I can write more text adventure reviews but...

Dear Textadventuretron fans,

I can't write any more reviews unless I'm compensated somehow.  If you know any text adventure designers who would like to have a game reviewed, I'd be more than happy to try out their game on Mac or iPhone for a very reasonable fee.  I'd also be happy to post text adventure reviews for a couple bucks, literally a couple bucks, if you write about or create text adventure games.  Around 4000 views later on my Anchorhead review, I realize I need to make this a business to better keep it going.

Just email me at lionelabby@yahoo.com for details, or hell, just send me some bucks and a request, or even just a tip if you liked my Anchorhead review.  Let me know also if you'd like any kind of Textadventuretron merchandise.  You want to buy it, I'll be more than glad to make it up.  I'd also be glad to get a community going if I hear back from enough people and I can at least make a part-time or better living at it.  Stranger things have happened. :)

$ PLZ

Thanks so much,

Lionel

Lost in the Depths of Anchorhead

One of the biggest downsides of playing text adventure games is that you can run into a section where the designer was distracted or failed to consider the syntax 95% of us would use. A box of stuff to find might yield to "search box" but, just one time, not respond to "examine box", causing a few hours of hair-pulling before stooping to read a walkthrough.

Michael S. Gentry, author of Anchorhead, makes no pretenses to making a perfect game. But it comes very, very close especially if you are a fan of H.P. Lovecraft.

Anchorhead takes you out of your home in sunny Texas, dropping you right in the middle of a bleak, rainy November day in a small, unwelcoming town. In a tip of the hat to equality, you play a female protagonist (Lovecraft never portrayed woman leads), following your husband Michael to Anchorhead to claim an inheritance from a mysterious branch of Michael's distant family.

You start the game outside the locked-up real estate office, where you were supposed to meet the agent, while Michael wraps up at the university across town. There are plenty of slightly unsettling places to visit -- a bar full of sullen fishermen and mill workers, a mysterious monument in the town square, a boarded-up church, and a tantalizing locked door located under a bridge. You are even able to make it to Michael, but a can of fish oil will provide red herrings to solving the encounter with him. It doesn't work.

Anchorhead is divided up into several days, and doesn't seem to have the annoying timekeeping that many other games have had, with dying flashlights, disconnected scripted timed events, and so on. In all, the game is heavily passive and atmospheric, even though it is loaded with interactivity and curious objects. It waits for you do discover small secret upon small secret, until their sum becomes more than any sane person can bear. You won't be able to sleep until you've complete the entire day's discoveries as they were meant. If you come close, you'll know since you can take a bath and soak some of your lurking worries away. One of the things that will make this game last a lot longer is the fact there are some puzzles that, while appearing immediately solvable save one object you know you should have gotten already, aren't. And they won't be solvable until Day 3 or 4.

Syntax is typical "Get X", "Do Y", with a good bit of "Ask A about Z". But this isn't a hop-socky adventure that consists of monosyllabic jumps from one action to another. It puts you through your paces and connects it all smoothly, with no inaccuracies or accidental plot holes ("shouldn't that door be crushed already?").

Gentry has managed to breathe life into an obscure genre by writing a rich, gradual, yet deep descent into the madness and terror that once was exclusively Lovecraft's. The interface is gracious and reasonable, and the plot is laid out in a splendid mix of references to Lovecraft, and Gentry's own diabolical creativity. This is one game you won't burn through and best of all there are online walkthroughs should you ever be totally perplexed. The few times I did have to look, a tiny bit more experimentation would have gotten me to where I should have been.

The only flaw I really saw could be defused into a matter of personal taste. I did examine one box I needed to proceed with, but got nothing because I didn't search it. Aside from that one tiny detail, I very much enjoy the effort and detail that Mr. Gentry has put into this enjoyable and original text adventure.

Textadventuretron Ratings:

Fun: 8 A little on the dreary side all around but if you read Lovecraft it's all part of the territory. Interesting takes on many memorable characters and situations. The good thing is once you get rolling it takes about an hour before you hit a snag.

Writing: 10 Polished to perfection. I don't really empathize with the female protagonist, but otherwise it's all novel-quality. Only thing I really wonder about is why a woman can't find a heavy enough rock between a church and town to smash a padlock with, but I guess that's artistic license and gaming practicality.

Fairness: 9.5 I never got stuck in an area by not knowing how to say something. I got really hung up trying to solve what should have been the first puzzle, but you can do what you have to in the alley without any special inventory.

