hidden door, and an Indiana Jones-style weight puzzle to recover four gem clusters. Thus far, after a disappointing start, I am coming to enjoy the game. Mike Berlyn has a good handle on puzzles and has managed to keep the game grounded in a sense of realism. The hieroglyphics have been fun to puzzle through, though a bit inscrutable. More importantly, they have been just understandable enough, with effort, that I could advance through a puzzle or two.

I am reluctant to admit this, but the solution to my “plaster wall” problem was embarrassingly simple: I just had to destroy the wall with my axe. I had avoided this solution in large part because no real archeologist would deliberately destroy priceless artifacts like that, but it appears to be the only way to advance. At least in my mind, I could imagine myself cataloging each of the rooms as I came to them, carefully labeling where I found this treasure or that. But take an ace to a wall? Not really how I’d approach it. It was bad enough that we broke the statue last time, but at least that was an accident...

Destroying priceless artifacts for fun!

If you enjoyed destroying that plaster wall, I have a surprise for you: it’s a two-for-one sale! Just beyond that wall was a short hallway followed by another plaster wall. This second one has some hieroglyphics on it, plus two niches, one to each side of the door. I see the symbol for “mast” in the text (although I can’t make out too much more), so I straddle the mast across the hall by putting the ends in the niches. That works! I think I know where this puzzle is going, so I climb onto the mast before taking the axe to this second piece of priceless history. I was right! As soon as I broke open the wall, a torrent of sand came out and quickly causes the floor to collapse under its weight. I find myself standing on the beam across the hall with a seemingly bottomless pit right below me. I feel especially clever for figuring this out from the text, even as a bottomless pit stretches the realism a bit. I half expect to see a nasty little dwarf run by any second! I try to tie the rope to the mast to see how far the pit goes, but the game tells me not to bother. Okay, then. Should I give Mr. Berlyn credit for guessing I would try that? Or demerits for not putting anything to see down there?

I step through the hole in the wall into a large antechamber, the “Chamber of Eternal Royalty”. The area is three rooms from north to south with my makeshift door roughly in the middle. In both the north and south ends of the room, there are sealed doorways. I design to tackle the northern one first. That door has some more hieroglyphics on it (also containing the “mast” symbol), as well as a “timber lintel” above the door. I had to Google to learn what a “lintel” was and it’s apparently a beam across the top of a door. Since I know the mast is involved somehow, so I experiment and discover that it is exactly the right height to wedge the mast under the doorframe. (Of course, I had to run back to collect the mast from the other hallway. The game lets me reach in and get it without falling into the pit.) Because this game enjoys destroying priceless history, I have to destroy the seals with my axe to open the door. When I do, a large weight comes down but is stopped by the mast. Another puzzle solved with basic carpentry!


This is a lintel, in case you were curious.

Just beyond that door is the burial chamber! Not only is there a huge sarcophagus in the room (the queen, I presume), it has a number of other features that I suspect will be essential to getting it open: two small recesses on the cover, four statues of the same gods that we saw in the X-shared room, plus the statues’ arms are blocking the lid from opening. I play around with these things but cannot find anything to do yet so I head east into an adjoining room.

That room is called the “Treasury” and it has a table with several “discs” protruding from the surface. One of the discs has a scarab on it. Playing around with them, I believe they are some sort of hidden scale: when I press on them, they go up and down. The discs look to be exactly the right size for the gold and silver chalices I found earlier. I actually had to restore and replay this section since I left them upstairs in the Chamber of Ra. There is no way to get the mast out of the doorframe without dying or getting stuck so I expect I’ll have to make sure I do this part last. I put the two chalices on the discs and pick up the scarab, only to die when the ceiling collapses. Did I do them in the wrong order? I try them the other way and the same thing happens. What am I missing? I look more carefully and notice that you can see if the discs are above the table, below the table, or completely flush with it. Since the gold chalice is heavier than the silver one, they never balance. The trick I find is to fill the silver chalice with the water from our canteen. I seem to have exactly enough water for this and it fills it nicely up to the line. With that done, I can safely remove the scarab and head back to the sarcophagus chamber.


I thought a scarab was an ornate dagger. Oops. 

My newly collected scarab fits nicely in one of the recesses on the sarcophagus lid. Unfortunately, I do not have anything else that fits in the other recess, no any clear way to open the sarcophagus. I suppose I could try my axe again, but solving the puzzle seems like the best approach. The four gem clusters, matching the four gods on the lid, seemed like a good guess but they don’t do anything either. I give up here to puzzle out the door at the southern end of the antechamber.

The southern door kills me immediately: as soon as I open it, the left and right walls come together and crush me like an archeologist sandwich. I have to restore back again to before solving the northern room to have the mast available and yes, I can put it between the walls to block me from being crushed. Is that a record for number of puzzles solved by a single object? It feels like it must be. With that, I can enter the so-called “Chamber of Rebirth”. This one has a bunch of Egyptian decorations surrounding a slab with four circular holes. I check through my inventory and find that the gem clusters fit the holes nicely but I had to find the right order. I had to experiment to get it since it wasn’t the order that we found them in the X-shaped room: diamond, ruby, opal, then emerald. Once done, the slab opens to reveal a spatula (really!) and a book. Examining the spatula gives me the hint that it is used to open books and turn pages so I do as it asks and use it to read the book. I think it says to put the scarab in the big hole and the book in the small hole-- probably back in the Burial Room.


True fact: ancient Egyptians used spatulas.

I grab the book and leave the southern annex, taking my mast after I pass. The walls around the door slam shut, just like before, but this time I’m not caught in the middle. I play through the northern room and the treasury again to get the scarab. Just like instructed, I put the scarab and the book in the correct recesses on the sarcophagus and I hear a click! I try to lift the cover, but the four statues on the corners are still blocking the lid. Now, I can turn then but when I get to the fourth one, they all snap back again. It’s clear I need to use the right order and this is where the strange “@” symbols in the X-room come into play: you put them in the order of the count of at-symbols. With that done, statues release the lid and I can finally open the cover...

And I die. The walls collapses, burying us. “You will never get out of this pyramid alive.”

But it’s not another puzzle to be solved, it’s actually the end. I “Won!” with 400 out of 400 possible points. The best ending in this game is that you die.

MOTHER F***KER.


I’m glad no one spoiled me on this, but seriously: F**K YOU, Infocom.

Time played: 1 hr 25 min
Total time: 5 hr 40 min



Several days pass…

I needed to step away for a bit after playing this game, to try to find something intelligent to say about a game that bent expectations to the breaking point. I also hope that some time will let me give a fair score, even if the game didn’t play fair with us. I can appreciate that there was an artistic point being made here and that Mike Berlyn was trying to push the envelope of adventure games. I can appreciate it, but I still cannot like it.

Perhaps the nicest way to put it is that this game might be a “dark mirror” of Zork (and to a lesser extent, Planetfall). Mike Berlyn was clearly playing with Zork tropes and references: the initial aboveground section until you find the location of a secret treasure-filled labyrinth is straight from Zork I. The town of “El Menhir” references a location in Zork II. For all that exploring and stealing the treasures of the Great Underground Empire was a good thing in those games, this game paints them as quest by a narcissistic thrill-seeker who wants nothing more than to loot the treasures of an ancient world for his own glory. Enchanter painted the Zork protagonist as a comical figure, but here he’s an anti-hero or even a straight-up villain. The final death scene may even be a response to Planetfall's optimistic closing moments, replacing the unexpected survival of a key character with an equally unexpected death of the main character. Planetfall ended with a surprise sign of relief, while Infidel ended with a surprise cry of anguish... and, in my case, vulgarity.

While I can appreciate that there’s some artistry here, it doesn’t work as a game. We might remember that we started off playing as an asshole (I was upset about it at the time), but by the time we were several hours in, I had become fully engrossed in the puzzles and had internalized the character. He wasn’t that abusive treasure-seeker that deserved his comeuppance, he was me. I worked with him through trap after trap, decoded dozens of ASCII art hieroglyphics, and was trilled each time I managed to progress a bit farther in the game. To then have the opening narrative pulled back at the last moment like this, throwing out all of the attachment that I had gained for the character… it was a big “f**k you”.

Let’s figure out a final rating.


I pity the fool… who plays this game unspoiled.

Final Rating

Puzzles and Solvability - Ignoring the story and ending for a moment, the puzzles in this game are fairly well done, difficult but not too difficult. Impressively, they managed to stay very “real world” with Raiders of the Lost Ark-style traps that are mostly within the realm of possibility. There was no magic here, no grues, or anything that couldn’t have fit in the real world (except perhaps one bottomless pit) and so building puzzles was much harder. Add to that the metagame with the hieroglyphics and you have some difficult but fun entertainment. My score: 5.

Interface and Inventory - There isn’t much I can add to what I’ve said many times about the Infocom parser. This game avoided many of the glitches that I found in Enchanter, although the knapsack was an unwelcome addition with extra turns spent just manipulating inventory. And while I was complimenting the realism a moment ago, I did spent the majority of the game carrying around a seven-foot long ship’s mast with no apparent difficulty. My score: 4.

Story and Setting - Where to begin? The story was the least effective part of this game, serving as an unwelcome distraction at the beginning and a colossal middle-finger at the end. There was no progression with this character. The setting was done well with many Egyptian allusions which I suspect made more sense to someone steeped in Egyptian history and myths, but I do not know how much faith I can put into someone’s research when they can’t even bother to look up the correct location of the Nile on a map. My score: 2.



Ancient Egyptian for "Burma Shave"


Sound and Graphics - The perpetual use of ASCII art for the hieroglyphics, and to have those be an integral part of the meta-puzzle of the game, was great. Not quite a point, but worthy of a round-up pity point. My score: 1.

Environment and Atmosphere - Meandering through an ancient pyramid and temple was a ton of fun and a lot of effort was put into getting the details right, or at least believable. While the game was empty, devoid of even a grue to keep me company, that fit to the setting that Mike Berlyn was trying to build. For all that I did not like the story, the environment that he built was well-done. I just wish that it had contributed more to the story. My score: 5.

Dialog and Acting - The prose was, as usual, fantastic and Mike Berlyn’s style came out in the room descriptions and puzzles. The initial section where my character seemed to be going insane (remember the strange response when I tried to look into a hole?) was pretty much forgotten about by the time we made it into the pyramid, which is a good thing. Without any NPCs to interact with, I don’t think I can go too high here. My score: 4.

Final tally: (5+4+2+1+5+4)/.6 = 35! I am going to use my discretion points to subtract 2 points because no matter how technically good it was, I cannot recommend a game that screws with its players like this. The ending soiled what could have been an otherwise great addition to the Infocom canon. Even more so than Suspended, this is the first Infocom game that I came out disliking. I want to love Mr. Berlyn’s games, but I suspect they are not for me.



With a score of 33, that places this game just above Suspended and Zork II. I would recommend either of those games before this one, but it’s really just the framing and ending that makes me so down on this game. Ignoring that, this is a competent adventure with a great code breaking meta-puzzle, something that I’ve never seen in an adventure game before. Maybe taken in that light, this game doesn’t suck as much. I can’t wait to see what Mike Berlyn does when he has a decent framing. The third time will be a charm, right?

The average guess was 36 which implies that most readers either expected me to like this more or were unaware of the ending. (I was really hoping for the surprise to be aliens.) Ilmari managed to guess the lowest score and get it right on the nose. Congratulations! You’ll have to give yourselves CAPs after the next mainline game.

Up next for the Zork Marathon, I’m going to take a cold shower and try to convince myself to keep playing. I hope the first set of Infocom gamebooks will be a palate cleanser because I’m fried after this one.

Zork Marathon: 1983 Books & Yearly Wrap-Up

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Written by Joe Pranevich



It’s been twelve months since we started this increasingly misnamed “Zork Marathon” and I thought it was worth a few minutes to pause and look back on the games we played and look forward on the games ahead. This year, we’ve more or less taken the story of Infocom from the exploration phase at MIT with Dungeon/mainframe Zork, through the formation of the company, up through the first ten games-- five years worth of history. Behind the scenes, the cancer that would eventually destroy Infocom was already growing: Cornerstone, the business product that some hoped would bring them respectability was well underway. We have plenty of time and a few more games before we get to that grim milestone.

Before we can look back, we have one more detail in 1983 to close out on: the first three Zork books. Since almost the beginning, Infocom had been creative with its marketing and its packaging. Most of the games had “feelies” and custom boxes-- Starcross literally rolled off the shelves due to its flying saucer-shaped boxes. But as Enchanter was launching, someone on the team thought that doing a gamebook tie-in would be a good idea. This would allow them to market the new game while also indirectly promoting the still-hot previous Zork titles. They could have gone to an established writer (as they would later), but instead they reached out to jack-of-all-traces Steve Meretzky, fresh from launching Planetfall. The results are somewhat surprising...

Our two heroes admiring a freshly created diamond.

In short: they don’t suck. In fact, all three books show a love and reverence for the Zork universe that I wasn’t expecting. On top of that, they are simply fun to read from cover to cover. There are things I do not like-- more on that in a bit-- and things that don’t work, but they are surprisingly competent for first-time gamebooks written by a first-time author as an advertising tie-in. That seems almost amazing.

Before I jump into the plots of each book, I should explain the form. These three books are essentially “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style books set in the Zork universe. They are not “gamebooks” in the same sense of the Fighting Fantasy ones that we talked about before (see: Seas of Blood) as they do not have RPG elements, rather you just read the story and make decisions every few pages as to what to do next. If you want to attack the dragon, you could turn to page five. Want to flee? Try page seven. In that way, a reader can experience the book many different times to find many endings. Most of these books had only a single “good” ending and making the correct choices while reading is essential to getting to the end. At this point in the 1980s, this style of book was booming and many publishers were starting their own series. The format itself was only a few years old, invented by Edward Packard and first published in 1976. (His first such book, The Adventures of You on Sugarcane Island, is fairly difficult to find today but Amazon has some copies used.) For my part, I liked Mr. Packard’s books but fell in love with Joe Dever’s “Lone Wolf” series which would launch in 1984. Infocom jumped on this bandwagon with Tor Books, a science fiction and fantasy brand that remains hugely relevant today. In fact, if anyone knows anyone there that can help me write for their website, I would be much obliged…



The three books written by Mr. Meretzky in 1983 are The Forces of Krill, The Malifestro Quest, and The Cavern of Doom. All three included illustrations, but I have only been able to track down the illustrators for the first and third: Paul van Munching and Dell Harris. The second book’s illustrations are uncredited; I assume it was either a joint effort or a Tor staff illustrator. Mr. van Munching has been difficult to track down and I found only a few other books around 1983-1984 that he is credited with illustrating. Mr. Harris however has remained a prominent science fiction and fantasy illustrator for the past thirty years, making frequent stops to sell his art at conventions and on eBay. You can find his work at Atomic Dog Studio. I’ve sent him a feeler to see if he has any recollections of working on this book or if he met any of the Infocom crew but I have not received a response at press time. Each of the books had a separate cover illustrator, but as before only the first and third are credited to someone named “Parks”. Despite my best effort, I have been unable to track down who that may have been.

As the Infocom books are well out of print, I have included samples of the illustrations from all three volumes here. If anyone at Tor or Activision ask us to take them down, we will, but I feel they are worth showing to a broader audience. In many cases, these were the first official illustrations of locations and objects within the Zork universe. I’ll try not to over-do it.


A map from the first book is remarkably Zork-like.

The three books follow the adventures of June and Bill, a brother-sister adventuring pair that stumbled onto an “ancient sword of elvish workmanship” near their school. When they picked up the weapon, they were transported to the Kingdom of Zork where they were recognized immediately as Juranda and Biovtar, two noble children who had disappeared two hundred years earlier. In their first adventure, we learn that their uncle Syovar was unable to prevent the fall of the Great Underground Empire at the hand of the Warlock Krill. At this point in the games, the history of the GUE is only sketched out at key points and I do not know how or if the backstory from the books will be used there. It is also not explained why no one seems particularly surprised to see children reappear that had been kidnapped two centuries earlier, nor why everyone fails to notice that they seem unfamiliar with the kingdom they are supposedly from! It’s a kids’ book so I’ll try not to think too hard about it. To save the kingdom, we need to find our (extremely old) uncle to give him the sword, plus find three palantirs that can be used to defeat Krill.

When I said earlier that the series is a love letter to Zork, that is most apparent here. The two children explore a surprisingly accurate rendition of the dungeon in Zork I, finding numerous locations and in-jokes. The palantirs, of course, are from Zork II but that is forgivable. Along the way, we visit the white house, find a resistance movement in the coal mine, battle a troll, explore Flood Control Dam #3, and even take the slide from the mine down to the cellar of the white house. Once we return the three palantirs to the trophy case (of course!), the final battle with Krill begins. The good guys win and we are given the magical Ring of Zork to return anytime we like. That beats two middle schoolers trying to hide an elvish sword at their house…


Rafting down the waterfall is still not advised.


Lizard cultists like in Enchanter storm the white house!

The first book also does a great job doing what the most recent game failed to do: integrate the Enchanter and Zork game worlds. Here for the first time, Krill (the antagonist of Enchanter) is made an integral part of the mythology of the first three games. Some aspects don’t quite work, but it could just be me. For example, I’m still not entirely clear on the time period. I always imagined that Zork took place in a world sort of like the 1950s: we had a house with a working postal service, a giant Flood Control Dam, basic robotics, modern-style banks, etc. It’s still a fantasy universe with dragons and trolls, but it’s fantasy overlaid on top of a somewhat modern world. These books take that idea and chuck it, instead giving is knights and wizards and a much more generic fantasy tone even as they use many of the same locations. It feels disjointed. I also was thrown off by having the white house be owned by someone named “Ellron” since that was just a bit too close to “Elrond” (from the Lord of the Rings) for my taste.

The second and third books continue the children's’ adventures. In the second, the siblings have dreams of their uncle Syovar being suspended above a pit of snakes. They use their magic ring to come to Zork and find he has been kidnapped but a different wizard, Malifestro. This time, the pair are joined by Fred and Max, two cowardly elves that become recurring characters. Along the way to his lair in the Flathead Mountains, the group stumbles on yet more Zork references: a cyclops that is afraid of Odysseus! A stiletto-wielding thief! It turns out that their uncle is already dead, killed by the wizard, but that’s okay since they discover a different demon who grants them a wish (ala Zork II) that he be resurrected. As soon as he is, the uncle goes out and kills Malifestro for us. It’s great fun but many of the locations used for Malifestro’s castle were straight out of Enchanter, making me wonder if the antagonists of the first two books were swapped at the last moment. I especially loved a “cheating page” that I found where you can get negative points and a bad ending if you claim to have an item that doesn’t exist.


Enchanter’s endless stair


A wishing demon. 

The final book breaks the mold… somewhat. This time, the siblings are brought to Zork by accident but discover that their elvish friends, Fred and Max, have been lost while exploring a newly unearthed (if that is the right term) section of the Great Underground Empire. We also learn that our Uncle Syovar had a wife and a son back during the fading days of the empire and his son was lost and has never been seen again. Of course, we travel to the forbidden part of the Empire, rescue Fred and Max, and even manage to find Syovar’s son, trapped for decades in a hauntingly disfigured body that we promptly cure. This is the most exploration-focused of the three books and it once again makes some references to the series, but they are mostly more subtle than before since we’re supposed to be entering new territory.

And that’s it for the books! We’ll return to one more “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style book in 1984 and then a few novels in subsequent years. For a company that was so fixated on the idea of “interactive fiction”, it’s strange that they would try their hand at the less interactive kind of fiction. It’s a shame we didn’t get a Meretzky book like this on Planetfall or any of the other series.


It’s important to keep the Tomb of the Flatheads clean. 


Here There Be Dragons

Looking Back

It’s hard to believe, but in the last year we’ve done twenty-nine Zork-related posts, on average one every other week. This is in addition to other related games such as Leather Goddesses and Oo-topos which were not counted as official “marathon” posts. If you are coming late to this party, here’s a convenient index of all of the games we have played so far:
  1. Dungeon- (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8
  2. Zork I - (1)
  3. Zork II - (1) (2)
  4. Deadline - (Ilmari) (Joe)
  5. Zork III - (1) (2)
  6. Starcross - (1) (2) (3)
  7. Suspended - (1)
  8. The Witness - (Ilmari) (Joe)
  9. Planetfall - (1) (2) (3)
  10. Enchanter - (1) (2) (3) (4)
  11. Infidel- (1) (2) (3)
I also want to call out a few non-awards:
  • Most Commented Game - Dungeon with 132 comments
  • Least Commented Game - Zork I with a measly 4 comments
  • Most Commented Single Post - Zork II’s “Introduction” post with 31 comments
  • Longest Game - Dungeon at 36.4 hours
  • Shortest Game - Zork I at 5.5 hours
  • Most Viewed Post - Dungeon Post #6 - “Joe vs the Volcano”
In general, Dungeon dominated many of the statistics because it was by far the longest game that we have played so far. By extension, Zork I, which was barely more than an abridged and simplified version of that, got the short shrift. The well-known games seemed to have attracted more viewers and comments overall. This is part of the challenge of doing every game in a series; not every game can be a classic. In terms of score, my highest rated game so far has been Planetfall with 42 points. (The Witness has 50 points, but was reviewed by Ilmari separate from the marathon.) The lowest is Suspended with 31 points-- Infocom is surprisingly consistent.


Lots of adventuring to come!

Looking Forward
So, what’s next? At the current rate, I might be able to complete ten more games in the next twelve months-- ending at Trinity from 1985. It’ll be a stretch, but it’s a good goal because that will bring us to the end of the “Infocom” era. All games after that point will be under Activision’s leadership. Depending on how things go and where we are in the main-line reviews, I might revert to only playing the remaining Zork games at that point. Speaking of which, Zork becomes a declining focus for Infocom over the next two years: six of the last ten games were tangentially connected to Zork, but only three of the next ten are.

Our next games in the marathon will be:
  • Sorcerer by Steve Meretzky
  • Seastalker by Stu Galley and Jim Lawrence
  • Cutthroats by Mike Berlyn
  • Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky
  • Suspect by Dave Lebling
  • Wishbringer by Brian Moriarty
  • A Mind Forever Voyaging by Steve Meretzky
  • Spellbreaker by Dave Lebling
  • Ballyhoo by Jeff O'Neill
  • Trinity by Brian Moriarty

Those Frobozz guys think of everything!

Of those, I am most excited to see three new Meretzky games on the list. He’s been the author that I have been most consistently impressed with so far; I’m especially curious how he’ll handle the Zork universe when he tackles Sorcerer. Will anything from his books be making the transition? But with that, I’m going to wish you well. We’ll have one more special bonus post from me in a few days, then I promise we’re back to our regularly scheduled reviews while I get to work on Sorcerer and prep for Sherlock Holmes.

(PS: I was totally serious about Tor.com, by the way. It’s one of the few websites that I visit absolutely every day.)




Save the “Lost Treasures of Infocom”! The current iOS game is 32-bit and Activision has not yet committed to upgrading it to support newer phones. This collection features 25 text adventures including two which were not in the original “Lost Treasures” sets: Zork: Undiscovered Underground and Leather Goddesses. It’s a must-have for any Infocom fan but it’s about to fall off the planet again. There’s a change.org petition here to ask Activision to upgrade the app to support iOS 11. I have no idea if it will help, but please consider signing. It probably can’t hurt.

