Game Review: Zork I (PC, Infocom)

While the text adventure genre has been popular amongst gamers since the days of Adventure and the pioneering works of Crowther and Woods. For a long time, games were limited to one or two word commands and simple single line descriptions of locations. But then Infocom came along with Zork (written by Marc Blank and Dave Lebling) and redefined the entire interactive fiction genre…

What’s The Story With Zork?

Zork, or to use its full name Zork I: The Great Underground Empire, is a fantasy adventure where – according to the box at least – you’re on a perilous adventure deep below the earth seeking out the Treasures Of Zork located somewhere in the Great Empire. You’re not really given a great deal of information about where you are, what your overall goal is or anything else for that matter. You’re thrown right in at the deep end and left to figure everything out for yourself.

Playing The Game

As I said at the start, Infocom changed the adventure game industry with the release of Zork. Instead of one or two words, Zork allowed players to enter commands in complex sentences, giving multiple instructions at the same time. Not only does this allow for more complex gameplay, but also allowed for a more fluid experience. Imagine you wanted to pick up a book in any other game and you’d use the commands GET BOOK followed by EXAMINE BOOK. Here you’d just type GET BOOK AND EXAMINE IT. It may not seem like a big deal, but it made play feel so much more natural.

But that is just the tip of the iceberg. It also allows Zork to distinguish between different objects so you can have different coloured objects and describe them as such when interacting with them. The scope really became limitless and instead of fighting with the interpreter you could just focus on playing and enjoying the game.

Getting Started

So once the game has started, you find yourself outside a house and to be honest, I did have some initial doubts about Zork at this point. With no information on where I could go (most will tell you what routes are available) and the description informing me of a building I can’t enter, it was only guesswork that allowed me to go anywhere else. Once I had moved on I found myself in a forest (after being in a field with no mention of any forests in view) and then the next couple of strange things happened…

Curiouser And Curiouser

At this point I found myself in a wooded area and there were birds chirping so I tried to listen to them only to be told that they had flew away. Nothing wrong with that, I thought. Wanting to check the location description again I used the LOOK command, only to see the birds mentioned once more!

But that wasn’t the only odd thing to happen in Zork at this part of the game. I walked West to get to the Forest, but walking East didn’t take me back to the house. Instead it took me somewhere completely different instead! I don’t mind an adventure that needs a little mapping exercise to help you find your way around, but when it feels as if the locations aren’t connected to each other properly it does lead to confusion.

At the same time, the game defaults to its BRIEF display mode. What this does is shortens the location descriptions to one or two words each time you return to them which only compounds on the confusion. This can be changed easily enough but for a first time player it’s not particularly helpful.

A Puzzling Time

The most important aspect of any adventures is the puzzles themselves and Zork doesn’t disappoint. Unlike many other games I’ve played (and even some of Infocom’s others like Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy), they’re fairly logical and even if you can’t work them out straight away, with a bit of thought or finding the right item later on you’ll work most of them out before too long.

That made playing the game challenging, but enjoyable so it was never frustrating – or at least not where the puzzles were concerned. The only thing that I did find irritating was the mapping of the game and struggling to find my way around some of the locations but this was something I quickly got over.

What’s In The Box?

Even though this is a budget release of Zork, it’s still quite impressive in terms of the packaging. As well as the game disk there’s a comprehensive manual that not only gives information on how to play the game, but a list of some of the key commands, the more advanced features of the parser, and the special feature that is exclusive to the PC version – the all-important HINT feature.

In addition to that, the box includes a poster of the game’s world map although the locations are labelled in the game’s own language so they’re impossible to read. A nice touch to see included in the package though even if it seems to have no real relevance to the game itself.

Presentation

As with all of the original Infocom releases for the PC, presentation is fairly basic. The game is run on a black screen with text in light grey – essentially a DOS window although this is more than adequate for this type of game. There’s a status bar at the top showing your current location, score and number of moves taken and that’s pretty much it.

Graphics weren’t introduced until later Infocom releases so this means it will run on pretty much any PC regardless of its age as long as you have the right type of floppy drive, and like the majority of text adventures it runs in complete silence.

Overall

For the first five or ten minutes of playing Zork, I did get the feeling that I had been looking back at the game through r0se-tinted glasses and that it wasn’t as good as I had remembered. But once I got past the initial teething troubles, I was drawn into an engaging adventure, packed with mind-bending puzzles and completely lost all track of time while I was playing. It’s no longer the greatest text adventure ever made, but it still holds up as offering a solid game worthy of anyone’s time and attention.

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