Pace: 9.5. Hangs up if you're not a supercomputer, but if you confess your weaknesses and take just a fleeting glance at the walkthrough you can still get a lot more fun out of the game.

Puzzles: 9 A lot of it is classic text adventure key-style puzzles, but being able to research the town stands out, and a lot of seemingly loose ends always come together.

Atmosphere: 10 I couldn't get over how closely Gentry channels some of Lovecraft's best imagery and concepts. The part about red-rimmed eyes does get a little thin after a while, but that was part of H.P.'s style as well: to hammer home a small detail that could morph into maddening given enough time and weight.

Navigation: 10 Forget some silly early text adventure maze that is 10% walls and 90% "you can't go there". Everything is clearly laid out and intuitive.

Overall: 10

Resources:

Download Z-machine (lets you run text adventure games)

Download Anchorhead

Spoilers/Walkthrough -- Don't peek till the game drives you nuts! :D

About this blog and text adventures

The first text adventures I heard about were by Scott Adams. Not the creator of Dilbert, but some super text guru who had a knack for making text adventure games with a two-word parser (MOP WATER, EAT PIE, COMMUNICATE AMBIGUITY). I did a little digging through some 1980s computer magazines (which was the thing to do considering it was the 1980s), and I found a stunning hodgepodge of labyrinths and houses and industrial structures with alluring names and descriptions. It was an article about Zork, a commercial groundbreaker for the text adventure industry.

And I daydreamed about playing the games for the next two years.

South Berwick wasn't and isn't a poor town by any stretch, but the computer revolution was just beginning. Our computer room had just one computer, an Apple IIc, and then a IIe. Everyone had to sign up for a pass for a half hour time slot, even the teachers.

But the games that were on there were far from text adventures. There was President Elect, a game where you chose from dozens of 1980s political candidates, engaged in debates and clashed along the campaign trail. My most amusing memory was learning that I could win with President Reagan by making a valid point 20% of the time and bullshitting the other 80. Though the game taught me a lot about the political machine, it boiled down to picking an equation with a famous name on it and seeing what stuck.

There was a Star Trek game where I had to lope from quadrant to quadrant firing phasers and photon torpedoes. But it was written in Basic, so I was able to hack all the damage levels of my weapons, get infinite shields (well, ok, have an energy level in the billions), and so on. So, a little fun in how I could break it.

But text adventures...

The closest I came for a long time was Tunnels of Doom, a quasi-3D hack-and-slash that had barebones narration with intriguing monsters and special abilities. My brother hoaxed me about a cyclops he claimed he saw on Level 10, and trying to find that son of a bitch helped many a summer afternoon go by. But eventually it, too, was mastered, and when the cassette drive got fuzzy I couldn't load the game I'd saved on tape.


The TI-99/4A was dying in popularity, and cheap games were the rage in my room. I finally scored Pyramid of Doom and a game where I was in a nuclear reactor and had to save the world with a mop bucket full of heavy water.

It was a start. Having to sum up my thoughts in two words was a big challenge at first, but I got used to "climb ladder", "press button", and so on, with the occasional who-knew mind-bender. "Alleviate serpent"? "Wrangle hypotenuse"? Maybe not exactly, but damned close.

If you're Googling yourself right now, Original Scott Adams, and stumbling onto this post, I have to ask you: what the hell was up with the snake at the portal in Pyramid of Doom? Six times out of ten it would kill me the second I opened the portal, but some sort of bug (or your own programming caprice) would give me one turn to face my doom. Couldn't shoot it, charm it, beat it, eat it, poison it, anything. But it would ignore all my commands and then fall on my head like the angel of death the next command I typed.

But my first dalliance with a sentence-analyzing parser came from Zork. Dan Blakeslee, you have my eternal apologies for repeatedly coming to your house and asking to play. But there was nothing better going on in South Berwick in that post-70s time than to plug into some wild ideas from another barrel full of slightly older, on-top-of-the-world geeks. It was the first immersive virtual reality I'd experienced.

Over the years I've taken the easy way out with wordy video games -- RPGs and Silent Hill -- and scratched the surface of World of Warcraft. But with a friend's gift of an iPod and one app out of dozens -- Frotz -- things have come full circle. I've found a lot of games I missed in the 1990s, and resources that will let us all play together and discuss the games.

I will be adding more to this blog, especially as it's just about an hour old, and who knows... maybe running Textadventuretron can become an adventure in itself.

Lionel Houde

P.S. If you have your own resources you want to suggest or share, by all means please mention them.