Missed Classic: Adventure - Won!

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Written by Joe Pranevich

You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building.

After the “fun” that was Infidel, I needed a palate-cleanser. I’ve started looking at Sorcerer already-- and if all goes well, you’ll have the Intro post to that game next week-- but I needed a break. So I hope you will not mind that I use the occasion of my birthday to talk about an important game in my life: Adventure. Ilmari already did a fantastic review of this game (as Missed Classic #2 back in 2014), but he didn’t win in his playthrough. That provides me the flimsiest of excuse to talk about it again, but I’m going to take that excuse!

This story started for me at a different birthday 31 years ago: my mother had given me a copy of Software Country’s Golden Oldies collection for the Commodore 64. Included in that, plus other public domain masterpieces such as Pong and Eliza, was the original 380-point version of Adventure. It may or may not have been the first adventure game I played, but it was certainly the first adventure that I owned legally. I didn’t beat it then-- I still remember my babysitter telling me that no one ever had-- but it remained on my mind. For years, I would pick up the game and play a bit of it. Three years ago, I made a concerted effort to win… but failed. It was time to change that.



Ilmari and others have already retold the history of this game, so I will just recap it in brief: in 1976, Will Crowther created an incomplete prototype of a game which he called Adventure. Although unfinished, it traveled around the nascent ARPANET and inspired some passionate fans. (This original version was rediscovered in 2007 and is playable but not winnable. We may take a deeper look at it at some point in the future.) One such fan was Don Woods who expanded and “completed” the original game-- in order to locate Mr. Crowther to ask his permission and to get the code, he emailed crowther@ every domain name on the internet at that time. Talk about dedication!) This new collaboration would eclipse the original in every way and is now the defacto Adventure.

I cannot possibly narrate this game since I have played so much of it for so long. I am not starting fresh-- in fact prior to picking up the game this time, I already knew how to get the majority of the treasures. The key remaining mysteries were that I never finished mapping the “All Alike” maze or found the Pirate’s treasure. I also had been unable to defeat the dragon before, but some comment along the way spoiled me to that solution. (I wouldn’t have gotten it anyway, I suspect.) I even had to find my old notes because I forgot much of the game so it was a rediscovery.

Introduction to the “Golden Oldies” edition of Adventure

Even though I cannot narrate the game straight through, and I do not want to step on Ilmari’s review from a few years back, I’d like to take some time to talk about some of the parts and the puzzles. This will help to explain the issues that I had trouble with and how I finally solved the game (with a hint).

The opening of the game is classic, but I think that “classic-ness” hides just how amazing it actually is. Adventure sets the ground rules and introduces players to most of the tricks they will need all within the first several rooms. Let’s run it through:
  • We begin the game outside near a building, a well-house for a large spring. The introduction and hints tell us that we need to locate the cave and return treasure to the building, so we explore there first. Inside we find all the supplies that we need: a lamp, a set of keys, some food, and a bottle of water. 
  • Not far from the building is our first miniature maze, the forest. Only two rooms, but it gives us a flavor of what we might encounter later. 
  • When we reach the grate, we have an easy non-puzzle: just unlock it with the keys. By the time we reach here, we should be familiar with the interface and come to understand that we’ll use our inventory objects as tools. We probably have also worked out that we’re going to need to map carefully as going west doesn’t always mean you can return east. 
  • Inside the cave is a mostly-linear set of introductory rooms ending at the Hall of the Mountain King, our first “real” puzzle. Along the way, we’ve found everything we need to solve it: a bird, a cage, and a rod with a rusty star on the end. If we’re especially clever, we’ve noticed the magic word “xyzzy” on the wall in the Debris Room and found that it takes us back to the building. That’s not very useful-- it saves only seven steps-- but it clues us in to look for similar magic further in the cave. 
  • We might also have found the nugget and realized that we cannot take it up the stairs with us. No way out but forward, right? 
  • We know from the introduction that the bird can scare away the snake and that the snake is afraid of the rod. Even though we found the rod first, we have to drop it to collect the bird. Once we do that, we can unleash the bird’s small and feathery fury on the shame. It’s easy and “all in the manual”, but it unlocks the rest of the game for further exploration. Instead of a linear path, we have exits in “all” directions. Time to play! 

The “Cobbles Crawl” (Lynn Brucker, © Cave Research Foundation 2005)

And that, I honestly feel, is a perfect start to the very first adventure ever. In only a handful of rooms and barely more than one puzzle, we know the mechanics of the game and have found our first treasures. It seems easy because there were so many games that came after this, but I can’t think of many that spelled out their own ground rules so well or so quickly, bringing you into the game world and setting you loose. It’s no wonder that mainframe Zork copied the opening recipe almost entirely, including the little forest maze.

I am going to pause here and tell you to please check out ‘Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original "Adventure" in Code and in Kentucky’ by Dennis G. Jerz. Not only is it a fantastic look at the game Adventure, it also features some amazing photographs of locations from the game. I’m not going to link more than this one here because it is much more important for you to go and check out the photos on their site. They really are fantastic.

After the initial section is over, the real heart of the game begins: a massive open-world exploration of more than a hundred confusing rooms and passages. Just mapping what you can access immediately takes forever and there seems to be little rhyme or reason. Like we saw with mainframe Zork, there are a few discrete areas that constitute puzzles on their own, but most of the game is spread quite far around. That means that objects you need for solutions are often far removed from the puzzles that need them. The “trident” that you use to open the clam, for example, is a minimum of ten rooms from the destination. Proximity provides no clues so the game is even more difficult to solve than it might first seem.


Hall of Mists and Long Hall

From here, I’m going to describe more of the puzzles and areas as we come to the end. This isn’t exactly how I solved it since I am decades removed from coming into this game fresh. Instead, consider this something of a simplified description of a line of attack that I followed. Even if you know the answers, the game isn’t necessarily winnable. Many times, I ended up stuck and had to restore because I got myself into a battle with the annoying little dwarves that I just couldn’t win. (The first time to meet them, they throw an axe and run. Every other time, you have to throw the axe back at them with a probability of success. Sometimes you kill them first and sometimes they kill you, but nothing stops an exploration run in its tracks faster than having an army of little dwarves throwing knives at you.

Just to the west and above the Hall of the Mountain King is the first area that some adventurous travelers are likely to explore, where I ended up when I picked up the game again this year. Really clever travelers could have figured out how to get here even before beating the snake, by “waving” the rusty rod at a fissure to create a crystal bridge, but I suspect most new gamers came here by heading west from the snake, pocketing the lovely gold coins on the ground, and exploring.

The main feature of this area is two mazes: the maze of passages All Alike and the maze of passages All Different. Mapping the “all different” maze isn’t terribly difficult if you take good notes with the only secret being a hidden vending machine containing replacement batteries for your brass lantern. The “All Alike” maze is much more difficult to map-- and I only successfully mapped it myself for the first time recently. The maze is huge: 14 “alike” rooms, 11 “dead ends”, and a special “Brink of Pit” room that offers an exit. It’s impossible to get enough items to drop one everywhere but thankfully the “dead ends” are all simple and only connect to a single other room. Once you work that out, you can get away with mapping the rest easily enough.

In addition to diamonds lying near the fissure, the big reward in this section is one you are unlikely to be able to access first. In fact, this is one of the treasures that I missed until just this play through: the pirate’s chest. At random during the game, a pirate will come and steal all your treasure; he tells you that he is taking you to his lair in the maze. Only after that can you find his room in the “All Alike” maze and not only recover any items that you lost, but also pick up his treasure chest. I had a nasty habit of reloading the game every time he stole a treasure from me and so I never found this until well after I had mapped the mazes.

What is a pirate doing underground anyway?

Two Pit Room

Southwest of the Hall of the Mountain King is the next key area, the Two Pit Room and its environs. You can’t really say that this is “next” because you could go just about anywhere else, but I’ll bring it up second because this is where we can explore most profitably without hitting any dead ends that we have to come back to later.

The two pits that the name refers to are an eastern pit containing oil and a western one containing a talking plant right out of Little Shop of Horrors. (The 1986 film that you are thinking of hadn’t come out yet but Crowther and Woods may have been familiar with the original 1960 film.) If you feed the plant water, it grows. The key here is that we have to do it in two trips, coming back when we have located a second source of water. There are more than a few in the labyrinth of tunnels, but a reservoir just to the west and north was my supply of choice. Once you have fed the plant twice, he is large enough that we can climb up to access a new area containing a giant’s golden eggs (from Jack and the Beanstalk) and a rusty iron door. The eggs and their associated magic words (“fee fie foe foo”) will be useful in a later puzzle, but for now we can go back and fetch some oil from the other pit to open the door. Just beyond that is a waterfall and a trident which will also become useful later.

The final curiosity of this section of the maze is trivial: we find a velvet pillow in one room east of the pits and a precious and fragile vase just to the north. We have to return the treasure, of course, but we are clumsy adventurers and would smash the vase if we put it down in the hard ground. Once we find the pillow, we can put it down first and save the vase from an unexpectedly hard landing.

A troll under a bridge.

Troll Bridge

Just beyond and a bit southwest of where we retrieved the trident is the Troll Bridge, another area that is very tricky. I solved this last time I played but I completely forgot and didn’t remember what the solution was until I consulted my old notes. It’s a good one!

When you enter this area, you have to cross a bridge guarded by a troll. He’ll be more than happy to let you through… for a fee. We have to give up one of our treasures! The first time, I used the coins here thinking that it was a choice between the batteries and the troll, but I later learned that the coins are a treasure too. The solution is in a very subtle magic word: “fee fie foe foo”. This incantation doesn’t transport us anywhere, rather it transports the golden eggs back to the giant’s room. How the heck could you discover this by accident? I have no idea. In fact, I have no idea how I figured it out at all since all I had was a note in my map that I did. You’d think I’d remember… In any event, if you give the troll the eggs, we can then fetch them back after we’re done with the section and therefore not lose a treasure. Fantastic!

On the other side of the bridge is an area near a volcano, notable for containing a set of spices (another treasure) and a chained up bear. If we were smart enough to bring the food and some keys along, we can feed the bear to make it friendly and then unchain him with the keys. The golden chain is another treasure. We have to pay another toll on our way back but rather than lose the spices, you can “throw” the bear at the troll to defeat him. I’ve read a number of people complain about this puzzle and while it’s not great, the use of the “throw” verb is in the troll’s dialog and we had to use it earlier to toss him the eggs. Not ideal and it could have been clearer, but I figured it out easily enough. With that, we can defeat the troll to claim two more prizes before using the giant’s magic words to return the lost eggs. We’re making progress!

Don’t trust secondary entrances...

Y2 and Below

Just a bit north of the Hall of the Mountain King is the “Y2” room where we find a rock labeled “Y2” and we hear a voice saying “plugh”. Of course, this is another one of the famous magic words of Adventure and saying that here causes us to warp back and forth to the building. This not only will provide a more convenient exit (I almost always use this one rather than the “xyzzy” one), it also provides us a way out that will allow us to transport the gold nugget that we found in the beginning of the game.

Just below there is a segment in the southeast corner of the maze that contains one of the simpler-but-still-fun puzzles of the game: the clam. We find a series of four sloping rooms where we can vaguely smell seawater. In the third room, we also discover a giant clam but it is closed and we can’t seem to open it. I solved this one by accident: if you try to open it normally, you cannot succeed, but if you have the trident that we discovered, the clam opens easily and a pearl rolls out. It will roll down the ramp and end up two rooms away, but it is easy to head down and pick it up without further difficulty. Other than the connection between the trident (representing Poseidon?) and the clam (representing Venus?), I’m not sure how you’d know to use the items together, but I eventually came across it.

This corner also is home to the “Witt’s End” maze and its Anteroom outside, as well as one of the very unfair puzzles of the game. In the anteroom is a copy of Spelunker Today magazine. It’s not a treasure and we gain nothing by bringing it back to the building; instead, we have to drop the magazine off in Witt’s End. I’m not sure if there is any way to know to do this and the original players supposedly solved this by using a debugger to search through the code. It’s become so well-known now that I knew to do it, but I doubt I could have figured it out on my own-- or even known there was something to find out.

“Witt’s End”, incidentally, is a maze in name only. It’s a single room (which we can easily see when we drop the magazine) and we can’t leave in any direction. If we stay stuck long enough, we will be offered a hint not to go west. I always solved this by going east until I randomly get out but I believe you can do so using other directions as well. This is one of a handful of rooms where random chance plays too much of a role in exploration. (The “Bedquilt” room is another example.) Still, knowing what to do, it’s pretty easy.

This is a plover.

Plover Room

Just to the north of the Two Pit area is a set of puzzles that I had not defeated before but which I conquered now for the first time: the “plover” room. I had learned at some point that “plover” was one of the famous magic words of Adventure, so I cannot claim to have had no help.

Our first interaction with the “plover” area will be when we discover a narrow fissure that is just barely wide enough for us to squeeze through if we drop all of our items. (A second narrow fissure further south cannot be traveled through and I suspect I conflated the two locations mentally.) It sounds like the Coal Mine puzzle from Zork, right? Except here, there is a dim light on the other side and we pick up an emerald. We can even bring the emerald back through the fissure with us! Puzzle solved? Not exactly. There’s also a room to the northeast that is dark and we have no light source. To explore it, we’re going to have to solve the puzzle.

The trick here is that “plover” is a magic word. When used here, it takes us to Y2. Of course, it is very dark so we only hear the voice saying “plugh” to know where we are. I didn’t notice immediately, but it seems that the “plover” magic word has two functions: not only does it take us between the plover room and Y2, it also moves the emerald back to the plover room. (Since I had found the giant’s magic words earlier, I knew that some magic words could affect items but even so this side-effect is obscure and unexpected.) The trick is that we have to do it in two parts: first, using “plover” to access the room while we still have a light source. That lets us into the room just to the northeast to snag a bronze pyramid, another treasure. We can then return that to the building and then head to the plover room the long way to grab the emerald. Since it’s small, we CAN take it back through the fissure with us. This was a fun set of interconnected puzzles, especially as I didn’t realize at first what was making the emerald spring back to its starting position.

Strangely easy to defeat.

The Final Puzzles

If you have been following along, that’s fourteen treasures so far with only one left to go: a rug being guarded by a dragon just southeast of the Hall of the Mountain King. Solving this at first appears to be difficult as none of the weapons we’ve found so far will work. Unfortunately, it turns out to be a cheap joke: we just type “kill dragon” and the narrator asks if we mean with our bear hands. We say “yes” and the dragon is dead. It’s dumb.

But with that, we have defeated the game. Of course, this rapid talking through of the puzzles misses one huge point: this all takes a long time. The map is confusing and while I’ve described areas as being discrete, that’s far from the truth. Getting this far without running out of light is hard even when using the batteries for extra time, it is nigh impossible to do it without using them. The final puzzle in the main game then is the most difficult and requires the most luck: solving the game before the lantern dies the first time.

In my final playthrough, this is the path that I used. I was careful to turn off the lamp each time I returned to the surface because even wasting those turns was too many. Every time I made a mistake or spent too much time getting killed by a dwarf, I restored.
  • I started out by doing the basics up to defeating the snake. 
  • I grabbed the silver just north of the Hall of the Mountain King and then used “plover” to grab the platinum pyramid. I also nabbed the coins. (3 treasures done) 
  • Next, I headed back in empty-handed to grab the emerald before swinging by the vase and pillow on my way out. I also quickly threw the magazine into Witt’s End. The dwarf appeared for the first time during this segment and so I retrieved his axe. (5 treasures done) 
  • After that, I made a big plunge in grabbing the food, keys, and bottle. I killed the dragon for the rug then headed to the Two Pit room to get the eggs. I ran back to get some oil so that I could open the door leading to the trident. Before heading back up, I also crossed the troll bridge (using the eggs as the toll) to get the spices and chain. For good measure, I grabbed the pearl on the way out. (10 treasures done) 
  • I dived back in to get the jewelry, nugget, and retrieve the eggs again when the pirate finally arrived. I immediately headed to the “All Alike” maze to retrieve what I had lost plus pick up his chest. I didn’t have enough inventory space to get the diamonds on my way out so I had to take a very small trip back in to retrieve them. (15 treasures done) 

At this point, even with as much optimization as I could manage, my lamp is getting dim. What am I supposed to do now? I know from reputation that there is an endgame, but not sure how to get there. After a bit, I get a message that the cave is closing and that I need to exit through the “Main Office”, but I do not have enough battery power to make it out. Eventually, I realize-- and this took me far too long-- that even if I run out of battery power I can still stand in a room and “look” without dying. I can’t see anything but I can use up turns. And, after a few of those, the cave “closes” and I am teleported to the endgame.

Shhh! The dwarves are resting.

The Endgame

First, an admission: I didn’t realize that we needed to just wait a certain about of turns before the endgame started. I assumed that I needed to exit via the grate but I never had enough turns to make it back. I took a hint to discover that I needed to wait. It turned out not to be my final hint.

We find ourselves in a new set of two rooms, essentially “backstage” of the game. It’s a great surprise and a breakdown of the fourth wall. We find dozens of sleeping dwarves, piles of rods with rusty stars on them, cheerful birds and snakes, etc. It’s surprisingly cool, more so because I managed to stay unspoiled about this ending for the last thirty years. We can pick up some of the items in the room but there doesn’t appear to be anything we can do with them. The trick, which I worked out on my own, was in the one object in the room not in the game: there are rods with rusty marks on one end, not rusty stars. I guessed correctly that the solution would involve those, but unfortunately I had to take one more hint:

The new rods are dynamite. If we drop them in the northeast end of the room, head to the other side, then type “blast” then we blow a hole in the wall and the game ends. We won! I never would have figured that out on my own. Not only was it unclear (and unexpected) that the new rods were sticks of dynamite, there’s no way to guess that we would have to use that word to even where to put the charges. It’s an unfair puzzle, undoubtedly the least fair of the game. Whereas Zork’s endgame was a master class in fantastic puzzle design, this one took the most obscure puzzle of the game and made it worse. It’s a disappointing ending, but I am glad I won!

There is no higher rating. Woohoo!

Final Rating

Ilmari already rated this game and his rating will remain our official score for the game, but I wanted to see how it would have scored if I had done it. Let’s see:

Puzzles and Solvability - This game deserves so much credit for being the “first”, but I feel I need to grade it based on how it sits next to its descendants rather than its contemporaries. To that end, I’m very torn. The opening sequence is one of the best openings of an adventure game, especially one that had to define and explain itself to first-time players. That said, too many of the puzzles are too obscure and the final endgame is disappointing. I want to make it a two, but I have to round up a bit just because the emerald puzzle was nice. My score: 3.

Interface and Inventory - Again, it’s difficult to understate how much this game set the standard for adventures to come, but I have to be fair from a historical perspective. While the two-word parser is limiting (so limiting that the author cheats a bit, for example with the dragon), it actually never gets too far in the way as the interface does a good job of guessing the objects for our verbs. The descriptions are well done and we never particularly are at a loss for what we are viewing. That said, the descriptions are not quite verbose enough and we can’t get any deeper descriptions of objects. I am torn between a two and a three, but... My score: 2.

Story and Setting - Is there a story here? I’m not sure. The ending sort-of makes you a part of the story in a neat way, but you spend most of the game just knowing you need to wander around and collect treasure. That said, the setting is fantastic especially as it is based on a real place. The twisty and confusing passages work here much better than they did in Zork where they only existed to be complicated. My score: 3.

You can really visit the cave! (Or, at least, a bit of it.)

Sound and Graphics - Naturally, the first text adventure game has no graphics. My score: 0.

Environment and Atmosphere - Exploring the cave is great fun, even if you don’t try to recover all the treasures. The atmosphere is well-done and the surprising endgame would have been fantastic ten years later. I especially loved the mirror canyon, two rooms where you can see someone gesturing at you across a cavern. Only when you explored further can you find yourself at the bottom of the canyon, looking up at a gigantic mirror hanging from the ceiling. It’s great stuff. Perhaps the best aspect of this game. My score: 6.

Dialog and Acting - The prose is serviceable but very terse with only a handful of room descriptions that even border on literary. It’s fine, but just fine. My score: 3.

Tally that up to get (3+2+3+0+6+3)/.6 = 28. I’ll give it +3 for inventing our genre for a total score of 31. That is a bit lower than Ilmari’s score of 33-- he liked the text and the interface more than I did-- but all in all pretty close. We know there’s a certain amount of variability in these scores and I’m pretty satisfied overall.


From here, I will be heading back into regular Infocom territory for a bit. Thank you for humoring me with this special birthday post. In terms of future Adventure coverage, there are a few versions that might bear further investigation, especially Crowther’s 1976 original (and incomplete) game and Wood’s 1978 (440-point) expansion. There is also no shortage of expansions by other authors over the years. Still, this is the version that I suspect inspired our genre the most and I am glad to finally be able to say that I won. I am especially glad that I won using the version of the game that I played as child. It took me back; thank you!

Up next: Sorcerer.

The Dagger of Amon Ra - The Thirteenth Hour

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By Deimar

Laura Journal Entry #3" What a day. After just arriving and getting a job I have managed to see the lows and highs of this city in a single day. I have even managed to get into a high class fundraiser party in a fancy museum. Sadly, the party ended when I discovered the corpse of the main guest inside a sarcophagus. Well, sadly and lucky for me, as I have a feeling this story will sell a lot of newspapers and there doesn’t seem to be another reporter here. The only caveat to that plan is that somehow I am now trapped with the other guests in the museum and I think I am starting to smell blood in the air”

I didn’t remember it when changing from chapter 1 to chapter 2, but when starting chapter 3 I got a message telling me “Excellent work. Your father would be proud of you”. That is an encouraging message, as I have previously doubted having gathered all the necessary information. I might not be going that bad (although Ilmari has pointed out some things I missed in chapter I). My only question is if that message is always the same or depends upon a hidden score.

Doing the interrogation with everyone listening surely produces wonderful results

In any case, chapter 3 starts with Laura in the main hall, where the fundraiser party was held, waiting for O’Riley and Wolf to finish interrogating all the staff and guests regarding the murder of Dr. Carter. When all of them leave, Laura is approached by a man called Ernie Leach, who tells her that he and Dr. Carrington have the only keys to the museum and that if we want to leave we just have to ask him. He also warns Laura to not get caught downstairs unless she wants to make Wolf go mad(der).

Afterwards, Laura asks O’Riley what have he learnt about the murder but, keeping on character, neither Wolf nor the detective say anything remotely useful. And so, Laura decides to get her hands dirty and solve the murder herself. Hurrah?

Now we regain control of our protagonist and the first thing I noticed is that there are several characters walking through the museum. Specifically, the countess and Dr. Carrington. None of them have anything interesting to say but to provide an alibi for the murder. We will see about that. But for the moment, following the countess leads to the picture gallery, where the only remarkable thing is that there is a picture with a blinking spot. Closer examination with the magnifying glass shows that there is a key inside the paint. How on earth did they manage to encrust a key inside a painting and why is beyond my comprehension at the moment, as is the possibility of releasing it.

There is a key encrusted in the barrel full of gold. You have to have pixel-perfect precision to click on it. Such fun!

The next room contains a sculpture of Rodin’s The Thinker and four exits. Two galleries up north, with the one on the left leading to the paintings we just left, a door on the right and an exit south. I have to say that I get a little loss with the exits available in any given room. Sometimes there is no indication that there can be an exit in one side of the screen, and the only way of discovering if there is one is because the cursor changes to an arrow. But it doesn’t always change. For example, doors are except to that rule, even considering you don’t have to “use” them. And the graphics not always do a good job indicating that a room has an exit.

