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So Zork wasn't the first text adventure, but it had better story telling, a more capable parser, and a richer world than its predecessors. It must have been a very influential game, because it's one that people mention a lot in the interactive fiction world.
It's also a game I've never played. But after a while, I started thinking I should.
There's a version of Zork that was (re)written for the Hugo IF engine. I got my hands on it, fired it up under Gargoyle, and started playing.
This game was written in the late 70s and published in 1980, so it does what most video games did back then; it allows you to die. That means you have to restart the game and try again. This die-and-try-again is probably essential to playing the game; you have to learn what you need to do next time and what to avoid by failing.
This isn't really how most IF works nowadays. Usually, you don't die unless you do something really foolish. Otherwise, you just keep plugging away until you solve the puzzle. Psychologically, I think that makes for a better experience.
Well, actually, you don't entirely die. Most of the time you get sent back somewhere and your inventory gets scattered about. Then you have to go around looking for it. Not fun.
You start out above ground near a house, a forest, and a few other things. Eventually, you can figure out how to get into the house.
Navigating through the forest, it becomes clear that it's the kind of maze where you can't really map it out. You can wander through the forest in various directions, but ultimately, you exit into the same few locations. So you can't map the forest on paper; it's inconsistent. I never was much of a fan of that sort of thing.
Sometimes you'll get to a room where the game doesn't describe where the exits are and you just have to start guessing. Fun. 😜
The first 'level' in small enough that you soon explore it all and figure out there must be some secret thing to do, but there don't seem to be any clues. That's never fun in a game. You know now you're going to have to look for any clues you missed, or try doing all sorts of things with every object you find.
Well, I'm too old for that, so I used the in-game help menu that hugoZork comes with and figured out I'm supposed to 'move the rug' in one of the rooms to find a trap door. This is sort of a nasty thing to do to the player in my book. That's sort of a specific action. And examining the rug doesn't give you any clues that it might have something beneath it.
So I figure the rest of the game probably has things like that in it too.
Oh, and you can 'take' things like solid gold coffins that in real life would be way too heavy to carry.
I learned from the gopherpedia page for Zork I, that the overall goal is to collect twenty treasures of Zork and put them in the trophy case. I'm not sure when or how the player is supposed to find out that this is a goal. With hugoZork, you start the game with nothing more than a note that says, "Welcome to Zork", or something. Maybe you find out later in the game.
Examine pretty much everything in the game, and it always says it, "looks just as you'd expect." No clues. This is for highly significant items too. 👎️
This game is too hard for my liking. I used the walkthrough to get through it and there was at least one time when the solution involved doing or saying something unusual that isn't rally hinted at at all. There's also an element of luck involved. Sometimes you have to keep trying something until you get lucky and succeed, but it's hard to know that what you're trying is even possible when it keeps killing you.
So this isn't my kind of game, but it has a lot of good elements, so if you enjoy a real challenge, this might be for you.
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✍️ Last Updated: 2022-02-02