Anyway, when Laura walks through the room, she hears some voices from behind the door. I tried to spy through it by looking at the door, using it (it was conveniently closed), speak to it… but to no avail. That’s when I had my Scooby Doo moment and thought of using the glass I picked up at the party tables. Surprisingly, it worked. I guess that is going to be this chapter’s eavesdropping and we will be doing plenty of it. The two voices belong to Yvette and Dr. Mykos, who are having a conversation in Yvette’s office, but when things are getting interesting we suddenly can’t hear them anymore. Because reasons. No, really. We can’t hear it because suddenly they decide to whisper.

Yeah, I have a feeling a reporter might be eavesdropping behind the door using a glass as a magnifier so let’s whisper everything we say

Exiting the room via the other gallery takes us to a giant pillar with a very obvious secret door, but I couldn’t open it at the moment. Taking the south route took me to Dr. Myklos’s office. The office is as interesting as the office of a death-obsessed Egyptologist can be. There is a living cobra; some dissected animals; skeletons; a copy of the rosetta stone, although just half the stone, containing the translation of the letters n to z to hieroglyphics, which Laura writes down into her notebook; and a board with an Egyptian text that I can’t translate as I am missing several symbols. I really hope I won’t have to speak with someone forming words with them or translate the board, as it is 2 pages worth of text. It looks tedious. Also, that is a pretty inaccurate representation of the rosetta stone, but I will give it a pass, as I am glad I won’t have to learn ancient greek to play this game.

Get. Off. My. Steve!!

There is also a snake repellent, but when Laura tries to take it, Dr. Myklos appears to get ahead of her and take it. She says that there are a lot of snakes in the basement and that she uses it so she can work downstairs. This “downstairs” seems to me like the place to be, as the characters keep commenting on it. So when she leaves, Laura follows her. In The Thinker’s room she hears a noise coming from the pillar room, but when we go there there is nothing. I went back to the thinkers and started messing with everything as the pillar room is completely devoid of any objects. And voila, the head can be moved to reveal the a passage in the pillar room. We can see some stairs going down and a lamp. With a broken light bulb, mind you. Not everything is going to be easy around here. I suspected the result, but I tried to get down in the dark anyway.

Our intrepid reporter!! Unable to go down some stairs in the dark!!

Well, one step forward, but now I was stuck with basically nothing to go on. I went back and tried to go into Yvette’s office. She wasn’t there anymore and had conveniently left the door open. The first thing that caught my attention was a desktop lamp. Laura couldn’t take the bulb as it was on. After turning it off, it was too hot. It is all complains with this girl. I decided that the best course of action would probably be to do something else and wait for it to cool down. Nothing else seems interesting in the room, although you can play with a paper guillotine.

Leaving through a door to the right leads to Dr. Carrington’s office. But as soon as Laura enters she hears some voices coming from Yvette’s. And guess what, it is Yvette trying to sack Najeer. Although she does mention something interesting. Apparently, she showed Najeer a secret passage in the museum so he could celebrate some ceremonies.

I wish I can meet such a passionate tour guide at some point in my life

After the conversation, it is time to search the office. Looking at the nearby fireplace provided a piece of coal. Just what I was looking for. Watching McGyver has taught me the value of using carbon based substances to reveal hidden texts. And behold, we can finally read whatever was written in Dr. Carter’s notebook. And it is just his schedule for the evening. An appointment with Yvette at 8 in the Egyptian room, another with Tut at 10 at the same place and a final one with Dr. Carrington at 11 in his office. That would mean that the hour of death should be around 8, as there was a blood mark of a woman’s shoe at the scene, and unless Yvette decided to go back, that would mean that the murder took place before their date. That also probably means that Tut’s ankh is a red herring to throw us off the trail of the real murderer, but maybe I am reading too deep in all of this.

Continuing the search, I found a telephone with the line completely cut; a phone book; Dr. Carrington’s schedule for the night (he has an appointment with the countess and Ziggy at 1 AM at the medieval armor display); a communicator; and a desk clock. There is a communicator in each of the offices we have already visited, but none of the other ones seems to work. However, this one has way more buttons than the others, suggesting this is the master one, but I was not able of making it work.

I went back to Yvette’s and now I was able of taking the bulb, which in turn allowed me to repair the lamb over the stairs and go down. I don’t know what I was expecting but it definitely was not a marble hall with a “break in case of emergency” glass. Well, Laura and I are definitely the kind of humans that consider a murder a case of emergency, and a 60 million years old dinosaur bone as good a hammer as anything else way less valuable. The prize for our uncivilized behaviour is an oil lamp. Ok, I guess we will be visiting someplace dark in the future, but at the moment we don’t have any use for it. As I was considering which exit to take, there are two doors here, a ferret appeared. Yeah, a ferret. Go figure. I couldn’t do anything before it disappeared and left me wondering if this was a King Quest V rat saving instance. I might resort to violence if it is.

Taking the door to the north leads to Wolf’s office. To emphasize his role as the weapon obsessed naz.. german, the room is full of weapons hanging from the walls. There are very few items of notice here. The most obvious one is a mousetrap in the middle of the room, with a cable leading to a picture on the wall. Trying to take the cheese used as bait leads to…

Come on! Not even Wile E. Coyote would make such a trap

The rest of the room can also lead to ludicrous deaths, as touching any of the weapons electrocutes Laura. There is a library behind the desk containing all kinds of books on weapons and violence, and the desk has the sempiternum communicator, which is not working. So, a dead end.

Taking the other exit advances the clock to 10.15. The room behind is a storage for… animals kept in murky liquids? It is kind of creepy, with a complete lab for preservation but nothing much else. There are two doors here, one to the east and one north. The east one is Ernie’s office, but he is busy right now taking a close look at Yvette’s Eiffel tower. A tattoo in her tight. This woman is insatiable. This time around however, there is some juicy information. Apparently, Ernie is a gambling addict and is deep in debt with some guy called the icepick. He is doing some fencing jobs for a Big Al, which allows him to avoid the wrath of the icepick. He is not worried about him, in spite of him leaving threatening messages, as Ernie won’t be able to pay if he is killed. However, he confesses that he is quite afraid because this night he has seen something he wasn’t supposed to. And with that, a character introduced 30 minutes ago gets ahead in the race for having stolen the dagger. It actually makes quite sense, as he is the person who could take the dagger without activating any alarms or breaking anything and also be able of leaving the dagger in the gift shop.

I don’t think this is the kind of game where I can join in but… Can I? Please?

The door at the back leads to a storage room where Dr. Myklos is looking for her ferret, Daisy, to feed her. Cool, a quest!. At last!. She kicks us but now I had a suspicion regarding that missing ferret and the cheese in the mouse trap. Before you say anything, I am completely aware that ferrets are carnivorous, but seeing as this is a Sierra game and the cheese is the only piece of food I have seen, it is probably the right answer. After going back to Wolf’s office, I tried a few things with the mousetrap until using the bone did the trick.

By this point I was thinking about nominating the bone as the most useful item in the game, but after waiting for a while for the ferret to appear again in the first room of the basement and wandering around the museum when I got bored, I was reminded again of the true star of the game. The glass. Yvette is at it in her office again, this time showing her Eiffel tower to detective O’Riley, who seems a little… possessive. The kind of guy with trusting issues, access to a gun, and some interesting opinions regarding the morality of taking bribes and looking the other way. Could the detective have murdered Dr. Carter because he found out he was seeing Yvette? Or is he just a sellout?.

No, thank you. I am not that desperate to get in bed with O’Riley. I will wait for your next conquest, Yvette.

I was so enthralled with the story in this part of the museum that I must confess I couldn’t remember how to reach the area where the Egyptian exhibit was. Even to the point of thinking the game was playing with the map and had barred me from accessing that area. So after several embarrassing minutes of wandering around doing nothing I managed to get to the dinosaur exhibit and…

Come on, Laura. Give me your best surprised yet glamorous look!

Murder! Well, kind of. There is a headless body lying in the middle of the room, but the way he died is a bit… strange. Judge yourself:

This one is easy. The giant winged reptile did it!

Detective work proved to be inconclusive. The only details worth mentioning are that the tuxedo is a rent, that the corpse smells of champagne and has stains smelling of turkey. There is also a loose wire hanging from the pterodactyl but at the moment I couldn’t do anything with it. Close examination of the neck provides details about whatever was used to cut it, as it seems its main purpose was not cutting necks. Here immediately I thought of the paper guillotine but that seems a little impractical. The clock advances to 11.15.

I tried to interrogate the wandering characters, mostly Yvette and the countess. Yvette didn’t have anything useful to say, but the countess acted suspicious after being asked about Ziggy, in a way that made me think that was the corpse with the back ache, making the countess the prime suspect for that murder.

Ziggy’s dea… deceas… sleeping with the fis… a fine person?

I started wandering around the museum myself. While exploring the Egyptian exhibit I discovered the body of Dr. Carter was not there anymore, probably moved by the police between trying to see the Eiffel tower and work a bit for a change, and that I had missed the first half of the rosetta stone. Now I was ready to decypher any Egyptian text. However, after checking the board at Dr. Myklos’s and realizing I would have to make the translation myself, I decided against and keep on wandering, to the next murder.

What is with this game and deaths by desiccated animal?

It seems like this time it is Dr. Carrington the one who has bitten the dust. The clock in his desk is now broken at 12.04, suggesting the death was very recent (I have not been commenting on every time passing event). The letters C.P. are written with blood on the desk, and his index finger is covered in the liquid, so it is safe to assume he wrote them. The only person with those initials is Dr. Pippin Carter, but as he is dead and a P.C. and not C.P. I don’t think that’s what Carrington meant.

It was close to 1.00 and the date of Dr. Carrington with the countess and Ziggy. Seeing as two of the three people meeting are probably dead, I was curious as if the countess would appear, but on the way there I met Tut. He didn’t say much, but admitted to having lost his ankh. When I reached the medieval exhibit, I hid behind the tapestry as before and soon enough the time advanced and the countess appeared carrying something huge.

Are you carrying a painting or are you just happy to see me?

After waiting for a while, the countess decided to leave. I think this proves that Ziggy is the dead man in the dinosaur exhibit. But then, why would his killer still appear at the appointment? Does this mean that she doesn’t know about the murder of Dr. Carrington?

I went back to his office to look for more clues about what the appointment could be about, when Tut and Yvette entered her office. She had asked Tut to help move her desktop to cover an ugly red stain. Apparently, he owes her, as she let him in when he was not allowed and for keeping his secret. Yvette seems like a spider in the middle of a web connecting all guests. Anyhow, he cuts himself while moving the desk and both of them leave to Tut’s place. Wherever that is as he is a traveling Egyptologist. At Yvette’s, the guillotine is full of a suspicious red liquid, and after touching it, the blade falls over the desk. However, before I could do any more investigating, I was interrupted by Dr. Myklos who unceremoniously kicked me off the office.

I think Dr. Myklos is onto something here...

She told me Yvette had gone to see Ernie, so I went down there to see if I could pick up any more information. To my surprise, Yvette was not there so it was the perfect opportunity to finally interrogate the handyman. Apparently, we were trapped inside the museum as the keys were missing, so it is not like he had anything better to do. There are only two interesting things in his conversation. The first of them is that detective O’Riley is constantly dropping grape stems everywhere. He is no the first person to mention that, so I take the hint and write it down. The second is that he is a veteran from the Great War and thus doesn’t like Wolf that much. That piece of information is not that interesting, but if you see what he has to say about the other characters, that is quite a monologue.

Yes. Very peaceful at night. If you ignore the tens of people running around, making love, killing each other… Perfect job for a quiet man!

Dr. Myklos is no longer in the back storage room, so we can finally see what’s there. There is a trunk under a table, with an inscription saying it belongs to Dr. Carrington. So finally, after quite a few hours in, we get to see the famous corpse-filled trunk. Sadly, it is locked. Other things of interest in the room are an empty bottle of oil snake and some meat in a freezer. Maybe I was too hasty with the cheese theory. Time to find the ferret. But first, I decided to fill the bottle with some oil in the preservation room.

I started looking for the ferret until I got bored and then started revisiting locations and clicking on everything. At Dr. Carringtons, I discovered that there is a safe behind a picture. After playing with the combination for a while, I realized that it was a 4 digits number, just like the numbers in Carrington’s phone book. I had discarded the list of names and numbers the first time I saw it because it seemed like a practical joke. The first initial of each name spells the word Tribune and there are names like R. Williams and I. Diditt which are obvious puns. But this time there was a name that caught my attention: B. Sayff. And so the safe was opened. Inside was the diary of the previous owner of the museum, the late count. He was very afraid of the countess, as he suspected her of only marrying for his wealth and now trying to get rid of him, with a passing mention to Yvette saying “Yvette fears her too”.

Well, back to wandering every single room again. The prize this time is finding that Ernie’s is empty, which allows our little kleptomaniac to ransack everything not nailed down. Starting with the snake catcher in the floor, something tells me I will be catching snakes rather sooner than later, and a pair of wire cutters. While we are there, Dr. Myklos uses the communicator to tell Ernie to check on VAT 13, as there seems to be a problem. I was expecting another body, but after poking the container with a net Laura retrieves the dagger of Amon Ra, the real one. Hurrah!

I think they are making mutants here. I fully expect wolverine to be in one of these tanks

But now I was again at a loss at what to do next. Back to walking I guess… While passing through the painting gallery, I decided to try to remove the key from the picture with the dagger, which worked quite well. I am surprised the solution to that was so simple. The only thing locked I have found are a door next to the medieval exhibit and the trunk, so it was time to try both of them. It turned to be the trunk, but nothing in a Sierra game can be as easy as just opening something with its key. As soon as it is open, a group of carnivorous beetles gets out and eats Laura. Now I know where The Mummy writers got the idea. I tried several things until I realized the solution had to be the meat (sorry, Daisy). But the window of opportunity is really small so I had to try several times before managing to give them enough food to forget about the skinny reporter. Inside the trunk, the cleaned bones of a man with clear signs of forceful strangulation (is there any other kind of strangulation?) with a watch dedicated to Dr. Carrington III. Meaning that as we suspected, the now deceased Dr. Carrington was an impostor. 1.45. This night is dark and full of terrors.

That diet really works wonder on your figure...

Going back to the thinkers room, Yvette and O’Riley are having an argument, as he knows she has been shagging some other men (if he only knew the truth, that it is ALL other men) and she knows that he had something to do with the burglary of the dagger, as Ziggy told her. Wandering some more around, I finally discovered how to use the communicator at Carrington’s office. There is one button to turn it on and off, another to change the mode from listening to speaking, and one for each room you want to communicate with. This allowed me to listen to some conversations, but it was just Myklos and Wolf getting along and Yvette and O’Riley doing the same. Got to wonder how many conversation have I missed and if I could have listened every time the characters decided to speak low to avoid eavesdropping.

I managed to track the countess and confront her about the pocketwatch. She was terribly upset and tried to take it, but Laura didn’t let her (should be careful now, she could be the next victim). After going back to the stairs to the basement the clock turned 2.00. At Ernie’s I discovered a button on the wall that opened a secret passage at the back storage room. Of course, going inside produced the expected result.

This darkness is more dangerous than in Zork

After turning on the lamp and going in the passage it led me to the Egyptian room. I think this enforces the theory that it was Ernie the one who took the dagger, in spite of the conversation between Yvette and O’Riley. Maybe he was working for the detective, but it had to be Ernie the one who took it from the case. Not that it matters because when reaching the first screen of the dinosaur exhibit we find him death. But first a look at Laura’s expression:

By this point she is so used to it that it gets boring

And now the corpse:

He should join the gymnastic team. Such flexibility!

Looking at the body, Laura finds some animal hair smelling of alcohol and his shoes are damp, which to me suggest he tried to recover the dagger from VAT 13 and after not finding it, whoever he had a meeting with to hand out the dagger was not very happy. 2.15. Laura immediately encounters Wolf and O’Riley at the gallery and tells them about the murderer. Only the last one, as the other corpses must had not been important to her. Wolf naturally gets a little suspicious about the reporter that keeps finding corpses wherever she goes, but that goes nowhere and Act 4 starts.

After having found three consecutive corpses I would also suspect her. I might even jail her, just in case...

I have mixed feelings about this part to be honest. It seems to me like all I have done is wander through the museum and finding things to do by mere chance. However, it is oddly satisfying finding more and more information about these characters and the questions I have regarding the case. Like for example, why cut Ziggy’s head? Where is it? Did Dr. Carted die because he knew too much or because he saw something he wasn’t supposed to? Will Steve turn out to be the bad guy after taking advantage of Laura? Who will visit Yvette’s Eiffel tower next?

Session Time: 1h30m
Total Time: 6h36m

Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There’s a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read it here before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no points will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. Please...try not to spoil any part of the game for me...unless I really obviously need the help...or I specifically request assistance. In this instance, I've not made any requests for assistance. Thanks!

Lure of the Temptress - Twist Away the Gates of Steel

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by Alex



So I got the Weregate open.

I’ll bet you’re wondering, “How did this happen?” Well, today’s your lucky day. We’ll get to that. But first, in order to understand the process and what to make of it in the grand Adventure Gamer tradition, let’s go back to my last post on Lure of the Temptress. Remember when I said that I enjoyed the game’s approach to puzzles?

. . . I actually find myself enjoying Lure of the Temptress’ approach to puzzles. My earlier complaints notwithstanding (and it looks like I’m not the only one experiencing pathfinding issues, though this seems to be more of an issue related to the ScummVM emulator), now that I have more time with the game under my belt, understand the interface and what the developers were trying to do . . . I kind of like it.”

I need to qualify this statement: While I enjoy the game’s approach to puzzles, I cannot say I particularly enjoy the puzzles themselves.

Let me explain.Take a game like Quest for Glory I. After about ten minutes of interacting with the game world, the player is presented with an array of quests, of things to do:
  • Find out what happened to the Baron’s daughter
  • Find out what happened to the Baron’s son
  • Kill or capture the Brigand Leader
  • Kill or capture the Brigand Warlock
  • Find the Healer’s missing ring
  • Find spell components for the healer
  • Find out why the stableman is such a jerk
And these are quests you discover within the first few screens. Better still, the player has agency, the ability to actively go and accomplish these quests. There are things that our nameless hero does himself to get that ring, find that Baronet, capture that Brigand Leader . . . and he can do them in nearly any order. Most adventure titles, graphical and text, are structured in this way, and this is one of the things, in my opinion, that makes the genre so popular.

By contract, Diermot feels like a passive hero at best. There is the overarching quest (get rid of the Temptress), but each individual step is presented in a, thus far, entirely liner fashion which Diermot accomplishes by talking to person A who tells him to go to person B and talk to him or give him object X in order to unlock the next fetch and/or talk quest in the chain. Which is too bad, because there are a bunch of intriguing things about Turnvale that excited me at first blush to explore the game world (What’s up with that monastery? The weird gate? The Town Hall? The Castle? Where’s the missing apothecary? Why are these buildings boarded up? What’s the deal with the goat?!). So yeah, there is a relatively expansive and interesting setting. There’s just not much to do in it.

Until you talk to the proper person, that is.

Keep all of this in mind as you read the chain of events that brought Diermot, Ratpouch, and Goewin to the now-open Weregate.



We left off with Mallin giving Diermot a book to deliver to Morkus over at the Magpie. This allows Diermot to ask the citizens of Turnvale if the book means anything to them. I can also ask people what they think I should do about Selena. Apparently, the book means something to Ratpouch: It’s the Book of Gethryn. Gethryn was apparently an ancient monk who has not been mentioned once in the game or the documentation, and the book contains his teachings and wisdom.

I got some pretty entertaining answers about it, though I wasted a few groat asking useless Gereint the bartender at the Severed Arms for help. The jerk will only talk to you if you buy something from him, and he never offers anything of value. What a guy, right?


To be fair, it is pretty dumb of Diermot, an outsider, to boldly proclaim his plans to
overthrow the sorceress who rules the town he is in to anyone who will listen.

Some facts about the book from Turnvale’s varied and ridiculous populace:
  • Luthern: Can’t read.
  • Catriona: The Book of Gethryn is evil, and will curse all those who speak its blasphemous syllables. But, by her own admission, she could be wrong.
  • Ultar: The barbarian has read it and bemoans that it is “All talk, no action.” And yet, Diermot can’t ask him for a translation . . .
  • Gereint: Expresses annoyed wonder at how Diermot got the book, then quickly states he doesn’t know anything about it, or what it means.
  • Edwina: It looks like a religious book to her. She doesn’t like religion, relying on frog sacrifice instead of prayer to ensure a good harvest. I’ll . . . I’ll stick with the prayer, thanks.
  • Ewan: The shopkeeper identifies the Book of Gethryn as “a little-known collection of handy tips on home improvements.” I identify him as an idiot.

Everybody in this game talks nonsense . . .
  • Grub: The old man gets cranky, complaining that he’s a freelance mystic and not a linguist. You know, as an aside, every single person involved in this so-called resistance to Selena is utterly useless. Except for Ratpouch. Maybe I should just save him and leave this town.
  • Goewin: Doesn’t know the language it’s written in, but sees a symbol that represents dragons. FINALLY! SOMEONE USEFUL!
  • Nellie: Can’t read.
  • Gwyn: The binding is made of human skin, the writing is intelligible, there are no pictures . . .
  • Morkus: Lastly, the guy I’m supposed to give the book to . . . just gets mad at Diermot every time he offers it.


However, once the book was in Diermot’s possession, something changed! That’s right! All of a sudden a notice appeared on the monastery on Blackfriar’s Row. It reads:

“REWARD! A unique hand-crafted terracotta statuette depicting the Temptation of Gethryn will be given to the person returning the book stolen from this house. Apply within.”


Holy cow a quest! It would’ve been more interesting if this had been on the monastery the whole time, creating getting the statue as an objective in the players’ mind, but I digress. The hell with Morkus. I’m giving the book to the monks!


If I can just make it to the damned monastery . . . LOOK AT THIS SCREENSHOT! One-two-three-four-FIVE NPCS BUMPING INTO EACH OTHER AND SPOUTING STUPID DIALOGUE! Virtual Theater can be an Actual Nightmare sometimes.

Seeing the notice also brings up the option for Diermot to ask people about the monks. About the only useful things Diermot gleans are that:
  • They are called the Brotherhood of Gethryn;
  • They have taken a vow never to meddle in the ways of ordinary men,
  • They have “strange beliefs,” such as the world being round;
  • They are said to be wise; and
  • They don’t really speak to the townsfolk, something I can attest is true as the only conversations I’ve been able to have with them are inside of their monastery.
In any event, I experience yet another mild annoyance created by the Virtual Theater mechanic: I go to the monastery and am greeted with this:



I suppose I could wander around town to find a monk, but given that (a) I’ve been hitherto able to speak with them only within the monastery, and (b) I had to wade through five ping-ponging NPCs to make it into the monastery, I decide to just stand and wait.

Eventually the monks come in. And they are more than happy to see have their book back.

The first brother I talk to is named Whelk.


Not quite . . .

Whelk gives Diermot the statuette for his honesty, making me wonder if I missed something in trying to give the book to Morkus . . . or if it was just another red herring, the game seemingly offering multiple quest paths or solutions, but really railroading the player into one.

Yeah, I’m going to go with the latter.

The statuette, according to the in-game description, is a “grotesque” depiction of a “vaguely human-shaped” figure “with limbs of different lengths twisted at impossible angles” with a “hideously ugly and contorted” face. Times like this make me wish that the game’s inventory provided a little picture of each item. Alas.

Statuette in hand, Diermot now has the option to ask Brother Whelk about the strange scent in the air.




I admit it: I laughed.

It turns out Diermot was referring to the smell of incense, not flatus, that pervades the monastery. This was, after all, conveyed in the description upon using the “Look” command from the main menu.

“Oh, that! It’s something Brother Toby brought back from his visit to the barbarians. I still burn it occasionally, for medicinal purposes of course. Here, take some!”

Whelk then gives Diermot a sprig of some dried plant. It’s a good thing I know an apothecary. Maybe I can show this to Goewin and figure out its use. The only other interesting thing Brother Whelk has to say is, in response to Diermot’s question of what to do about Selena, is to find the “Dragon in the caves” which would help defeat the Skorl. Of course, Brother Whelk has no idea how to open the gates to the cave, nor does he mention where the damn caves are. I’m assuming he means the Weregate, since there’s a vaguely dragon-like shape sketched on its doors . . . and that process of elimination leads me to the conclusion that there’s no other place it could be.


Yeah, it’s kind of dragon-esque.

Thanks for the pep talk, bro.

The other monk about town happens to wander in as I’m speaking with Brother Whelk. He just so happens to be the Brother Toby that Brother Whelk alluded to just a few paragraphs up. Brother Toby also suggests that Diermot find the dragon to help defeat Selena. You know, trying to tame a dragon with nothing but a knife, some broken glass, and a sprig of incense doesn’t seem like the best idea, guys.

Ah! But Brother Toby has some—get this—useful information! I should have figured that, of all the dopes wandering around Turnvale like headless monkeys, leave it to the monks to actually have some wisdom:

“If you are brave enough, seek the Dragon. You will need to cast a spell to charm him. The spell is an infusion of three herbs: Houndstooth, Cowbane and Elecampane. When you wake the dragon, use the infusion quickly! They are bad-tempered creatures at the best of times.”

Another fetch quest. Oh boy. This one seems like it might actually require Diermot to go do something other than talk to people, right? Like go and search for the ingredients to this potion like when the hero in the aforementioned Quest for Glory I has to find the components for the healer’s dispel potion in order to—

Wait a minute. Goewin is an apothecary, so she’ll probably have the herbs in stock. I’ll just go and . . . talk to her.

I ask Brother Toby where the ingredients can be found:


You and me both, Brother. You and me both.

Anyway, now Diermot can ask people how to get to the dragon. The only useful people are Ultar, who tells Diermot that he has to get past the “Devil-pig-man” who lives in the cave by bashing him in the head where he has no armor, and Grub, who tells Diermot that he needs a sword and should wait for the monster to come to him.


Is . . . is this the Devil-pig-man?

Ultar, Ultar of all people, is also the one who tells Diermot how to open the Weregate: Talk to the gargoyles and call them by their names: Fengael and Hammawen. I think figuring out that I need to call them by name, but having a separate quest to learn the names could have been fun. Instead, I just interrogate everyone in Turnvale until I get the answer. That’s what Lure of the Temptress has been like, actually: a detective game. And we’ve already coveredgames like that here on The Adventure Gamer.

So there are two things Diermot should have before attempting to find the dragon: A sword and the potion. I look in vain for a sword, even though Diermot is friends with a blacksmith who has a damn sword hanging on the wall of his forge. And as Luthern is supposed to be Diermot’s friend who wants to help him get rid of Selena and the Skorl, you’d think he’d give the sword to Diermot, right? But no. No. Diermot cannot even ask about the sword. I can almost guarantee that some event will have to happen before I can even bring the topic up to Luthern.


Come on, game. Throw me a bone.

Whatever. The potion should be easier. After needing to select the correct combination of herbs for Gowein (thank goodness for screencaps), I get this bit of news:



Is that . . . does this mean that Diermot has an actual, honest-to-goodness quest here? A puzzle? Hallelujah and happy days! There’s something to do that doesn’t involve talking to people and showing them various inventory objects, right? Right? Please tell me I’m right.

The weird thing, though, and once again a place where I see Lure of the Temptress drop the storytelling ball, is that Diermot can’t tell Goewin about Wulf’s fate, that he talked to Wulf—Goewin’s friend—and give her some kind of closure. Also, doing so could have served as a hint to the player, with Goewin saying something like, “The only other place you can find Cowbane is . . .” and point Diermot in the right direction. Instead, Wulf’s death is treated as a great big whatever, although at least we get an answer to what was in Wulf’s pouch (I do have to point out that I am glad that the game decided not to make not getting the herb from Wulf’s pouch a mandatory puzzle, the failure of which to do so resulting in a dead man walking scenario. That would have been much more of a Sierra move).

Anyway, I have to find some Cowbane. I ask Goewin if there is a substitute, but she says no. I show her the sprig Brother Whelk gave me, and Goewin identifies it as lavender and stichwort, of no use to her in making the anti-dragon potion. But it gives me an idea: I’ll show this sprig to everyone!

Wouldn’t you know it, crazy old Catriona is helpful! I show her the sprig and she says it’s kind of like Cowbane, which they have growing in the garden outside of the forge. She goes the next step, telling Diermot that it’s the blue plant. Fantastic! Somehow I didn’t get any screenshots of this conversation, but here’s a picture of the outside of the forge:



You can see the blue plants near the garden wall. The weird thing was that when I first exited the forge after getting this information, the blue plant didn’t show up as “Cowbane” when I put the curser over it, but when I exited the screen and reentered, it did. A minor point, but it makes me wonder if it’s an emulator issue of if it was an issue with the game itself.

It doesn’t matter, because now I can get the potion from Goewin. In classic adventure game fashion, she tells Diermot to “come back later.”



“Later” consisted of just wandering around talking to random people until the potion was ready. Off to the Weregate! I go and Diermot now has the option to talk to the gargoyles, which I do. The gargoyles tell Diermot that they’ll only open the door for a women. When asked how Ultar got in, Fengael and Hammawen reveal that Ultar might have an interesting side hobby:



This makes me wonder if there’ll be another quest to disguise Diermot and put together a drag disguise a la Leisure Suit Larry 2, or if I have to go back to Taidgh’s apparatus and drink more of the potion which made Diermot look like Selena. But then, thanks to Virtual Theater, who should wander into the screen but Goewin. With a heavy heart, I realize that the answer to this puzzle is probably just to ask her to say the gargoyles’ names.


Yup.

I do appreciate Goewin’s help, and as a bonus she wants to come along with Diermot and Ratpouch. I’m hoping that this will lead to more unique puzzles using the game’s mechanic of telling NPCs to perform certain tasks, but I have my doubts. I also don’t have a sword. So we’ll see how this goes. I hope the puzzling gets more interesting, I really do, because I feel like Lure of the Temptress has the potential to be a great adventure game right buried just under its surface. Now, it just feels like a mediocre one. But I’ll save my judgment for the end.


I wish . . .

Into the caves!

Inventory: Broken glass, knife, tinderbox, flask of water, diary, statue, potion, sprig, 4 groats

Session Time: 1 hour
Total Time: 4 hours, 55 minutes

The Dagger of Amon Ra - Lost?

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By Deimar

Laura Journal Entry #4 "Ok, ok. I have to get out of this museum. People are dropping like flies. First Dr. Carter, and then everyone else. I am starting to believe I am the murderer as I seem to be the only living soul around here. But I will soldier on and see the end of these murderers or I am not called Laura Bow!”

Who would have thought? It really seems like Yvette cared for Ernie. We start this chapter at her office trying to comfort her. She repeats the bit about Ernie being chased by Icepick, a loan shark, but that’s something we already knew. What surprised me in that conversation is that Laura reprimands Yvette for spending too much time with her Steve. I mean, we have seen her with Ernie, O’Riley, Tut, Najeer… basically the entire male cast but for Steve. I really must have missed something along the way…

And immediately after leaving her to her woes, we find the thought but sensitive stevedore-by-day artist-by-night Steve at The Thinker, talking with Dr. Myklos. He comments that the paintings in the gallery are all fake, but Laura doesn’t want to have any of it and presses on about all the women he has been with tonight. And just when Laura is about to get really mad at him, Yvette comes rushing to cry on his shoulder, taking him inside. That’s a short mourning period. Obviously, I couldn’t let the french blonde to get away with our Steve, so I used the old glass on the door trick™ to listen to them. Well…


Mon dieu! Let’s shout some more easily misinterpreted things so we can provoke a hilarious situation!

Curiously, that IS the same face she used when looking at a dead corpse. Maybe we will find Steve’s soon and we will be pretty sure of who did that

Yes, I will leave you alone so you can keep grasping her neck with your hands. It is not as if there have been several murders this night and Steve hasn’t been seen in a while...

After that I went to the gallery and realized that all of the descriptions explicitly say how fresh the paint looks. So maybe the countess was smuggling the real pictures with the help of Ziggy and the fake Carrington, but then.. why would she want to marry him for his fortune? The reasoning took me nowhere and I was at a loss about what to do next. So I went to do some wandering but after a while I got bored and decided it was as good a time as any other to translate the Egyptian texts in Dr. Myklos:

I.PAY.HOMAGE.TO.THEE.YE.L
ORDS.OF.ETERNITY.RA.ST
RONG.IS.THY.SAIL.IN.THE.WI
ND.AS.THE.LAKE.OF.FIR
E.IN.THE.UNDERWORLD.BE
HOLD.SHU.THE.MOTHER.C
REATNIG.THE.GODS

IN.SILENCE.FROM.HER.WO
MB.QUICKER.THAN.GREYH
OUNDS.AND.FLEETER.T
HAN.LIGHT.LET.ME.NOT
BE.BUNRT.LET.ME.NOT.BE
CONSUMED.LET.ME.NOT
PERISH.AS.MY.MUMMY.LIES.P
ROSTRATE.IN.MY.TOMB

That was definitely a good use of my time. Therefore, I decided to keep walking in order to find the next action that would make time pass by. It might seem I am just trying to find those triggers, but I feel like there is a lack of clues to chase in this game that is a bit worrying. Half the time I don’t even know why I do the things I do. For example, the next time jump occurs when reaching the basement room full of tanks with animals. But there is nothing that triggers it, simply walking and nothing seems to have change. But when going back upstairs to Yvette, we find her room completely trashed.

I knew she was not a natural blonde!

There is not that much left in the room. A high-heel and a piece of Yvette’s dress seems to indicate that the poor soul has probably abandoned the realm of the living and trapped in a museum. There are some some ginger hairs in the table, but I seriously doubt Dorian is the guilty part, as he has been pushed too far to be Laura’s love interest and I do not think this is the kind of game that would make him the “baddy”.

I went to explore but it didn’t take me too long to notice a new addition to the picture gallery: a plastered figure of a woman. Suspecting foul play, I decided to make use of the old, literally, glass breaker of a bone I’ve been carrying around and uncover the ugly truth under the plaster.

A girl is dead. Delacroix. Yvette Delacroix. She is covered in plaster. White plaster.

It seems like she was strangled using her own hosiery. Well, tough luck. Life is hard and shit happens. One moment you are chasing our Steve, and the next you are covered in plaster and exposed in a picture gallery as a sculpture, a sure way of drawing attention to the fact that there is a decaying corpse in the middle of the room. Ces’t la vie.

And here I had some problems with saves that I don’t fully understand, but I will try to explain. I went to the medieval exhibit and found one of Steve’s boots, suggesting he has probably gone the way of the dodo too. Na, don’t think so, he has writer’s immunity. In any case, going back to The Thinkers shows a cutscene where we can see the countess going completely blue on top of Dr. Myklos’s desk, and the aforementioned doctor interrogating her about what are her needs. At some point I started to think I had fallen asleep and woken up in them middle of a Looney Toons cartoon.

May I remind you that this is the same death and violence obsessed doctor that has been talking about death all night?

The doctor rushes off the office to seek for detective O’Riley, as those seem to be the last words of the late countess, when she encounters Laura and explains the situation, suggesting that countess presents the symptoms of having been injected with a snake’s poison. Jeez, I wonder which or whose snake could that have been…

Lucky for us, Laura is an expert of finding lost prone-to-kill objects!

When we enter the office, Laura is attacked by Myklos’s cobra. I didn’t know what to do at that moment and got killed. And here is where I lost track of the boot. I was barred from saving once inside the office, so I had to replay a good portion of the game, basically from when I discovered Yvette’s corpse, but when I got back to the medieval exhibit I didn’t find it. I do not know if I encountered a glitch or if I missed a time passing event but the boot was no more. However, while I was there I started to think about how I hadn’t been able of finding Ziggy’s head in the mask room and that it could have been hidden inside one of the suits of armor. And voila!!

Well, not the death man’s head I was looking for, I should probably leave it alone…

Dr. Pippin’s… I wonder if that has been there the whole time and what does it mean. I assumed the body would have been retrieved by the police, but seeing it is here and nobody ever mentioned it being lost… I guess the theory of O’Riley being the killer is right on the money. He is the one that found the corpse after me and the most interested in not involving any other cop. That also would explain Yvette’s dead, as we saw him being a complete and jealous jerk. That would also explain Ernie’s, although if he helped the detective stealing the dagger that could be another motive. Ziggy probably knew his dirty laundry. But why kill the countess (although she did whisper his name before dying)? And Steve? Dr. Carter? The last two probably for jealousy, but I can’t find a motive to kill the countess. Or Carrington…

Well, back to trying to fight the snake. We have been carrying a complete “catch-the-snake”™ kit so it is not that difficult. You have to use the snake oil on her first to scare her and then use the snake-catcher to put her back into her cell, but it took me several tries as you have to use the oil until the bottle is depleted. In any case, now there are no poisonous reptiles (by the way, the reptiles are now winning the death pool by 2 to 1 over everything else) we can try to help the countess…

She looks younger now. Maybe I should try that lifting technique…

The counted died from a snake bit on her ankle. Laura finds some grapes next to the desk, which supports the theory of having been killed by O’Riley, and some smelling salts after looking into her hair… Yes, you heard me right, smelling salts in her hair. I guess that was a thing in the 20s.

Leaving the room now begins Act 5, which teleports Laura to the mammoth room where we found Ernie with a hooded maniac chasing her with a spiked cub. So if you are like me and right now are asking yourself how on earth did we reach this point from leaving Myklos’s office I have only one thing to say. I have no idea. No, really. This is beyond rushed. Why make this jump? Why teleport Laura this way? Does it serve a purpose other than having a chase scene? It is totally disorienting starting the act in a completely different room, with the music running wild and then seeing the hooded figure approach Laura. Not to mention, you are not allowed to save at this moment, and I was allowed in Myklos’ office. So every time I died I had to restart from before dealing with the snake, investigate the countess’ body, and try a new thing to avoid being killed by the murderer. And believe me, it took me too long to realize what I had to do.

The thing is, the murderer chases Laura into the dinosaur exhibit where Ziggy’s body was found, and taking any exit from this room leads to death. It took me a while to realize that, like in Lure of the Temptress, the solution is obvious. Well, a little less obvious than in Temptress, but the same solution nonetheless. Close the door, and tie the knobs together with the wire from the pterodactyl that you can cut with the wire cutters from Ernie’s office. Simple, but not a permanent solution. Although the silver lining is that now we can save. The next room is the medieval exhibit, but what to do here was more straightforward, as the first time I entered this room I noticed the door can be barred. Not that it matters, as Laura seems to be chased by a cybernetical system coming from the future that has no respect for blocked doors.

You always lose at hide-and-seek, don’t you?

In any case, it does give you more time to experiment what to do next. Going to the mask gallery does nothing, and going north leads to the Egyptian exhibit. I tried hiding in a sarcophagus, but Laura just steps out when the killer is near. After trying hiding behind the tapestry again and in a chest, I started to focus my attention at the old locked door with the “Employees only” lettering. You can’t open the door, but you can try and open the transom over it. Well, you have to move a chair next to the door to reach the window but then you can open and close it. I didn’t notice anything changing, nor I could go inside the room through it, but when hiding in the sarcophagus again, the murderer didn’t find Laura. When going outside the sarcophagus, she hears a noise like an angry multiple-murderer hooded figure breaking a door.

So I went back to that door and now was open. I guess the killer thought Laura had sneaked through the transom and broke in to see if she was there, and then left south when he found nothing. In any case, inside the room there is a crane and several boxes. Operating the crane puts a box against the now broken door. I don’t think that will do too much, as you can clearly still go under it, but it is something. A for effort. Behind another box at the far right side there is a hidden door, leading to a lift that takes us to the basement where the museum stores his sarcophaguses. Yes, that right, there is a room full of sarcophaguses in the museum.

But the awesomeness of PU II, the mummy of a teddy bear will make this moment more bearable

As soon as Laura steps off the lift, it goes up for the terminator. I immediately close the door and try to block it with a sarcophagus, but that is not the answer to this riddle. The answer is to open one of them, take the mummy inside and use it to block the door. Which is obviously the sensitive thing to do, as the mummy will hold better than a chunk of wood and metal… But now I was trapped, with no apparent exit at hand. I clicked on everything, looked at everything and even started to wonder if I had dead-ended myself when my pixel hunter provided the answer, as the sarcophagus left of the door has a snake in its forehead that can be moved with the snake catcher to unlock the sarcophagus. Neat. And then we change the movie and suddenly we find ourselves in this.

Now, I know I have said this a lot in this game but this time is for real… can I join in?

Talk about getting out the frying pan… We find Najeer and the cult of Ra, ready to kill the reporter before she can tell the world that there is a cult. I am perfectly happy of belonging to a club whose first rule is not to talk about the club, but they don’t seem to inclined to let me in. But when Laura makes a point saying that ancient Egyptians didn’t make human sacrifices, they reconsider the proposal and let Laura leave as long as she can answer the riddle of Ra. This has been mentioned by some of the characters but I didn’t give them any attention. The riddle is split into two parts, the first is:

What ith the room you leave without entering?

What ith the room you enter without leaving?

Of course, you have to answer using the hieroglyphs. I admit that I didn’t solve the first one by myself, as I had some help from my wife. But once the first one was solved, the second one is pretty obvious and stays on the subject. So with the riddle solved, Najeer let us leave after Laura promises not to tell anyone about the crazy Egyptian cult making sacrifices under the museum in a secret chamber. Thinking about it, kind of makes senses she makes the promise. It is not as if someone is going to believe that...

I knew it wasn’t you!! And even in spite of your complete lack of personality I will always love you!!

The next room takes us to the boiler room, where we find an unconscious Steve. And this is another puzzle that took me way too long to figure out. You can give the salts to Steve to revive him. But after a while he stands up and then falls into the ground, not making a single comment or movement afterwards. Exploring the room reveals that there is a picture of Osiris that could be moved… by two persons. Ok, I get the hint. There is a boot in the floor (which I guess wouldn't be here if I had taken it back at the medieval exhibit) and he is missing a boot. Maybe he can’t walk due to the lack of footing gear. But I can’t give him anything right now. So I reload and try again, but I don’t seem to be fast enough to give him the boot or putting it on him while he is unconscious. Until in one of the tries I managed to give him the boot before he stands up. You see, when you look at the floor, Laura says it is too hot. So my best guess is that he can’t take the hotness and collapses. Or something. I don’t really think this puzzle is very well designed, it seems a bit flimsy. Now I realize that I might have had problems because I was playing at maximum speed, but in any case, that’s a poor excuse for a puzzle.

In any case, with the two of them now capable of working together, they move the mural and discover a hole in the wall. Going inside the darkness surprisingly does not kill you. Not immediately at least, because the tunnel is full of cobras. And not of the kai variety. Laura still keeps some oil, so this one is easy. It is the next screen that proves to be more difficult. The next part of the tunnel is the end, but the tunnel is blocked by a pack of rats. Even more pressing, there are some gunshot noises coming from behind, which proves that you can’t send a cult of Ra to do the work of a reporter. We still keep the cheese from the mousetrap in Wolf’s office, but using it with the rats leads to another glorious dead. Did I mention that after entering the boiler room you can’t save? How I hate this game…

Thank you captain obvious. What tipped you? The gunshots? I bet it was the gunshots!

After a few tries, I finally found the solution, which is to throw the cheese through one of the windows you can see in the image. Taking the other as an exit throws Laura and Steve into the dinosaur exhibit, via the throat of the talking T-Rex. I don’t even know where the other window is supposed to lead. In any case, Steve blocks the exit, so there is just one thing left to do. Push the button and let the T-Rex talk. And boy he does…

I think there is something in your teeth…

And I would have gotten away with it too if it weren’t for you meddling kids and your stupid giant talking reptile!

We are actually not shown the face of O’Rile… I mean… the murderer. By this point he is the only character alive but for Tut, and he doesn’t seem to be fit enough, so he has to be the killer. But that’s for the coroner to decide, as Act 5 ends and Act 6 begins, which consist in an interview with the coroner in front of everyone and their mothers so they can laugh at me and my pity attempts at detective work.

The coroner first asks about all of the murderers and although I think I have the killer figured out, he also asks for the motive behind each killing. So my best bet is jealousy for the males and Yvette and to cover another crime for the countess. Then we are asked about the skeleton in the trunk, which is easy as he is definitely the true dr. Carrington. When asked about his killer, there was only a name I didn’t recognize in the list: Watney Little. So that’s one thing for sure I totally missed, but that has to be Dr. Carrington’s killer as shown in the introduction.

The coroner keeps asking questions, but the only one that produced a result was answering the countess when asked about a scheme to steal paintings from the museum. However, when asked about her male associate, I answered Ziggy and got chastised, saying that he was not in fact her collaborator and that I should have confronted her in the medieval exhibit with a prove that her partner had been killed. So I guess the answer to that is to show her the watch or something else from fake Carrington and she will spill the beans about this Watney Little character.

In any case, apparently I failed miserably, as the coroner told me to not ever interfere again with a police investigation and got kicked from the newspaper too. The ending here is a bit dark, to be honest, describing Wolf taking his life for his failure, Myklos taking to solitude, Dr. Carter’s ghost chasing Laura for not recovering the dagger (a lie!!) nor his murder, Tut committing suicide also… Oh, and one night a dark figure enters Laura’s room and guns her down. And this one is actually animated, so you can reflect further on your failures

So… any other suicide that could be attributed to Laura?

Although strictly speaking I have beaten the game, I have decided to replay the game in DosBox to see the differences with the ScummVm version and to see if I can uncover more clues that allow me to beat this coroner senseless!

Session Time: 1h54m
Total Time: 8h30m

Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There’s a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read it here before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no points will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. Please...try not to spoil any part of the game for me...unless I really obviously need the help...or I specifically request assistance. In this instance, I've not made any requests for assistance. Thanks!

Missed Classic 46: Sorcerer - Introduction (1984)

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Written by Joe Pranevich


Infocom’s 1984 started off with a bang: Sorcerer, the fifth canonical Zork title and the second in the Enchanter trilogy, was the first game of the year. This is also the first Zork title not to be written by Lebling and Blank. Instead, it is helmed by the mastermind behind the Planetfall game as well as the Zork gamebooks that we looked at recently, Steve Meretzky. He is my favorite “implementor” of the gang so far and I am looking forward to playing this game immensely. I hope he sticks the landing after the disappointment that was Mike Berlyn’s Infidel.

But that does raise a question: why was Sorcerer released so soon after Enchanter? Each of the Zork games to this point had a fall release (November for the first two, then September). By releasing Sorcerer in March, that left only a five-month gap between releases. Was it intended to capitalize on the marketing of the Zork books? If so, why was the fourth and final gamebook released in the “usual” timeslot in October? It’s almost as if the fourth book was timed to be released when Sorcerer would have come out… If there is a story here, I do not know it and I welcome anyone that can shed some light on the subject. Whatever the reason, Spellbreaker took the usual fall release spot and players had a 17-month delay after this game before the finale.

The first sign I see that Mr. Meretzky is in charge of this game comes immediately after opening the manual: the new game is not shy at all to be connected to the previous Zork titles. I’m excited!



Fake magazines have become something of an Infocom trend.

I mentioned this in the post on the gamebooks, but Sorcerer has the setting that I “expect” from a Zork game. This series always struck me as being nearly-modern with fantasy elements grafted on, sort of like Fallout’s 1950s charm but with a lot less dark humor. So having a good portion of the manual take place in the guise of a Popular Enchanting magazine feels exactly right. The various articles in the magazine provide some humor and essential backstory:

  • We learn that cooperation between the guilds across the former Empire is at a nadir. At the last Convention of Enchanters and Sorcerers (CES), guild members from different regions competed in a game of one-upmanship, alternatively casting more and more powerful “fire” and “extinguish fire” spells until they nearly burned down the convention hall.
  • The cover story about Belboz’s retirement paints the guild leader as equal parts wise and mischievous, not unlike Rowling’s Dumbledore. The article also makes some explicit connections to Zork I as Belboz was born near the Aragain Falls from that game. (I hope not in a white house…) It also goes further than anything we’ve seen so far to set a timeline for the universe, setting the Empire’s collapse in the year 883 (exactly matching the date when the guards stopped appearing in Zork III!)
  • There are several references to a school named GUE Tech. This will be the name of a school in Lurking Horror, but beyond that I do not think there is a connection. I haven’t played that game yet.
  • There are a few other references to Enchanter and Zork in the letters section and one-off blurbs here and there. We find details about the “gnusto” spell (used to write spells into a spellbook), about a “cleesh” scroll lost in a swamp, and someone else lost a brass lantern.


This is a great manual although it would have been lovely to have continued the brilliant typography from the Enchanter manual.

The original release also came with an “Infotater”, a spinnable dial that allows us to get information about certain monsters in the game. You can see a picture of one above: you turn to the correct monster on the dial and an image and information appear in two little windows. The spinnable version was only included in the original release of the game; subsequent versions used a printed-out version instead that was more convenient but lacked the same sense of style. The Infotater offers information on twelve monsters from Bloodworms to Yipples, gives a brief description of each one, and a set of “colors”. I assume that are for copy protection. The grues’ colors, for example, are black, black, red, black, and purple. The grues are the only monsters I remember from previous Zork titles.

And just so no one thinks I’m shirking on trivia-duties, the “CES” trade show for the guild was likely a reference to our real-world Consumer Electronics Show where vendors lined up to outshine each other, albeit without the use of magic spells. Sorcerer was released just after the 1983 Winter CES in Las Vegas although I have been unable to determine if Infocom had a booth there.

Enough of that! Time to play the game.

That’s one way to start a game...

We start the game in medias res, in a forest while being chased by a hellhound. We don’t know how we got there. One tree looks climbable so I head up, only to be attacked by a snake. With the hound below and the snake above, I’m trapped and am quickly bitten and killed. Fortunately, it turns out to be only a dream and I am safe in my bed in the guildhall. That’s a strange way to start a game...

Just for kicks, I restart. Is it possible to get farther into the dream? On the next play, I escape the hellhound by going northeast and find myself safe, momentarily, at the edge of the forest. In a few attempts, I manage to get blown up by a minefield and attacked by a swarm of locusts but with perseverance I manage to map out fourteen rooms, including two dark ones. If I manage to escape all of the pitfalls, I will eventually get struck by lightening and die so there’s no way to take this forever. There also doesn’t seem to be a “point” to the exploration except to find a ruined fort, a castle, a river, and other assorted locations. I have to imagine this will matter later because that’s a lot of rooms to design for just an opening sequence...

And you were there… and you were there...

All dreams come to an end. The real start of Sorcerer.

We wake up in the dark in our room in the guildhall. Our “frotz” spell wore off in the dark so the first challenge is to turn a light on and get out of bed. Thankfully, spell books are mildly glow-in-the-dark so I can read mine to take stock of what spells I have for this situation. I start the game with:

  • Gnusto - To copy a scroll from a spell
  • Vezza - To view the future
  • Pulver - Cause liquids to become dry
  • Izyuk - Fly like a bird
  • Yomin - Mind probe
  • Rezrov - Open locked object
  • Frotz - Cause something to give off light

Of those, “gnusto”, “izyuk”, “rezrov”, and “frotz” are from Enchanter while the remainder are new, I lost my spellbook at the end of that game so at least there is some explanation why I have lost so many awesome spells for turning people into newts and talking to wildlife. I also notice that since I have a more senior enchanter, I have permanently memorized “gnusto”, “rezrov”, and “frotz” so I no longer need to read the spell book for them. Convenient! The new spells seem useful and I am curious how the game will treat them.

I admit that I start the game by over-thinking: what am I supposed to cast “frotz” on? In the last game, you could be in a walking-dead situation if you cast it on yourself so I am reluctant to do so now, even if I have faith the game wouldn’t be that dumb as to screw you up immediately. It doesn’t let me “frotz” either the bed or the room so I settle on casting it on my spellbook. Does it matter? I doubt it.

Apparently, the guild is grue-free given how much time I just spent in the dark.

Just outside my room is a note saying that everyone is off having a picnic without me. (Thanks, guys!) It also asks if I have seen Belboz as he’s been acting funny lately. Not the most subtle plot-drop in gaming history, but it gives us something to go on.

Belboz’s quarters turn out to be just across the hall. My success defeating Krill in the last game brought with it some perks! The room has a wall hanging, a potted plant, a large desk, and a chatty parrot. As I walk in, the bird squawks something about hiding a key. He continues yammering on as I explore the room, at one point mentioning that someone should never have lowered his mindshield. Was Belboz the victim of a mental attack? Does that explain his strange behavior? In his desk is a strangely convenient item: an amulet that glows depending on the distance to its owner. That seems utterly pointless for him to have for himself unless he was expecting trouble. As of right now, the amulet is completely dark. Also in the desk is a locked journal, but it is beyond my ability to “rezrov” it. I assume that is what I will need the key for. I eventually find the hidden key behind the wall hanging but it doesn’t seem to work in the journal after all. What is it for? The last item in the desk is the Infotater from the documentation. I take it with me, but it seems fairly pointless since I have my “real life” copy.

While I am ransacking the guildmaster’s room, I get messages that I am getting hungry and thirsty. Again? This is the fourth Infocom game in a row (Planetfall, Enchanter, Infidel, and now Sorcerer) with a hunger/thirst mechanic and if there is one trend that Infocom needs to drop, it’s this one.

Polly want a bagel?

I explore the rest of the guildhall but none of the rooms are as fruitful as the guildmaster’s:

  • At the far north is the “Chamber of the Circle” where meetings are held, but there appears to be nothing of interest now.
  • Just south of Belboz’s quarters is Helistar’s. I steal his “gaspar” scroll and write it into my book. “Gaspar” is the scroll to provide for your own resurrection and it’s mentioned a few times in the Popular Enchanting magazine. That seems like it would come in handy.
  • Frobnar’s quarters is across the hall, but he doesn’t seem to have anything for me to steal.
  • The lobby contains a “messenger receptacle” (read: mailbox) that is currently filled with the Popular Enchanting magazine from the documentation.
  • Just off the lobby is a storeroom containing a potion, a calendar, and a matchbook. The potion is for “berzio”, to eliminate the need to eat or drink. I eagerly drink! I take back what I said a few minutes ago as it seems that Mr. Meretzky was playing with the “needing food” trope rather than perpetuating the over-realism of constantly having to find water. The calendar says that it is 957 GUE, approximately nine years after Enchanter and the first Zork trilogy. The matchbook is empty except for an ad for a mail-away opportunity for a “vilstu” potion. That lets you get by without breathing so quite useful.
  • I steal the “meef” scroll to cause plants to wilt from the guild library. There’s also an encyclopedia in there with information on characters and items from previous Zork titles.
  • Finally, the cellar contains a trunk with a complex set of buttons. I can’t figure out how to open it.


I drop the matchbook in the mailbox and wait, but nothing happens. Leaving is also right out because a magic nymph blocks our way. I dream of an evil version of Belboz and he tells me that the real guildmaster thought I could rescue him. I get transported to the “Chamber of Living Death” where I am eaten alive and then regenerate over and over again. I’m in too much pain to do anything so I eventually just need to quit. I can’t even die properly!

Our guildhall.

Unfortunately, I seem to be stuck for now. I can’t seem to find a combination of buttons on the trunk. I even tried my seeing the future spell! I can see that the colors on the buttons (black, grey, red, purple, and white) match the colors in the Infotater, but if this is copy protection I am missing the clue for which animal I need to use. I’m missing something obvious, right?

With that, I am taking a break and will end the first post right here. More than an hour into the game and I haven’t made it past the copy protection. I must be losing my touch.

Time played: 1 hr 15 min
Inventory: spell book, scribbled note, small key, calendar, amulet, infotator, journal
Spell book: gnusto, vezza, pulver, izyuk, yomin, rezrov, frotz, gaspar, meef

Don’t forget that this is an introductory post so you can guess a score. Mr. Meretzky’s debut game, Planetfall, landed with an impressive 48 points on our rating system. Looking ahead, his two Leather Goddesses games received 40 and 43 points respectively. Post-Infocom, we have also reviewed his first two Spellcasting games at 48 and 51 points. Mr. Meretzky also had a small (but some say larger than publicly known) role in Gateway, one of our top-scoring games on the site so far with 65 points. Keep in mind that most of those were graphical adventures while this one is text-only. Good luck!

Lure of the Temptress: Nothing Means Anything: A Treatise on Adventure Game Protagonists Disguised as a Gameplay Post

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by Alex



Lure of the Temptress is like a food that you want to like, but every time you eat it, you get indigestion. Or a song you know should be up your alley, but in the middle of what should be a good part an obnoxious squealing sound ruins everything. Or that person you date time and time again, only for them to completely ruin the moment with an inappropriate comment or some ill-timed flatulence.

You get the idea.

The thing is, Lure of the Temptress has the bones of a good adventure game, but doing anything in it feels like such a chore. Navigating Turnvale (those damn interstitial alleys!), talking to people (the pathfinding sucks and sometimes just doesn’t work), getting from Point A to Point B (Virtual Theater causes NPC logjams) just is not fun. These are things that aren’t even puzzle-solving, just basic adventure game mechanics. Firing up this game fills me with the strong desire to be doing something else, like my taxes.


Compared to playing Lure of the Temptress, filling these out seems like fun!

I spent two hours in my last session and yet accomplished very little. I sincerely hope I’m near the end of this game; I don’t know how much more I can take. I am actively unhappy while playing it.

First, the good, what little there is: Inside the Weregate were a series of puzzles that were actually kind of fun, and made good use of the mechanics the game established during the first sequence, where Diermot had to order Ratpouch to push the wall and open the secret passage out of the castle.



As you can see from the screenshot above, there is a closed door to the right and two skulls on poles in the back of the room. The skulls are too heavy to take, but each can be pushed or pulled, making them face in a different direction. By turning the right skull to face left, so both skulls were facing the center of the room, I was able to get the left door to slide open.



The next room is much the same, except that it’s green. And manipulating the skulls doesn’t open the door to the left, though I am able to close the door that Diermot came through.


The green room.

After a few futile minutes trying various combinations, I realize that the game had Goewin accompany Diermot into the caves for a reason: The skulls in the first room must open this door! By experimenting with asking Goewin to turn the skulls in the first room in various combinations, I was able to open the door to the left, although the right-side door was closed, cutting Diermot off from Goewin.

Of course, when you ask Goewin to help you do something, the game’s uneven tone and, quite frankly, bad approach to characterization rears its ugly head:







Where the hell did all of this come from? When the hell did Goewin become a stock, “independent” female character? It’s not even as if Diermot is being a jerk or anything, or that Goewin has any helpful suggestions on how to get through these caves. The whole thing come from out of left-field and is the mark of lazy writing. Of course in the 1990s a female character has to be tough, sarcastic, and cutting towards the hapless male protagonist. It’s so stupid. Do people who write like this actually know women? Have they ever been in an actual relationship, or even observed one?

I know, I know: “Alex, it’s just a computer game. And an old one at that.” But it’s still stupid.

Also stupid is the fact that, even though Goewin had been cut off from Diermot, she somehow appears in the room after the green room, the blue room.


Somehow, even though Goewin is in the room to the right . . .


. . . she ends up in here with Diermot.

Well geez, if she could phase through walls or whatever, why do I have to bother mucking around with the skulls?

Anyway, after this room comes a connecting room with nothing of note, before Goewin comes face-to-face with the monster Ultar warned him about! But uh-oh, I don’t have a sword, even though the game a) explicitly told me I needed one, b) showed me one in Luthern’s forge, and c) did not let me get it.

Whatever shall I do!

Nothing, as it turns out. This is the message that flashes on the screen as you enter the room:

“The smell of death hits you and you struggle to hold back a feeling of nausea. You decide that you have gone too far to turn back now. Picking up an axe that has been carelessly discarded—presuambly by a warrior for whom it no longer holds any use—you prepare for battle.”


Bam! Here’s an axe!
That’s right: The game just . . . gives you a weapon. It’s yet another example of where there could have been a puzzle—find a weapon—but nah, screw it, here’s an axe from out of nowhere.

So now we get to experience the game’s combat interface, hinted at in the manual. Depending on where the cursor is—high, medium, or low—Diermot can defend or attack by holding the mouse button. I remember Ultar telling Diermot to let the monster come to him and attack high, so that’s what I do, and after a few blows . . .











. . . the dread beast is no more. It’s pretty good, as far as adventure-game combat interfaces go, but I never got the sense that Diermot was in any danger. As with most things in Lure of the Temptress, it’s anti-climactic.


Kinda like this guy . . .

But hey, I found the dragon!



So I have this potion that Gowein made that’s supposed to enchant the dragon, but how do I use it? What do I do? Does Diermot drink it? Do I have to force the dragon to drink it? Do I splash it on the dragon? On Diermot?



I throw it on the dragon, getting the message that it has no apparent effect. But I decide to roll with it. And what do you know, it worked. Because Lure of the Temptress seems to take the “Whatever” approach to inventory-based puzzles.


I did?

Upon being commanded by Diermot to help, thanks to the potion, the dragon recounts the story of an evil demon that feeds on human greed. The great Gethryn had driven the demon away, but Selena’s magical meddling had revived the foul beast, which now controls the enchantress! So everything is not her fault, except it kind of is, because she brought this demon back in the first place.

Luckily, the dragon provides a way to stop the monster: An object of power left behind by Gethryn, a small orb called the Eye of Gethryn. It’s a stone imbued with a spell of banishing that can drive away the demon . . . but the dragon warns Diermot not to look at it. Diermot wisely sticks the thing in his pocket and leaves the caverns with Goewin, who suggest that Luthern might have an idea how Diermot can infiltrate the castle.

Yeah, that Luthern. The guy who had a sword but wouldn’t give it to Diermot. The guy whose idea of fighting back against Selena is graffiti. The guy who’s only useful function has been to drink a flask of liquor so Diermot can use the empty flask for a magic potion of transformation.


A little more backstory.

Diermot’s mission, then, is to find a way into the castle. You know what this means: another round of talking to everyone!


You and me both, Larry. You and me both.

I’ll cut to the chase: Everyone’s useless. This is what Luthern has to say:


No kidding . . .

And that’s it. Other than Goewin expressing her love for Diermot in a way that once again underscores this game’s tone deafness . . .












Is this supposed to be cute? Funny? It comes from out of nowhere, and the characters are so thin, and Goewin was super-bitchy to Diermot in the caverns, that it all has the emotional impact of a feather beating against a battleship.

. . . the only one who offers any useful advice is Mallin, telling Diermot to keep an eye on one Skorl in particular whose behavior is kind of strange.



This is where I got hung up, and had to put out a call for help. Luckily, my man Voltgloss stepped up and provided just enough of a nudge for me to move on. You see, I was on the right track, I had just missed one key thing.

I took Mallin’s advice and followed around the odd Skorl patrol. Which one? Damned if I know—I always figured that there was just one Skorl wandering around town, so I followed him to try to figure out what Mallin was getting at.

First, the Skorl went to the Magpie and demanded a barrel of beer from Nellie. Then he went to Ewan and shook him down for food. Finally, he’d go to the castle gates, pace around a bit, and then repeat the process.

I followed the Skorl around like a dummy for 20 or so minutes, talking to Nellie, talking to Ewan, trying to do what the Skorl did, all to no avail, before Voltgloss’ hints clued me in to an option that I was not previously aware I could avail myself of. You see, Diermot can “look through” the window to Ewan’s shop.



I honestly don’t recall this being an option before. Maybe it was and I just forgot. Either way, here are two things that piss me off about this puzzle:
  1. The conversation that Diermot snoops in on is the same as if he is standing in the store . . . except that it continues to the good stuff. There’s no indication, if Diermot is in the store, that the Skorl abruptly cuts himself off or whatever, giving a slight nod to the player that they’ll have to listen in on the pow-wow unseen. You know, the way a good game would; and
  2. There is nothing fun about puzzles where the player has to just wait somewhere for an NPC to do something. Virtual Theater was not utilized to the fullest of its potential.


What Diermot learns is that the Skorl are getting sick of Selena too and want Ewan to hide into a barrel that will be delivered to the castle, pop out, and murder Selena when she’s not looking. Of course, Ewan is a coward, but this gives Diermot an idea.


I just get a kick out of the fact that the giant, mean,
heavily muscled, flesh-eating Skorl is named “Wayne.”



Our “intrepid” “hero” (I can’t use both terms about Diermot sincerely) decides to make a deal with Ewan, offering to be smuggled into the castle instead. Ewan is only too happy go get out of this, urging Diermot into the barrel before the Skorl returned.


This picture only lasted for about three seconds, and nothing happened. I wonder if pushing buttons to take the screenshot skipped an animation sequence, but I really don’t care enough to go back and check.

So in the castle’s wine cellar, Diermot is embarking on what is hopefully the last mission of his quest to rid Turnvale of the wicked Selena. Except he’s not going to murder her. Oh know, he’s going to banish the demon that’s taken control of her.

As an aside, though, Lure of the Temptress’ whole main quest feels like an accident. If you remember the intro, Diermot kind of accidentally ended up in the king’s hunting party, he accidentally survived, and he accidentally found himself involved in Turnvale’s struggle for freedom. I know that he at least decides to do the right thing, but even in the 1990s, when the trope of the “accidental hero” was prevalent, it felt really old. Playing this game some twenty-five years later makes it feel doubly so.

I like heroes to have agency. To go back to Quest for Glory I, the hero there wanted to be great. He actively chose to go to Spielburg and put things right. The same way Guybrush Threepwood travels to Melee Island because he wants to be a pirate and Sir Graham embarks on his various quests because he wants to save the kingdom and then later find a wife. Even Leisure Suit Larry had agency: the dude wanted to get laid!

Diermot, by contrast, is a nonentity, a dork, a feeble cardboard cutout. None of his feats of derring-do feel believable because he has not been established as anything other than a bumbling schmuck. You wouldn’t care much for a character like this in a novel or a movie, unless there was some heavy character development. There is none of that in Lure of the Temptress, which does not make for engaging adventure gaming.


Derp.

Anyway, wish me luck as our stupid protagonist comes to the likely stupid end of his stupid quest.

Inventory: Broken glass, knife, tinderbox, flask of water, diary, statue, Eye of Gethryn, sprig, axe, 4 groats

Session Time: 2 hours
Total Time: 6 hours, 55 minutes

The Dagger of Amon Ra - Won!

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By Deimar

If you have kept up to date with this playthrough, I have played The Dagger of Amon Ra to completion but failed miserably to answer the coroner’s questions. As I played the version of the game sold by GoG which uses ScummVM, I thought it a good time to replay the game using DosBox to try and beat the game and see the differences between the two versions. In that regard, there are not that many.

The first and most obvious one is, as Laukku pointed out, that there is no option to have both sound and text during the game. You have to choose one of them. Given that the quality of the recordings is not that great, that is more of a feature than something you can really miss but it is an odd option to leave out of the game. In fact, this time I played with only text to shorten the experience and because I don’t really think you are missing that much without the voices. I didn’t notice any other major differences but for a myriad of bugs, but I am not even sure this affects only the DosBox version. But I will get to them while recounting the game.

My plan for this second playthrough was to try and discover what I had missed by being a bit more thoughtful and persistent and not simply accepting time jumps as they come. Also, I just went ahead and read Illmari’s clues and a walkthrough after considering being “done” with every time slot so I don’t have to replay the whole game if I miss something crucial. Let’s see.

Like I missed commenting on this awesome piece of music



Act 1. Laura Bow: A Nose for News

Resume: Laura arrives at New York, gets a job at the Tribune covering the theft of the Dagger of Amon Ra from the Leyendecker Museum. She asks the detective in charge of the burglary, detective O’Riley, who turns out to be an arrogant misogynistic useless man and doesn’t seem to give a damn about the burglary. Also, he is the killer, but you should know that already if you have been paying attention. In any case, we meet other members of the cast such as Ziggy, a man with a shady reputation, and Steve Dorian, a stevedore who I still don’t know why is involved in any of this other than to serve as Laura’s love interest. In any case, the chapter ends when Laura manages to get a dress fit for the fundraiser party that is going to be celebrated at the museum at 7pm.

What I discovered for myself: If you recall my post about chapter 2, I complained about not knowing half the characters nor their occupation. Turns out, you can learn most of it in this chapter. Myklos, Yvette and Wolf are Lofat’s clients so when he is asked about the Leyendecker museum he talks about them and their names are available so you can interrogate other characters about them This yields no result but to know that Rube, your partner at the Tribune knows Yvette. Intimately. And so does Lofat. And the list keeps growing and growing. Also that Myklos and Wolf are involved.


My god. She out-fified Fifi!!!

The same can be said about Najeer. Talking for the first time with Ziggy he asks who sent us. I don’t really recall what I answered the first time, but this time I chose Rube and he was ready to talk. He even tells Laura about the riddles Najeer keeps asking him, which are the very same ones that will be asked to Laura later in the game. Nice foreshadowing.


I am not sure. Can this be considered foreshadowing or a simple spoiler?

Another thing of interest is the fact that Steve Dorian stops talking to Laura as soon as he learns that she will be attending the fundraiser party. He actually ask how much would it cost to enter. Isn’t he an adorable stalker? From my point of view, it still doesn’t make that much sense but whatever.

Here I found one of the “differences” between the two versions, something that Sierra games seem to share when in DosBox, the “out of handles” error. This error halts the game and prompt the error in DOS. Which sucks as this didn’t happen once in the ScummVM version, but happen to me at least thrice while replaying the game. I already said during my first playthrough that there were some odd spots where you can’t save the game. I can not say if it is something to do with DosBox but in this second one I noticed large parts of the game where you simply can’t save until you reach a specific location, which when considered together with this bug has been a bit excruciating.

What I missed completely: Apparently, nothing. Good start!! :D

Act 2. Suspects on Parade

Resume: Laura goes to the fundraiser party and meets a bunch of very strange and suspicious people. Between talking to the guests and listening to their conversations, she discovers the stolen dagger in hiding in the museum's gift shop but sadly she is kicked out before she can do anything. Steve also makes an appearance and kisses Laura. Sadly, the party has an abrupt end when Laura discovers the corpse of Dr. Carter Pippin, the man who discovered the dagger in Egypt, inside a sarcophagus with a fake dagger thrusted in his chest.

What I discovered for myself: Nothing really. There is a mention of grape juice in Carter’s corpse, which is a first clue to O’Riley being the murderer and having something to do with the theft. But other than that I didn’t find anything new. I even tried a different order for the actions, but it doesn’t seem to matter and you don’t get to listen to any other conversation than the ones I already mentioned.

Well, there is one I did discover. How much I hate the conversation system. I already complained about it the first time but indulge me. There is a lot of hate here.

What I missed completely
: Nothing. Man, I’m on fire!!

Act 3. On the cutting edge

Resume: All guests are locked up in the museum and things start to go awry when corpses start piling up faster than the zombies in World War Z. Lucky for the intrepid reporter, she manages to recover the dagger of Amon Ra from a tank in the VATs room and discover the real Carrington’s corpse inside a trunk.

What I discovered for myself: Some things but of little consequence. I had to restore a lot in this chapter to replay the parts I had missed. And I found a second difference between the DosBox version and ScummVM. You see, there is a bug in the game, that I think is fixed in the ScummVM version. This bug makes opening the safe at Carrington’s office impossible, as you can click on the picture and it opens… and closes. Yes, it barres you from opening the safe behind. When I discovered this was a bug and not the game preventing me from destroying its plot too early I almost threw everything through the window. Lucky for me, I discovered that if you click like a madman on the picture, you eventually get the safe’s combination screen. The second time I used the combination the safe finally opened for me.

In any case, what I discovered were little details. For example, just at the beginning of the chapter we can find O’Riley looking at the pterodactyl that will eventually kill Ziggy and ask him about Dr. Carter’s corpse. He says the coroner, who apparently was at the party, took it. But if we go to the armour exhibit, the corpse is already inside the armour. It is a pity we can not confront him about this lie, but it is another strong hint that he is the murderer very early in the game.


I am pretty sure that his next move is marking with a big red X
in the floor the exact place where he has to place Ziggy to kill him...

We can also listen to a new conversation through the communicator at Carrington’s. This time between Ziggy and Ernie, but it is inconsequential, as it is just Ernie kicking off Ziggy from his office. I did allow me to notice however that the conversations I could listen to were basically the same I heard in the first playthrough at a much different time, so I guess the conversations are fixed and I didn’t miss much for discovering so late that I could use the communicator.

One of the things I learned in my first playthrough was to pay more attention at the schedules written in Carter’s notebook and from other sources. The first one is an appointment with Tut at 10.15pm in the Egyptian exhibit, which is the first jump in this chapter, starting at 10pm. Well, this proved more complicated than expected. This first jump is also the only one in the game that is not fixed by a static event like walking into a room or doing something. I had to restore several times because I kept jumping to 10.15 at several locations such as the VATs room or the picture gallery, which brings me to believe the time lapse is timed and happens after some amount of real time has passed. And the problem with that is that Ziggy’s corpse appears at that moment in the dinosaur exhibit, so you can’t meet Tut because that causes another time jump. When I managed to be quick enough to meet him, I was awarded with a not very interesting conversation between him and Laura, where he said Wolf called him to Carrington’s because of a call, but when he tried to answer the phone the line was dead. It’ is better than nothing I guess.


Are you sure? Because I vividly remember a detective and his
German pal interrogating everyone about this particular death...

Speaking of Ziggy, after finding his corpse I was finally able of finding his head in the human mask exhibit, just as I thought. I don’t know how I was able to miss it, as it has a different colour than the other heads, but it is there. You don’t learn anything new from it, but get to be questioned by Wolf and O’Riley. I noticed than in these interrogations O’Riley is always quite comprehensive with the girl that keeps finding corpses but I don’t understand why. Considering he is the killer, wouldn’t it be a perfect opportunity to pin the murders onto Laura?


You actually need to use the magnifying glass on the head
to realize it is Ziggy’s. The great reporter, everyone!

The encounter with the countess at the medieval exhibit was also way better this time, simply by following the indications of the coroner. If you walk up to her and ask what she is doing, she will spill the beans. She has been working with Carrington to steal the pictures in the museum. She gets fake ones that passes to Carrington in exchange for the real ones. Those are sold to private buyers and then the plan was to damage all the fake paintings in the museum to get the insurance money and cover the theft. She also talks about how Yvette probably made her late husband change his will (and another one for Yvette, I now wish I had kept the score) when pressed about the late count’s diary.


I am sorry. I don’t know why but this dialogue reminded
me a lot of this one and I couldn’t stop laughing

At 2am, we can be witness to a love encounter between Wolf and Myklos, but this only enforces what Lofat told Laura and serves no purpose I could see. I learned of this meeting through their conversation in the communicator.


On the other hand, it is quite entertaining listening to Wolf’s life. I demand an spin off!!

And I couldn’t find that many more things by myself. To be honest, it is a bit disappointing, as the game seems quite linear. Instead of going straight to where I knew there would be action, I intentionally went the other way every time and the game simply feels empty when you step out of the railroad before you, which as I stated before is not even a railroad as sometimes you have to wander to the next interesting thing.

What I missed completely: After seeing the size of Ilmari’s list of things I missed the first time I was worried. Specially after finishing the game and realizing there were a lot of things I simply didn’t know. And this is the chapter to learn about them. Frankly, I am a bit angry with the game, as they are quite verging on the pixel hunting variety of puzzles.

First, let’s talk about secret passages. There are a ton that I missed. Well, or maybe just two. There is one going from Myklos’ to the VATs room, which can be opened by moving the horn of the skull on Myklos’ desk. The second one takes you from Wolf’s to Carrington’s. It is opened by pushing a button behind some medals at Wolf’s. What purpose do they serve? I don’t know. Maybe show you how the killer moved through the museum, but that doesn’t make any sense considering he must have known the museum better than the people working there.


What’s even funnier is that the game won’t even let you
open the passage if it senses there is a character at the other end

Then we have the instance where I totally forgot I had something in the inventory I didn’t get to use during my first playthrough. You see, there is a carbon paper inside Yvette’s garbage. I took in my first playthrough but never managed to do anything with it. I tried using it with the coal and the notebook in hope of being able to read what was written over it. But no, the answer was to use Yvette’s light to read it. This is a case of a puzzle where you have to know how to read a carbon paper and I didn’t do my due diligence and investigate about it outside of the game. I think it would be good if the game offered some kind of clue on how to read it but I digress. The paper is simply a note to Ernie talking about his fencing job.

And then we have two items that infuriate me. Well, mostly one because it is the critical to the plot while the other is not even mentioned anymore. Do you remember that Carrington’s spelled the letters C.P. with blood when he died? I assumed those were initials for the man who killed him or something. It turns out it is “Crime and Punishment”, the title of the book in his library which contains the police file of Watney Little, a con man who just escaped from jail. This explains who the fake Carrington is, and the note on the file stating a blackmail explains that he was working for someone, presumably O’Riley. When you click in any other book other than this one you get a generic response. A very generic response, which suggest there is nothing to do with these books. Maybe is just me, but I can’t say this is good design.


I would say a police file of someone with such a long career would be easily noticed inside a book..

The other item is a book in Wolf’s that contains a garner and a note from Yvette (score +1). How can you find this book? You can’t. At least not easily. There are two columns of books and several rows. The trick here is that each column is split into two also, although with no graphical difference between the sections. What do I mean with that? If you look at one column and row, you get a close up of the books there and a description telling what that section is about. This is usually the same for a specific column and row except when you click on the lower row left column. If you click on the left of the “cell” you don’t see anything special.But if you click on the right, you can see a book will the hill facing inwards. I really think I can call this some foul play. There is no reason to thing clicking there will give a close up different that clicking anywhere else. Hell, there is no reason you should be clicking like a madman through this library. And the garner is not even given the dignity of triggering an interesting dialogue from neither Yvette or Wolf.


And the game won’t even let me show it to Myklos for laug… erm… for justice!!

Act 4. Museum of the Dead

Resume: I find it quite hard to resume what interesting things happen in this chapter. I guess that Yvette and the countess die, and Steve's disappearance is noteworthy but it seems like this chapter is completely devoid of meaning and seems an extension of the previous one.

What I discovered for myself: That there is another way to bug the game. After giving the meat to the beetles, there is a little scene that occurs at some point in the first screen of the basement that shows them carrying the meat through the door. If you happen to try to open the door before this animation is played, the game gets bugged and you are unable to continue. Another point for the ScummVM version. Other than that, there is nothing new to be learnt in this chapter.


They actually make another appearance during the cult of Ra
segment. That’s a long travel for meat eating bugs just to have lunch...

What I missed completely: Nothing.

Act 5. Rex Takes A Bite Out of Crime


Resume: A hooded figure chases Laura through the museum but she manages to avoid him, finds a sect of worshippers of Ra under the museum and befriends them, rescues Steve and solves the case by trapping the murderer between the jaws of the talking T-Rex at the dinosaur exhibit.


So let me get this straight. These people have built a complete effigy in the basement of museum with no one noticing its construction or the tens of people coming and going through a barred door or to the boiler room... 

What I discovered for myself: Nothing new. Wasn’t expecting to find it either.

What I missed completely
: Nothing.

Act 6. The Coroner’s Inquest

Resume: The coroner invites the police, all witnesses and the Laura’s boss to hear her explanation of the case. I rock.

What I discovered for myself and What I missed completely: I discovered that there are still a lot of things I don’t know. Here I was, after playing the game for a second time, using the hints provided by Ilmari and a walkthrough and I still was not able to explain why the things happened the way they happened. I mean, I am pretty certain that O’Riley was the one that killed almost everyone but the real Carrington. But there is a second question to every murder, the why. Why did he kill Dr. Carter? My guess is that is should be out of jealousy, as he was last seen flirting with Yvette and he was killed when he was supposed to meet her. But no, the walkthrough says I should answer “For financial gain”, and after checking with the coroner, that’s actually the right answer. How’s so? He had already stolen the dagger. What does he have to gain by killing Carter who has not given any sign of knowing who stole it? This is the central mystery of the game and it doesn’t even bother to provide an explanation for it. Not even for the red herrings in that murder such as the woman footprint or the egyptian ankh. And the plot suffers from it.


And the game pays homage to the pompous annoying guy!! Learn your lesson, kids. Be a prick. Someone might kill you but then you can be buried in the very same tombs you sacked!!

And the other murders? Ziggy, Ernie and Watney Little knew who stole the dagger, so they were a liability. And Yvette was a matter of jealousy. The countess? No idea. There is no indication that she knew anything about the burglary. Maybe she knew it had to be Watney Little, as she brought him in, but other than that, she didn’t know a thing about the relationship between Watney and O’Riley. And why not kill Steve? He simply knocks him out, presumably because he was with Yvette when O’Riley attacked but then… shouldn’t he be dead out of jealousy or to cover that murder? And why allow Laura to continue her inquiries through the game when he could have stopped her both violently or by imposing his position as the lead detective of the case.
 
Yes, really charming. You should be dead. Just saying...

I am sorry if I sound a bit bitchy, but the main purpose of a mystery story is to be logical. That we can understand what happened and why either by piecing the story by ourselves or because “the detective” gives a long explanation in the end and it sounds plausible. What differentiates a great detective story from a good one is that the reader can usually piece the clues together with the detective and not being surprised by information that was kept from him until the last pages. Hell, even the spoof comedy “Murder by death” makes fun of that trope. But it is not as if this game hides information. The information simply doesn’t exist, and no leap of logic could take you to understand why Carter was killed. As Carter’s assassination is the stone that sets this avalanche in motion, this weakens the whole plot. Add to that the things we don’t know why happen and the story weakens even more, and with that the game.

But going back to the game, I will have plenty of room to ramble in the final rating post, all ends well. Laura exposes his theory with the help of Tut, who appears as the star witness testifying he saw O’Riley kill his brothers, worshippers of Ra. I don’t know why on earth would he admit to being a member of a sect that makes human sacrifices to a police officer or the need of doing so, as it should be more than enough for Laura and Steve to testify how O’Riley tried to kill them before getting trapped on the mouth of the T-Rex. In any case, Wolf and Myklos get married, Laura gets promoted and married to Steve, Carter can rest in peace, Tut finally gets the dagger and nobody ever mentions the crazy sect under the museum nor are there any consequences. Oh, and no one murders Laura in her sleep. Game over. FINALLY.


At least I got my Scooby Doo line. Now I can end in peace

First playthrough: 8h30m
Second playthrough: 5h33m
Total Time: 14h03m

Missed Classic: Sorcerer - Just Getting Started

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Written by Joe Pranevich


Last week, we started Sorcerer, the fifth canonical Zork game. After a particularly vivid nightmare sequence where I was killed by hellhounds, snakes, locusts, and lightning, I awoke to find the guildhall empty and the Guild Master, Belboz, missing. Thanks to some security nymphs, I cannot leave by the front door to rescue him. Time is passing very quickly and if I fall asleep, I am captured by a demon and subjected to a fate worse than death. They say that even the longest journey begins with a single step; I’m not even making it that far.

Today’s post will be a bit shorter than usual. Several “real life” events conspired to prevent me from writing as much as I had hoped. I have made it farther in the game than I document here and I want to make sure that I’m taking the time to properly discuss the puzzles that I found, rather than rush through them to cover more ground with this post. On the bright side, this is a game worth savoring.

Needs more buttons.

Last week, I ended the session being stuck, so let’s take stock of my problems. There aren’t very many mysteries here left to solve so I expect that my problem is obvious to everyone but me:
  • I’m trapped in the guildhall. I only have a finite number of turns to figure out what to do before I become exhausted and fall asleep. As soon as I am asleep, I am captured and taken to the “Chamber of Living Death” 
  • If there’s a way out of that chamber, I cannot find it. You can’t even die properly in there and you have to restore to get out. 
  • A nymph blocks my exit via the front door because guild rules requires that at least one person be present in the event of an emergency. 
  • There is a trunk in the basement with four buttons on it: a black button with a picture of a star, a gray one depicting the moon, a red button with a bloody knife, and a purple button depicting a crown. Pushing them just gives me a clicking sound and the trunk is otherwise impervious to assault, magical or physical. 
  • I am carrying around a journal that is locked. The key that I thought went with it doesn’t work. 

The trunk is my best angle, but I’m convinced that it’s part of the copy protection since the same colors appear in the Infotator in the entries about different mythological animals. My magic isn’t helping me here either since the parrot does not have enough of a brain for “yomin” (read minds) and I never properly die in the Chamber of Living Death so my “gaspar” (prevent death) spell is useless. Even “vezza” to see the future just shows me the fort with the flagpole from my dream. I even re-read the whole manual again to see if I find a clue, but I do not.

TIL: Woodchucks and groundhogs are the same thing.

Rather than do a “Request for Assistance”, I start the game over from scratch and play the whole opening sequence again. I search the dreamworld for anything that I might have missed then, when I find nothing new, I try the guildhall.

One lucky break comes pretty quickly: this time around, I put the matchbook in the mailbox earlier in the day. I didn’t count turns, but this time I did it before the doorbell rang and before the Popular Enchanting magazine arrived. Doing that solves a puzzle I didn’t even know I was missing as now a “vilstu” potion comes in the mail along with our magazine. They work fast! The potion claims to reduce the need for breathing and that sounds like it could come in handy later.

Waiting a few days and playing the whole sequence over again was the solution to my other problem as well, though it is (in retrospect) very obvious. As I expected, the trunk is my ultimate objective and opening it is part of the copy protection. The combination to the trunk is the colors in the Infotator, just as I guessed. The specific animal name is given in the journal, but I had to open it first. So, how did I do it? I held the key and typed “open journal”. That simple! As I dig deeper however, I am nearly positive there is a bug here. Even though “open journal” works and the game helpfully says that it assumes you mean with the key, typing “open journal with key” does not work. Last week, I had been trying “unlock journal” and similar which do not work. Voltgloss commented in the last post that his version (older than mine) does not have this bug. Not a huge deal, but it threw me off and now I’m going to be worried about parser issues the whole game. I’m glad I did it all again, but not that glad. At least I got the “vilstu” potion, now!

The journal exposits the major plotline of the game: Belboz has recently become aware of a demon, Jeearr, whose powers could destroy the kingdom. He decided to investigate on his own, but after that the entries in the journal seem to be in a different language and handwriting. Why Jeearr, if he did possess Belboz, would continue writing in his journal, I am not sure. Just force of habit?? The inside cover has the detail that I am looking for: the current code is rotgrub!

Like mad cow disease, but worse.

I look up the entry on rotgrubs and resolve to never again eat uncooked food in the Zork universe. I am violating my rule a bit because I am using the gray box’s manual rather than the original Infotator, but I couldn’t find a replica in time to give me the full experience. I learn that its colors are gray, red, grey, purple, and red. Entering that combination on the trunk opens it and reveals a mouldy scroll: “aimfiz”, transport yourself to someone else’s location. With that, “aimfiz belboz” is now the strangest command I have ever typed into a text adventure. As I was preparing to draft this post, I replayed this section and found that I could not open the trunk even with the right combination. My guess is that there is some other check to ensure that you explored the guildhall before you go…Exactly what it is though, I have no idea.

The “aimfiz” spell lands me right back to where I was in my dream, down to being chased by a hellhound. But where is Belboz? He must be nearby, but I have no idea where. I flee northeast to escape the beast (as before, it refuses to leave its forest) and that room is the same too. I climb down into the snake pit, but here’s where I find my first new thing: I can now enter the dark rooms below. I pass a slimy room and climb down into a crater. There’s a ton of directions to explore, so I pick randomly and discover a few things nearby:
  • A room with a chasm just to the west. I die when I try to jump across.
  • The entrance to an amusement park to the southwest! It’s called “Bozbarland” and I need one zorkmid to get in. Unfortunately, it seems that enchanters don’t carry wallets and I’m going to have to go in another day. I’m just shocked it’s still open. Didn’t the Empire collapse hundreds of years ago? 
  • A hall of carvings to the south with an impressive-looking dragon carving in the center. 

Off to the northeast, the passage connects with a highway and certainly more adventure. Even so, this is where I am going to leave things tonight. Join me next week as we explore this new and different corner of the GUE.

Time played: 1 hr 5 min
Total time: 2 hr 20 min
Inventory: spell book, scribbled note, small key, calendar, amulet, infotator, journal
Spell book: gnusto, vezza, pulver, izyuk, yomin, rezrov, frotz, gaspar, meef

Lure of the Temptress: Won!

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by Alex


Well, I’ve done it. I’ve come to the ignominious end of an ignominious game. Upon getting Diermot smuggled into the castle, it didn’t take long to finish Lure of the Temptress, mainly because there just wasn’t much to do.

Let’s start from where we left off last post: Diermot had hid inside of a barrel, taking Ewan’s place, and was carried by a Skorl into the castle’s wine cellar. TBD helpfully pointed out that having “one’s turn in a barrel” is a rather vulgar Navy joke, and I like to imagine that Diermot did somehow participate in this rather nautical way of relieving tension.

But I digress.


There are a bunch of empty casks in the wine cellar that Diermot can’t do anything with, and a staircase to the right. It doesn’t take too long before a young boy comes downstairs to presumably wander around and bump into Diermot every time he tries to do anything.

It turns out that this boy is Minnow, Morkus’ son, whom Morkus sol to the Skorl for beer money.


That’s right: Morkus’ son is a slave of the Skorl. Gwyn mentioned this during my last play session, but I didn’t note it in my last post. It doesn’t matter, anyway. You’d think this would be a huge plot point, but nope. It’s just dropped, Diermot can’t even bring it up to Morkus, or to anybody else, for that matter. It’s just tossed off as an aside even though we’re talking about child slavery.

Yawn. Child slavery ho-hum.

Diermot can do a few things with Minnow: One is to have him tell the Skorl guarding the tower that Selena wants to see him, which Minnow tells Diermot is a bad idea. See, the Skorl is only interested in one thing: Drinking. And he’s so trashed he won’t be able to make it up the stairs, but Minnow tells the Skorl anyway.

Nothing happens.

Diermot can then have Minnow tell the Skorl that there’s someone in the basement. Minnow agrees and tells Diermot to hide somewhere.

I try to hide where it looks dark, since I can’t move Diermot behind anything, and then this happens:

It’s a visual metaphor, see? Diermot represents the player and the Skorl is the game.

So far, this has been the only way in Lure of the Temptress I’ve found to die. So I restore and try to explore my surroundings a little more before telling Minnow to lure the Skorl into the wine cellar. Clearly I’m missing something.


Upstairs is a kitchen. There’s a carcass of something on the table, but all Diermot can do is grab a disgusting chunk of smelly fat. On the oven to the right, despite being able to look at all the stuff, all Diermot can do is grab the tongs. The description of them indicates that they’re likely used to move hot coals to and from the range, but can Diermot do anything with any of the other objects?

Nope.

Still, inventory items usually bespeak of puzzles, even though I’m lugging around a statue, a flask of water, and a sprig of herb that thus far serve no function whatsoever. But a man can dream, can’t he?


Beyond the kitchen is a hallway with stairs to the left and a door to the right. I head through the door first and end up in the Skorl’s dining area.


Yeah . . . I back out of here and go up the stairs.


The stairs lead to a walkway above the dining hall. I overhear the sole conscious Skorl ordering Minnow to get him some wine. I wonder—could this be a good hiding place? Is this puzzle that simple? Knowing how Lure of the Temptress works, probably.

I explore the rest of this catwalk. It continues for one more screen before leading outside, where a raised drawbridge bars Diermot’s path to the tower beyond.

This is a rather pretty screenshot.

So I have some objectives, at least:
  • Find a way past the Skorl guard
  • Find a way to lower the drawbridge
  • Find Selena and use the Eye of Gethryn on her

Sounds like some actual puzzles!

To solve the first one, yes, the answer really is to just to stand on the catwalk after telling Minnow to alert the Skorl that someone’s in the basement. Once the Skorl leaves, I just walked back downstairs, through the dining hall, to the conveniently located drawbridge operating mechanism beyond.


After finishing the game, I consulted a walkthrough. It turns out I could have used the tongs on a cask in the wine cellar which would have started the wine flowing, even though the game told me that every flask was empty, but what the hell. Then I could have hidden somewhere (Where? Beats me.) and watched the Skorl drink himself into a stupor. But it didn’t matter.

Anyway, in the drawbridge room, there is a lever and a winch attached to the mechanism. Neither will budge, though the rusty lever will be operable once Diermot rubs that disgusting fat all over it.

Still, nothing happens. It didn’t take too long for Minnow to wander into the room. I tell him to pull the lever while Diermot operates the winch. It took a bit of timing, but we eventually lowered the drawbridge.


It’s another example of the “ordering allies around” mechanic that could have been used so much more and to so much greater effect in this game. But nope: this is the fourth and final time it comes into play. By Minnow! See you never!

Upstairs, the drawbridge is down and another man-bear-pig comes at Diermot for Lure of the Temptress’ second go-round at absolutely tension-free combat.

Yawn.

Unlike the first such beast, this one didn’t seem susceptible to head shots. So I poked it in the belly a few times until it too crumbled into dust.


My path was clear, so I moseyed on into the tower and came face to face with the woman who started this whole mess: Selena!


So what do you think happens? Do they trade quips and barbs? Does she try to zap Diermot, for him to need some inventory object and quick thinking to get out of this jam? Does the demon possessing Selena transform her into some foul beast that Diermot has to once again fight off with his axe, all the while not hurting the possessed enchantress so that he can dispel her?

Nah. It’s an automatic sequence that requires no player input whatsoever.




So Selena changes into a scorpion-woman, Diermot dodges her a few times, and then chucks the Eye of Gethryn at her, dispelling the enchantment. Game over.

At least the animation was nice.

Now, this is like if in Quest for Glory I, you don’t have to do anything when you finally reach the enchanted Elsa posing as the brigand leader. In both the original and the VGA remake, you have to first have gathered the ingredients for the healer to have made a dispel potion (you know, a puzzle) and then make sure you use it on Elsa before she runs you through. The Lure of the Temptress approach would be you get the potion after finding one stupid thing, the game doesn’t let you advance until you do this, and then automatically finishing the final confrontation for you.

And now, the ending:



Yup, two paragraphs of text. At least we know that Minnow got out alright, but wait: Goewin ended up with Luthern?

???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????


You mean this Goewin who had this to say about this Luthern when Diermot asked her about him in the caverns?




And didn’t Goewin, as recently as last post, tell Diermot this?


Who cares? Honestly, what does it matter? Lure of the Temptress is such a rushed, poorly written, unfinished game brimming with unused potential that it makes me want to scream.

Here’s what the developers could have done:
  • Created some kind of side-quest where Diermot could have won Goewin’s heart.
  • Had there been an endgame sequence where Diermot had to choose the right response to Selena, or even had to dodge her magic spells or whatever, before finding the right time to use the Eye of Gethryn on her.
  • Had Selena and Diermot end up falling in love in an unlikely pairing that would have at least been a little entertaining. Maybe they could have seeded references to this throughout, foreshadowing their ultimate union.
  • Had the rest of Turnvale’s citizens be involved with an uprising—an uprising Diermot helped Luthern foment—while Diermot was in the castle. I mean, they’re all friends with Ultar the barbarian! Couldn’t he have caused some damage?
  • The dragon in the caves could have been used to fight the Skorl, as hinted at in the game itself. Maybe this, coupled with the aforementioned uprising, could have been the distraction Diermot needed to get into the castle.

And these are ideas I literally just came up with off the top of my head with barely a second or two of thought.

But nah. Plot threads dangle like the dangly things on the bottom of a jellyfish like a great big unsatisfying mess. A great big unsatisfying mess that stings.

I do not recommend that anyone play Lure of the Temptress. We’ll see how it fares in the PISSED rating next post, but I can’t imagine it will do too well. The graphics are pretty nice, at least. Beyond that, we’ll see.

And one final thing before I go: what happened to Ratpouch?!

Let’s see this again, because I like watching Diermot get punched.

Inventory: Broken glass, knife, tinderbox, flask of water, diary, statue, Eye of Gethryn, sprig, axe, 4 groats, tongs

Session Time: 30 minutes
Total Time: 7 hours, 25 minutes of my life that I will never get back

The Dagger of Amon Ra - Final Rating

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By Deimar

Re-reading my previous posts about this game, it might seem like I loathe it. You could see me bitching about it from the introduction until the end of my second playthrough. But the truth is not so one-sided. I can say that I have actually enjoyed my trip even in spite of the multiple problems this game has. The game possesses some charm, although it kicks in later in the game, with the first two opening acts being too slow in my opinion. Even on my second playthrough I was delighted when discovering new things. Speaking of which, although my first and longer playthrough was on ScummVM, it is only fair to judge the DosBox version. Let’s begin.


Knowing what you are in for, I wouldn’t be so optimistic


Puzzles and Solvability
This is a weird category for this game. In Colonel’s Bequest there are like two puzzles worth the name. In this game, there are even less, bordering on none. Most of the time, problems have a very direct solution. Need to cut a wire? Get a wire-cutter. Need to catch a snake? Get a snake-catcher. There are no multi-layered puzzles and no alternative solutions. For example, there is a key encrusted in a painting and the only way of getting it out is using the dagger of Amon Ra. I am pretty sure you could use plenty of things to free a key in such a position. The most complicated puzzle in the game is getting the bulb to light the stairs to the basement, and even then it is just a matter of waiting for it to cool down.


Then there is that puzzle where you trick a boy with a worthless signed baseball

Then, there is the problem of how you encounter items needed to solve puzzles. This is especially glaring during the first act, but it is present to a lesser degree in the following ones. You HAPPEN to get in the taxi that has a ticket for a night dress. You HAPPEN to find a ticket for a meal and then find a food vendor who accepts the ticket, a free-food ticket that was owned by a homeless man no less. I will refer you to Alex ‘s beautiful entry on game protagonists to understand the difference between an active protagonist and a passive one. This game is a clear example of a passive protagonist disguised as an active one. If might seem Laura does things of her own will. But if we get a closer look, it really isn’t so. The player can't decide what to do in each predicament. There are no clues to follow most of the time or paths to take in order to solve a specific problem. You only wander around and stumble upon the solution to her current predicament. The only times she does something active is when waiting for a event to happen at a specific location. If you can call that active.

And lucky for me, I didn’t even encounter any of the dead man walking scenarios. But you could find yourself at the ending without the cheese or enough snake-oil. Apparently, in the floppy version, if you don’t find Steve’s boot in the medieval exhibit, you lock yourself out of finishing the game.

All in all, It simply doesn’t feel like a very well designed game. In my opinion, that for the purposes of this post is the only one that matters, this game deserves a low score on this category, as the lack of puzzles or agency really should be punished.

Rating: 2
Interface and Inventory

The game presents a standard Sierra interface and inventory so there is not that much to say here. The interface is quite functional and easy to use. So in overall, it is quite good but for a problem. The conversation system is infamous. I really, really hate it with all my soul. It just seems like no one playtested this thing and thought “hey, I really think having to traverse this notebook, having to click several times to ask anything and not keeping track of what has been asked to every character might not be a good idea”. Those are very small quality of life improvements that would have made the experience so much better. There are also the big quality of life improvements that should have been made such as the possibility of saving anywhere you want, or at least more often than you are allowed now, or having both text and speech activated.

And then you have the bugs. Game breaking bugs that quit the game or bugs that prevent you from some clues or vital information. You have every flavor. That’s why I am giving this two points less in this category than other Sierra games of the time.

Rating: 3


How much I loathe thee? Let me count the ways. 

Story and Setting

This being a mystery game, this should be the strongest point. But sadly, it is not. The plot has more holes than a minefield. Most of the time, you don’t know why things are happening. An early example of this is when you find the dagger in the gift shop during chapter 2. What’s the point of that? You never discover why the dagger is there at that moment; how the dagger is moved to another location or why; why there is an egyptian cult underneath the museum; why have they glued the key to Carrington’s trunk to a paint…


Why is it that no one has noticed a person carrying
a very suspicious statue to the hall of paintings...

I really think that in a detective story the player should be capable of tracking the movement of everyone, of every relevant object. There must be a method behind every action, even if we don’t understand it until much latter. But this just seems like a half-baked attempt at a mystery. I won’t even enter to discuss the motivations of the main antagonist, as I discussed them at length in my previous post.

However, while you are playing the game almost none of those things matter. It is only after you finish it that you realize its emptiness. The game manages to get a hold of you, promising an interesting story and makes you keep playing. Granted, it never delivers on that promise but that’s not the point here, The point is that the story is good enough that if you are not paying too much attention to the plot holes, you can enjoy it immensely. At least until the end when everything is discovered and you start to really think about the plot.

And let me mention that the setting is another thing completely. Sierra managed to perfectly capture the image of the 20s that has reached us through popular culture. A certain mix of nostalgia and naiveness. Every place in this game is crammed with details, information that rarely comes into play but manages to give the feeling or really being in a museum in the 20s or in the middle of New York and helps getting in the mood.

Rating: 5


And all of that leads to a satisfying ending

Sound and graphics

This game is gorgeous. Really. The close ups are absolutely amazing; the animations are fluid and clear on its intent; the character design is great and memorable; and the backgrounds are detailed, rich and a joy to see. If I have to say something negative is that sometimes it is not clear what exits are available in a particular room, but that a very minor peeve. I think this is one of the best games this year in this category.

Regarding sound design, I have to comment on the voices. Boy am I glad we have turned to professional voice actors and production. It is really not that bad, but you can notice they are not professionals and that breaks immersion pulling you out of the game. But other than that I don’t have many complains. The music is adequate although it doesn’t cause an impression and the sounds are well chosen.

Rating: 8


Even the dagger looks spectacular

Environment and Atmosphere

We can split the game into two separate environments. First we have the city of New York. And you get what you expect from it. A big city, full of people walking minding their businesses, cars, shops, etc… That is, until you get out of the first screen after leaving the tribune and realize how empty the city feels, with the complete opposite of what I just described. It doesn’t even feel like a city but more of a net of interconnected locations with a few actors.


There are even more cars if you take the time to look sideways before crossing

But the museum is another story completely. It does seem like you are in a party, with people dancing, talking and having a good time. Then you have the loneliness after everything has been said and done and there is no one left after the party and you are walking through the empty halls, late at night.

It is not an original atmosphere, but it is something. And like I said, it manages to convey that idea of the 20s shared by popular culture.

Rating: 6


And you have to love the car designs that are only
different because of the shape of their windows....

Dialogue and acting


If you like stereotypes, this is your game. Really. Characterization takes the back seat to stereotypes. When the most memorable thing you can say about a character is her nationality or role in the game (the hot guy, the slutty girl, the nazgerman, the Irish…). And that obviously affects the dialogue. The pro is that each character has a distinctive voice and style, with the possible exception of fake Carrington, who must have been away the day the wizard gave personalities away. The con is that each character is completely one-dimensional and that their traits are played continuously.

However, in the middle of all that stereotyping, there is some hidden brilliant dialogue. Like when O’Riley is talking with Yvette about how easy is to corrupt yourself being a cop. Or the quips Laura uses whenever she is attacked, usually for being a woman.

I have mixed feelings in this category, as the characters’ single trait is thrown at you so much it starts to get bothering but overall I feel the game’s dialogue is well written.

Rating: 7


Speaking of the devil… The number one culprit of being one-dimensional...

2+3+5+8+6+7 divided by 0.6 is 51.66, making 52 the rating for The Dagger of Amon Ra.



Seeing the other games in this range, I think this one has been fairly rated. It is not a bad game by any stretch, and it is funny and entertaining. But there are better games that should be played way before getting to this one.

CAP Distribution:

100 CAPs for Deimar:

  • Blogger Award - 100 CAPs - For blogging his way through the game for our enjoyment

80 CAPs for Joe Pranevich

  • Classic Blogger Award - 50 CAPs - For suffering the surprise ending of Infidel for our macabre enjoyment
  • Game Book Award - 15 CAPs - For his take on Zork game books
  • Unfinished Business Award - 15 CAPs - For finishing Adventure instead of Ilmari

55 CAPs for Voltgloss

  • Classic Blogger Award - 50 CAPs - For blogging his way through Oo-Topos for our enjoyment
  • The Oil Carrier Award - 5 CAPs  - For telling Joe an easier way to light his fire

20 CAPs for Reiko:

  • That meddling kid award - 20 CAPs - For guessing the game’s score

20 CAPs for Illmari

  • Young detective award - 10 CAPs - For providing tips to help me uncover the mystery
  • Mystical Egyptian Abilities Award - 10 CAPs - For guessing the correct score for Infidel

10 CAPs for Kus of the Valley

  • Psychic Prediction Award - 10 CAPs - For guessing the correct score of Oo-Topos

5 CAPs for Laukku

  • Old school detective award - 5 CAPs - For providing information regarding differences between the DosBox version and the ScummVM

Missed Classic: Sorcerer - Going Underground

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Written by Joe Pranevich



Last week, we made our first real trip back into the Great Underground Empire with Sorcerer. After learning that the demon Jeearr had taken control of the guildmaster, it was up to me to teleport to his location and rescue him… because everyone else went on a picnic. Using a handy Infotator that we nicked from the guildmaster’s room (and included in the game packaging), we cracked the code to a trunk in the guild basement which contained an “aimfiz” scroll, a teleporter. Moments later, we were halfway around the world and near the entrance to the sprawling Great Underground Empire. In a few minutes of exploring, I managed to find an underground amusement park and a quick death at the bottom of a chasm. It’s time to explore.

I want to pause before we get started because, as some of you know, Seastalker is the next game in the series. Written by Stu Galley and Jim Lawrence, it is Infocom’s first juvenile adventure game. Mr. Lawrence was an accomplished master of juvenile fiction, having written more than fifty books before the 1980s, not to mention comics and radio plays. He loved to write adventure fiction and contributed books to Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, James Bond, Buck Rogers, and other series… none of which I read as a kid. To help me get into the spirit of his work before starting into Seastalker, I am reading a few of those books, starting with 1957’s The Ghost of Skeleton Rock, a Hardy Boys adventure. I have put up a bonus post including my thoughts on that book and may do one or two more depending on timing and my ability to juggle the interactive and traditional varieties of fiction.

I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself. There’s a Great Underground Empire to explore, after all.


Fun and Games

As I sat down to narrate this post, I fell immediately into the old Zork challenge of trying to describe an “open world” game like this. To keep it simple, I’m going to try to describe the world in sections even though my own explorations were a bit less organized than this implies. My first discoveries on heading underground were a chasm that I could not jump across and an amusement park that I could not enter. As soon as I started this time, I remembered that I was an idiot and had a flying spell so getting across the chasm was no problem. Just on the other side is a “money tree” that sprouts zorkmid coins as fruit. I pluck one and the tree disappeared, but at least I have some currency. With that, I can enter the amusement park.

I pay my entrance see and discover that the park is a basic midway with five different areas scattered around the perimeter:
  • A flume ride. In the southeast corner of the midway, we enter a log boat and ride it (using “wait”) around a track including a hill with a splash at the end. At one point, the boat passes through a coal mine being tended by troglodytes. I can’t seem to find a way to get out of the boat without being killed but there may be a hidden passage into the mine this way. 
  • An arcade. The southwest corner has an entrance to a small arcade. Inside is a game where you throw a ball at some bunnies moving around a track. There’s a prize to be won if we manage to hit a bunny, but I am nowhere near good enough.
  • A casino. The western edge of the midway houses a casino with a single working (but free) slot machine. It’s not quite a “fruit machine” as most of the symbols are references from Zork I: a pot of gold, a hot pepper sandwich, and garlic. (A fourth symbol is a bowl of stew and I have no idea what that could be a reference to.) I pull the handle around fifteen times but never manage to get a win. Is it rigged?
  • A haunted house. The northeast of the midway has the most “puzzle-like” of the various rides, but I can’t seem to figure it out. We enter an unnaturally dark room, even beyond what my “frotz” spell can deal with. Anything we drop disappears, even if it’s glowing. There doesn’t seem to be any exits, but it feels like it could be a maze. Every now and then we see shapes passing through us or the quick flash of a rollercoaster car (more on that in a moment). I can’t help but feel this area is important, but I’ll have to come back later with a more powerful light. 
  • A roller coaster. The final ride in the park is in the northeast corner: a roller coaster. It’s essentially the flume again with a vehicle that we have to enter and then just type “wait” to enjoy the scenery. Unlike before, this one passes through the haunted house but if there’s a way off without dying, I cannot find it. 

The flume ride, “Log Jammer”, at Kennywood Park near Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania (image by Breemik08 / Wikimedia Commons)

This area reminds me of the amusement parks of my youth. If I can pause for another unnecessary digression, I want to mourn the loss of my favorite flume ride from childhood: Kennywood’s “The Log Jammer”. It closed recently after four decades of fun. Built by Arrow Development in 1975, it has many of the features of the flume in this game including the big splash at the end. Dozens were built like it all over the world, so it wasn’t a “special” flume ride. It occupied no special place in history, but it does have a special place in my childhood. It will be missed.

East of the amusement park is a room with carvings, especially a large one of a sleeping dragon on the south wall. It seems important but there’s nothing obvious I can do here yet.

The Ruins

To the northeast of the park and across a large crater is a highway. This is where I stopped last week, although it was a bit premature. Following the highway leads to a toll gate being guarded by a sleeping gnome. His toll is one zorkmid, but I already spent by only coin to get into the amusement park. I decide against restoring yet, but I’ll try to remember to come back here if I get stuck.

Just above the highway is the entrance to a dungeon. I didn’t realize it immediately, but it is the dungeon beneath the ruins from my dream sequence. (I also dreamed about a fort and initially thought they were two parts of the same area, but they are not.) There’s a torture chamber in the dungeon, complete with a “flaxo” potion that claims to cause “exquisite torture”. I’ll pass on that for now, but it sounds like it could come in handy. Just to the north is a pit of bones, presumably what happened to all of the torture room’s occupants. There's an exit high above but I cannot get there even with the flying spell. I’ll need to find another way.


It bites!

Great Aboveground Empire

After exhausting my exploration of the underground area, I return to the surface to map out what I can find above. Much of the area is exactly the same as my dream, down to the locusts and snake and minefield portions. I have more spells now, of course, but none of them seem particularly suited to surviving any of the obstacles. Even the “obvious” step of flying above the minefield doesn’t work because these are magic mines and they detect that I am there anyway. Boom.

In the fort to the northeast (separate from the ruin a bit to the south), I can lower the flag of Quendor but otherwise don’t find anything special. Is lowering the flag a sign of surrender? Elsewhere in the fort, there is a barracks and an armoury, both empty, plus a gun emplacement that still has an original cannon. It appears to be loaded with scroll, but I am bitten by something when I reach in to take one. Why were they firing scrolls around the countryside? I assume this is another puzzle, but I do not know what is biting me. A trapped grue? Something else?

I also should mention that I keep dying as I explore. Several locations such as walking near the river, crossing the drawbridge, etc. all seem to have a low chance of killing me each time that I pass. I have “gaspar” active so I am resurrected each time, but I still restore just in case there are side-effects. (In the previous Zork titles, death let you return to the game but usually in a “dead man walking” situation with no way to beat the game.)


Not quite as mighty now...

A River Runs Past It

At this point, I am stuck. I have explored all of the sections above and below ground and I resort to experimenting with my spells and trying new things. (Yes, I forgot about the toll booth on the highway and that I could restore to get a zorkmid.) It did not take too long before I was trying to fly over everything, wilting all of the plants, and such. While I was trying to explore the moat, I realized that getting in was death. If I cast the “pulver” spell, it would empty momentarily and then re-full. That gave me an idea! I went to the river and cast the spell there instead. This time, the river dried up for several turns and allowed me to walk on and explore it.

In the mostly dry riverbed, I can explore northwest or southeast. To the northwest is a pool of un-evaporated water containing some tentacled monster. It kills me. Downriver, we reach a waterfall that I do not have any obvious way to get down. I don’t get too far, but just across the river is a “bat cave” with a bunch of bat-themed objects: a “fweep” spell which turns me into a bat, a “blort” potion which lets me see in the dark, and even piles of guano (shades of Zork I!). The spell and potion both seem useful, but I was hoping for a Giant Lighted Lucite Map of Gotham City. While I explored, the river filled back up and there’s no way out the way I came in. Fortunately, there is a one-way path down to the Pit of Bones and I can escape that way. That must have been the high-up opening that I couldn’t access before.

Since I can already see in the dark, what could the potion be used for? I try using it in the haunted house, but it makes no difference. Whatever magical darkness is in there is pretty powerful magical darkness. Only the amulet seems to really glow in there; is that another clue that the endgame will have a connection to the amusement park? Is the demon Jeearr hiding out in a haunted house? How tacky! Either way, I am stuck again and resume randomly poking things.



Random Explorations

What comes next is difficult to describe in any narrative sense, but I was able to solve a few scattered puzzles in rapid succession. It all started when I read through all of the animals in the Infotator; I had previously thought that it was only useful for copy protection, but when reading through I realized that there was a hint to what might be biting me in the cannon: a yipple. A “yipple” is this universe’s version of a mimic and they are allergic to animal waste. By sprinkling in a little guano, I could get them to leave and reveal the one real scroll of the lot: a “yonk” spell. That one lets you temporarily increase the power of another spell, but it’s too complex to copy so I will need to choose carefully.

After that, I discovered that somehow there was an aqua potion hidden in the flag. I have no idea how it got there since the flag was fluttering nicely and it wasn’t immediately apparent when I took it down. That potion temporarily increases muscle coordination. I took that to the amusement park and used it to really nail one of those bunnies with a ball, winning a “malyon” spell as a prize. That one lets you give life to an inanimate object. While I am there, I pull the slot machine a few more times and I finally win a coin! I guess I just needed to be patient.

The dragon carving seems like the right place to use the “malyon” spell, but it doesn’t work completely. The dragon seems to shiver for a moment before turning back into rock. This seems like the right place to use “yonk” to give me an extra-powerful “malyon” spell, but I’m going to hold that thought for a bit. The original Enchanter offered plenty of dead ends if you misused the one-time spells, so I’ll try combinations like that once I run out of other things to try.



With my shiny new coin, I finally remember that I have a toll booth to explore and hand the gnome my zorkmid. That leads to a new area including a small hut with a fireplace and the entrance to a maze of glass. There’s a statue there which I can “malyon”, but the king just runs off. I restore back just in case that was stupid. I finally enter the glass maze (hinted at in the manual), but die immediately when I walk into a room with no floor. I think that’s a sign I should end my explorations for the day.

Don’t forget that you can also read my bonus post on The Ghost of Skeleton Rock and get a jump on the fun that might be Seastalker.

Time played: 2 hr 45 min
Total time: 5 hr 5 min

Inventory: spell book, scribbled note, small key, calendar, amulet, infotator, journal, flaxo potion, blort potion, yonk scroll
Spell book: gnusto, vezza, pulver, izyuk, yomin, rezrov, frotz, gaspar, meef, fweep, malyon

Quest for Glory I: So You Want To Be A Hero (VGA Remake, 1992) - Introduction

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Written by TBD.

Quest for Glory I: So You Want To Be A Hero is a remake of the 1989 game Hero's Quest: So You Want To Be A Hero. If you want to know why the name was changed to Quest for Glory, check out The Trickster's introduction post for the original Hero's Quest.

STAB DRAGON IN THIGH?

Unlike many fans of old Adventure Games, I'm not a fan of the Quest for Glory series. Don't get me wrong, I'm not NOT a fan either. I've just never actually played them. I own them since I bought them a few years ago, but haven't yet given them a go. I originally thought I'd tried this game once, but seeing as Steam's telling me I've played a total of 18 minutes of the series, and that was after I loaded it up to take some screenshots for this Introduction and download the manual, I was probably mistaken.

I likely first heard about the series once I got access to the internet in the mid-late 90s and I know I heard good things, but I was in the mindset of not going out of my way to find Sierra games, having played some of them and not thinking them any better than 'okay games'. If digital distribution were around then, I might have given them a go earlier, but here we are now – a Quest for Glory newbie wading into the waters with the VGA remake of the first Quest For Glory– it seems appropriate, or interesting, or apt, or... something.

I considered re-reading Trickster's posts on the previous games, but felt it would be more interesting to avoid them and see a brand-new-to-the-series person's take on the remake. So here goes...

Like the other Sierra VGA remakes (apart from King's Quest) as well as updating the graphics and sound, this game replaces the text parser with a mouse-driven point and click interface. This makes me happy, as I get frustrated when I try to play with a text parser these days. And I thought you were supposed to get more patient with age

Quest for Glory I was the last of the Sierra games remade in this manner, largely because they weren't as cheap to produce as Sierra had hoped, and didn't make enough money to be worth it.

Having said that, from what I've read this is the only one of the remakes to actually make a profit, so perhaps Sierra axed the remakes too soon.

The Coles

Once again with the Quest for Glory series, chief amongst the developers of this game were 'The Coles” which is apparently a term. They're currently hard at work on the Quest for Glory spiritual successor, Hero-U!

And this title comes with a fortune in gold and a beautiful princess, yes?

The manual continuously uses the pronoun 'he' when referring to my character, so I'm guessing playing as a female won't be an option.

WHO SHOULD I BE?

The big question before starting is, Who Should I Be?

Fighter, Magic User or Thief?

Once again, I'm leaving the choice up to you. For the next six days there'll be a little poll at the top left of our page where you can choose who I play as. I can be a fighter, magic user or thief. If you really want to read about the differences in puzzle solutions, feel free to choose the 'play as all three' option. Seeing as I have no idea how different the characters play, I'll leave my future in your capable hands. I'll definitely play at least the first section as all three characters for comparison's sake (and so I can start the game before the poll is completed)

The manual recommends I play as a Fighter during my first Quest for Glory adventure, which naturally makes me prefer one of the other archetypes - don't try to tell me what to do, game manual - I'm a free-thinking individual (who only makes choices based on the opinion of the majority! - Ed)

Here's what the manual says about the different characters:
  • The Fighter's weapon is his sword and his best defense is his shield.
  • The Magic User relies on intelligence and casting spells and his best defense is avoiding close combat.
  • The Thief uses skills, stealth and agility. His weapon is the dagger and he prefers throwing it from a distance. His best defense in combat is dodging.

Based on the manual's descriptions, being a jack-of-all-trades isn't really an option, as it will cost 15 skill points to learn the minimum 5 points of an unknown skill (like lock-picking for a fighter)

The abilities and skills are as follows:

ABILITIES
  • STRENGTH is important in performing physical activites, especially combat. The Fighter must be strong to be effective.
  • INTELLIGENCE will enable the Magic User to successfully learn and cast spells, and will benefit all characters when engaged in mental activities, such as out-thinking opponents in combat.
  • AGILITY is important during combat and vital to lock-picking and stealth. The Thief cannot prosper without agility.
  • VITALITY determines how much damage a character can sustain and how quickly he will recover from damage and strenous physical activity. High vitality is particularly useful to the Fighter.
  • LUCK can aid you in many subtle and mysterious ways, and is especially important to the Thief.
  • MAGIC is the basic skill required to learn and cast magic spells.

SKILLS:
  • WEAPON USE – ability to hit in combat
  • PARRY – ability to block using weapon or shield
  • DODGE – ability to avoid a blow by moving out of the way
  • STEALTH – ability to hide from sight
  • PICK LOCKS – a lock-pick or Thief's tool kit is needed to use this skill
  • THROWING – accurately hitting a target with a small object
  • CLIMB – ability to... climb things.

AUTOMATICALLY SET SKILLS
  • HEALTH – how much damage you can take before dying
  • STAMINA – your energy level – you fight better when stamina is high
  • MAGIC – how much magic you have available to cast spells

So, it seems the skills should be assigned as follows...
  • Fighter will want STRENGTH, VITALITY, WEAPON USE and PARRY
  • Thief will use AGILITY, LUCK, DODGE, STEALTH, PICK LOCKS, THROWING AND CLIMB
  • Magic User should take INTELLIGENCE and MAGIC.

Seems a bit lop-sided, making a Magic-User easiest to plan for and Thief hardest, but I could be extremely wrong in my interpretations, particularly as the manual suggests a Fighter will be the easiest for new players.

I also note that skills and abilities improve with practice as long as I have at least 5 points assigned to them.

Seems a little daunting, but I'm sure a Sierra game won't let me get into an unwinnable situation by making a decision based on limited information

The manual makes a point of telling me to play the game as my character would, and that my character selection also determines much about the sorts of obstacles I'll encounter and how I'll overcome them. I'm very excited to see how this concept works out in practice.

Feel free to get me to play the 'hardest' character, or the 'easiest' character, or even the 'funniest' or 'stupidest' character.

As for which skills I choose, I'll just choose the ones that seem most useful or fun. I'm not too concerned if I make a 'bad' character. I'm happy to make mistakes that make the game harder. 

Though, as always, if I've completely dead-ended myself by incorrect skill choices or in-game choices or oversights, let me know with coded hints so I don't spend hours searching for a solution that doesn't exist.

As always in the introduction post, you get the chance to bet on a puzzle I'll need help solving (I've needed help in every game I've played so far except one – thank you for being ridiculously easy, Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2!)

And of course, get your score guesses in. The original Hero's Quest was for a time the top game on this blog, and still sits proudly at number 5 with 68. The sequel received a 66, and we'll be playing the third game in the near future. Will this remake do better or worse than the original? Will my lack of nostalgia help or harm my opinion of the game? Will I finish the game without asking for assistance? Will I give my character a silly name? These questions and many more will be answered over the next few weeks/months/years/decades.

Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There's a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read ithere before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no CAPs will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. As this is an introduction post, it's an opportunity for readers to bet 10 CAPs (only if they already have them) that I won't be able to solve a puzzle without putting in an official Request for Assistance: remember to use ROT13 for betting. If you get it right, you will be rewarded with 50 CAPs in return. It's also your chance to predict what the final rating will be for the game. Voters can predict whatever score they want, regardless of whether someone else has already chosen it. All correct (or nearest) votes will go into a draw.

Lure of the Temptress: Final Rating

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by Alex



Strap yourselves in, ladies and gentlemen, and prepare for a tale of squandered opportunity. Deep down, I think that Lure of the Temptress and its game engine had the potential to be great. Not just good, but fantastic. Sadly, a case of the first-time yips might have gotten ahold of the developers at Revolution Software, and what we ended up with was a group of guys that didn’t yet know quite what to do with the shiny new toy they had created.


I LOVE that Diermot getting punched was used on the back of the game box.
If you’ve been reading my posts, you’d think I absolutely hated this game. I did not. I was more disappointed than anything because it showed flashes of brilliance. I will say that certain aspects of the puzzle design made it very cumbersome to play at times, which certainly diminished my enjoyment.

According to Adventure Gamer comments, Revolution’s later game, Beneath a Steel Sky, is fantastic and is regarded as a classic for a reason. I’m glad to hear that. Obviously, Revolution had great success going forward for a reason—hell, the studio still exists—but it’s heartening to know that its later games lived up to the wasted potential of Lure of the Temptress. I mean, they also produced the insanely popular Broken Sword series.

With that said, let’s get PISSED!
Puzzles and Solvability



Here is where Lure of the Temptress will score the lowest. That is because despite having a really unique mechanic for giving characters complex commands, there are only five instances where it is used: Having Ratpouch push the wall in the dungeon to open the secret entrance, giving Ratpouch the lockpick and having him open the wizard Taidgh’s abandoned house, having Goewin command the gargoyles to open the Weregate, having Goewin help Diermot turn the skulls to open the doors in the dragon’s cave, and having Minnow pull the drawbridge lever while Diermot turns the winch in the castle near the end of the game. Other than that, puzzles come in two varieties:
  1. Use an inventory object on something; and
  2. Talk to everybody in town and show them everything in your inventory until you get the right answer that opens up another dialogue option or triggers something else to happen.
Sadly, type two is far more common. Adding to the aggravation here is Revolution Software’s Virtual Theater mechanic. NPCs follow their own schedules, some of them walking about Turnvale instead of being in their shop or their house. This sounds cool, but when the puzzles require the player to ask everybody in town until they hit upon the right answer, it becomes very annoying. Especially when you need to go into the monastery on Blackfriars’ Row; the door is always locked and I was only able to get in by sneaking through when one of the Brothers was going in or out.

And even the inventory puzzles can be dumb. For example, needing Luthern to drink the liquor in the flask so Diermot can use the flask to store Taidgh’s potion of transformation, instead of, you know, Diermot just dumping out the liquor. And even the potion itself was a wasted opportunity to have a puzzle. Why didn’t Diermot have to gather the ingredients and create it himself?

Complicating things, the streets of Turnvale can turn into a cluster-you-know-what of NPCs wandering around and bumping into each other.





And lastly, when I needed Ratpouch, he had gotten stuck in one of Turnvale’s alleys near the beginning of the game. I only discovered him because, at my wit’s end, I decided to completely retrace my steps. The clever solutions from the order-giving mechanic aren’t enough to counterbalance these other issues.

Rating: 3

Interface and Inventory


The “Interface” part of this category, and if I were rating interface alone, I’d probably give it a 7. But as it’s coupled with inventory, I cannot rate it that high.

The interface is as easy to use as it is complex. This might sound strange, but hear me out. First, movement is accomplished just by clicking the cursor anywhere on the screen. If Diermot can go into a door or off-screen, the cursor changes into an arrow indicating the direction. Simple and elegant.

The interface shines in how Diermot interacts with the game world. First, left-clicking brings up a general menu, where Diermot can check his inventory, examine inventory objects, use an inventory object, drink something in his inventory, and look. “Look” gives the name of the room and a general description, which is very helpful and informative.



Right-clicking on something or someone allows Diermot to use an object on them, give them an object, talk to them (which sometimes opens up dialogue options), and give orders. Orders can be as complex as “Go to the Severed Arms and give Ultar the book and then go to the Weregate and drink the potion.” Sadly, the most complex command I ever had to give was giving Ratpouch the lockpick and telling him “Go to the Market Square and pick the lock on the abandoned house and then finish. It worked, it was clever and unique, but it was woefully underutilized.

The inventory was merely functional. The game offered detailed textual descriptions of the items, but there was no picture nor anyway to interact with or manipulate the items. This isn’t terrible, but it keeps the inventory system from being anything special.

Rating: 5

Story and Setting


Lure of the Temptress has a bit of a disappointing story. Not that the idea of rescuing a town from a rogue sorceress is bad, but because Diermot is such a dope. He’s a pathetic non-entity who just seems to luck into everything. There was some discussion in the comments about Diermot versus Roger Wilco, but the Space Quest games, at least to me, work because they were supposed to be comedy, and Roger shows a heart of gold and actually takes being a hero seriously. Diermot wants to be a hero, but . . . stuff just seems to happen to him. And he has no discernible personality.

The setting, however, is pretty good. I like the idea of a town being a game world. Turnvale is big enough to be interesting, though it would have been nice for there to have been a little outside exploration. There are the dragon caves past the Weregate, but that sequence doesn’t last very long. Also, there really isn’t much to do in Turnvale save talk to people over and over and over (and over and over . . .) again. As with much in this game, the story and setting have great potential but flawed execution.

Oh, and the ending sucked.

Rating: 4

Sound and Graphics


Here’s another category where Lure of the Temptress kind of shines . . . at least in the graphics department.

Soundwise, all I remember were some unmemorable tunes during the introduction cinematic, at the game over screen, when Diermot was being smuggled into the castle, and during his “battle” with Selena. There was also an incredibly annoying blare of something in Turnvale that seemed to happen every five seconds. I have no clue what it was supposed to be, or if my emulator’s sound settings weren’t what they should have been. Regardless, sound design is not one of Lure’s strong points.

The graphics, however, are good for the era. Impressive even. I like the hand-drawn nature, and while the animation is a little stiff, everything looks good, the backgrounds are detailed, and the cinematics are better than most of what I’ve seen. It’s a shame that everything is very muddy and brown. Perhaps that’s the nature of medieval villages, I don’t know. But compared to the bright fantasy world of Spielberg in Quest for Glory or the piratical settings of The Secret of Monkey Island—hell, even Future Wars had appealing graphics—Lure of the Temptress is second-tier.

That sunset, though.



Rating: 6

Environment and Atmosphere

Turnvale does present an interesting environment with an appropriately mysterious atmosphere. Why are all of these houses boarded up? Where does the Werecave lead? What’s up with that goat?!


We never find out.

Unfortunately, a lot of that mystery isn’t very exciting. The only house you can get into is Taidgh’s, the caves beyond the Weregate are rather unimpressive, the monastery is boring, and beyond some rumbling of a lack of food, Turnvale doesn’t feel all that “oppressed.” This is another case where Lure of the Temptress is all sizzle, no steak. Or goat. Whatever.

Rating: 4

Dialogue and Acting


Lure of the Temptress is so tonally all over the place, it’s tough to get a bead on what the developers were aiming at. I know that they said they wanted something that was a cross between humorous and serious, but they missed the mark on both counts. There were some kind-of funny dialogues between Diermot and Turnvale’s citizens, but so few were distinct personalities save Ultar the barbarian. And he didn’t do much but sit in the tavern and dispense a few hints.

The thing is, much of the humor falls flat because Lure of the Temptress seems to vacillate between wanting you to laugh at it and wanting you to take it seriously. The writing isn’t bad, per se. Some of it is quite good. It’s just nonsensical, there are so many loose threads, and the stakes never seem urgent. I honestly wanted Diermot just to leave Turnvale and its idiotic citizenry to their own devices.

That’s the crux of it. Every character was an idiot. Nobody was likable. Let the Skorl eat them all.


Or punch them all, as it were. 

Rating: 4

3 + 5 + 4 + 6 + 4 + 4 = 26, 26/.6 = 43.3, giving us a final scorer that seems eminently fair. I am going to use my discretionary point to deduct one on account of Lure of the Temptress just not being very FUN, giving us a final score of 42.



Sometimes you need to be harsh to something you think could’ve done better. And you’ve got to remember something here: don’t lie, people. PISSED don’t lie.

Contemporary reviewers were much kinder to Lure of the Temptress. Just scan the ratings from various Amiga magazines at this site: They really dug the game, with Amiga Mania going so far as to say “Every aspect of this interactive adventure is dripping with quality,” and Amiga Format stating “Temptress surpasses almost anything Sierra have offered, by being larger, funnier and a whole lot better drawn.”

Interesting takes. I’m sure at the time Lure of the Temptress was very impressive, particularly visually and as far as the interface went. But in hindsight, the weak plot and poor puzzle design drags down an interface brimming with potential.

I do not recommend you play this one, people. Based on what I’ve heard about Revolution’s subsequent games, you might be better off playing Beneath a Steel Sky or Broken Sword instead.

CAP Distribution:

100 CAPs for Alex:
  • Blogger Award - 100 CAPs - For blogging his way through the game for our enjoyment
11 CAPs for TBD:
  • Finders Keepers Award - 5 CAPs - For pointing out Lure of the Temptress could be found on GOG
  • When Barrel Is Not A Barrel Award - 1 CAP - For pointing out a crude joke
  • Straight Away Award - 5 CAPs - For getting the best score for the third Straight of 1992
10 CAPs for Laukku:
  • Sounds Good Award - 5 CAPs - For helping Alex with setting up correct sound for the game
  • Ignore the Pouch Award - 5 CAPs - For some sound advice on how to play the game
10 CAPs for Joseph Curwen
  • Psychic Prediction Award - 10 CAPs - For correctly guessing the score of Lure of the Temptress
8 CAPs for Voltgloss
  • Money, Not Seed Award - 3 CAPs - For telling us what groat means
  • Helping Hand Award - 5 CAPs - For checking a walkthrough to get a hint for Alex
5 CAPs for Andy Panthro
  • Straight Away Award - 5 CAPs - For getting the best score for the third Straight of 1992
4 CAPs for Trickster:
  • Daily Gossip Award - 4 CAPs - For showing up and telling what he's been doing with his life
4 CAPs for Kus of the Valley
  • History Teacher Award - 4 CAPs - For informing us on the history of "Arms" in pub names
4 CAPs for Laertes
  • Gambler Award - 3 CAPs - For hedging his bets
  • Thin Lizzy Award - 1 CAP - For good taste in music

Game 94: The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes - Introduction (1992)

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Written by Joe Pranevich



Greetings, friends! It’s time for me to brush off my mouse skills and play a game that requires clicking: The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes. Despite being released at the height of my youthful game playing, this one is completely unknown to me. I really was a Sierra-snob growing up, but I got better. I reviewed the first game in the Consulting Detectiveseries almost a year ago and I am looking forward to seeing another approach to adapting the characters.

Like so many of these licensed games, the developers do not have a strong adventure game pedigree. This is the first adventure to be developed by Mythos Software, a studio only two years old and thus far dedicated to arcade-style games. It was founded in Arizona by James Ferguson in 1990. James’s team was joined by Electronic Arts team members R. J. Berg and Eric Lindstrom, for game design and story respectively. Mr. Berg and Mr. Lindstrom were both new to their careers with their highest profile work in narrative games being documentation for FairyTale Adventure and Keef the Thief. One potentially shining light on the team was Christopher Erhardt, the producer. We haven’t come across him yet, but he was a former Infocom employee who was brought in to help the company adapt to graphical games. He also produced the Infocom release of Quarterstaff. It’s a new team, but I have high hopes!
Notice: No subtitle.

Before I get too far, I want to address the question of the game’s title. Many sources, including the left navigation bar on this very site, lists the subtitle as The Case of the Serrated Scalpel. That subtitle does not appear either in the manual or the game itself and I suspect that it was retroactively added to distinguish the game from its 1996 sequel. It doesn’t matter much, but I am crazy and pedantic about such things.

It seems silly to recap the origin of Sherlock Holmes, but I will be brief. Mr. Holmes is the creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, first appearing in print in A Study in Scarlet, a novel published in 1887. The character exploded primarily due to a series of short stories published in The Strand magazine starting four year later. Mr. Doyle had a love-hate relationship with his most famous character and killed him off in 1893, only to resurrect him again in 1901. Additional Holmes stories continued to be published until 1927. In these stories, Holmes is treated as something of a deductive genius, able to observe situations and make seemingly impossible conclusions from what he finds. Holmes is also an excellent actor and boxer, but tries not to fill his mind with topics (such as the sciences) where he cannot relate it to his crime-solving work. Mr. Holmes is also frequently depicted as a drug addict, falling into drug-addled stupors when not confronted with interesting cases. Most of the time, Holmes is a private detective, but occasionally assists Scotland Yard with the help of his companion (and biographer) Dr. Watson. It is supposedly through the fictional Dr. Watson’s writings that Mr. Holmes’s cases have been broadcast to the world.

Mr. Holmes has even by this point appeared in many text adventures and I hope to eventually play the two most famous examples, Melbourne House’s Sherlock (1984) and Infocom’s Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels (1987). We have covered his first graphical adventure, Consulting Detective, already on the blog. There are no end to Sherlock Holmes games and after this we will have at least the two sequels to Consulting Detective (in 1992 and 1993) and a Lost Files sequel in 1996. More recently Frogwares has produced a whole sequence of Holmes adventure games starting in 2002 and continuing to this day. I have no doubt there are many more that I don’t even know about.


Mythos Software circa 1992.

The manual is fairly typical of the era: some basic scene-setting and an extended look at the interface. The control scheme appears to be Lucas Arts-style with verbs on the bottom of the screen and an overall third-person view. Reading through it all, two features stand out: an “auto help” that clues you into what verbs are useful for clicked-on objects and a “journal” which purports to record all conversations in the game. I’ll have to play some to see how useful those will be.

At the end of the manual are two well-written epilogues. The second is just a brief history of Sherlock Holmes, but the first describes the real-life (as far as I can tell) history of Jack the Ripper, a serial killer that murdered six prostitutes in 1888 in the Whitechapel region of London. The manual discusses several real-life suspects (The Duke of Clarence, Montagu Druitt, H. H. Holmes, and an unnamed foreigner), but then adds a Holmesian touch by suggesting that Moriarty (Holmes’s supposed greatest adversary) may have aided the Ripper and helped to keep him hidden. If this is a Jack the Ripper game, that is also in a long tradition of Sherlock Holmes / Jack the Ripper crossovers. Without searching too hard, I found three unofficial Holmes novels, a Consulting Detective expansion set, and even one of the Frogwares games all feature Holmes and the Ripper in some way. There is obviously deep material to mine here, but I hope the authors were careful to not overly fictionalize the all-too-real murders of young women in 19th century London.

The game’s opening cinematic sets the scene: “London, England; November 1888”. It’s a beautifully rendered scene of horse-drawn carriages moving realistically through foggy streets, a clock tower in the background.


Just imagine everything in this scene moving through realistic fog. 

The opening then transitions into an alley behind the Regency Theater. A cat jumps off of a dumpster, knocking a bottle to the ground. A man dressed in a long cloak and hat enters the alley and hides behind a crate. Moments later, a woman in red emerges from the stage door. The man pounces on her, a scalpel outstretched. Moments later, she is dead. Another woman, this time in gray, steps out and discovers the scene. The villain looks up at her then flees.









The following day, we watch as a letter arrives for Sherlock Holmes from Scotland Yard. They would like assistance with the case! There’s some great voice acting here, giving us a real cinematic feeling. (As best I can tell, the voices are in the original edition of the game. Bonus!) The scene changes to Holmes and Watson enjoying their breakfast; Holmes seems to know already that someone came to the door and that they will shortly be receiving an interesting new case. This next part of the opening is rendered much less well and feels out of place against the very beautifully composed scenes a few moments before. Holmes and Watson read the constable’s letter and agree to take the case. The game is afoot!







If you were hoping for the grand finale to Sorcerer, don’t worry as that should be done in a few days. After that, I’m going to dedicate myself to playing this game while someone else does the Missed Classics for a few weeks. (We have a great one lined up!) If I possibly can, I will try to squeeze in Seastalker before Inspector Gadget, but we will see when we get there. And since I brought it up: has anyone played Quarterstaff and can advise if it is enough of an adventure that I should include in my Infocom marathon? Some sources call it a cRPG, but it seems to have the Infocom text engine parser around some graphics. I’m totally confused by it.

Since this is an introduction post, don’t forget that you can guess the score. I’m not sure what score I would guess for a game designed by guys who wrote documentation for two mediocre cRPGs and produced by the guy that was responsible for graphical games at a company renowned for not having graphics. Fortunately, I’m not the one that has to guess.


Time to play!

Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There's a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read it here before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no CAPs will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. As this is an introduction post, it's an opportunity for readers to bet 10 CAPs (only if they already have them) that I won't be able to solve a puzzle without putting in an official Request for Assistance: remember to use ROT13 for betting. If you get it right, you will be rewarded with 20 CAPs in return. It's also your chance to predict what the final rating will be for the game. Voters can predict whatever score they want, regardless of whether someone else has already chosen it. All correct (or nearest) votes will go into a draw.
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