Sorcerer, the latest recreational software package from Infocom, Inc., is the sequel to Enchanter, the interactive fiction game in which the player takes the part of a young adventurer who saves the land of Frobozz from the evil warlock Krill and earns a seat on the Circle of Enchanters. When Sorcerer opens, you, the adventurer, have awakened from a foreboding dream to discover that Belboz, most powerful of the Enchanters, has vanished. Your mission in this game is to find and rescue Belboz, and in the process, save the world from evil.
- SORCERER runs on Apple II; Atari; Commodore 64; CPM; DEC RT-11, Rainbow, DECmate; IBM Personal Computer, PCjr; NEC PC-8000, APC; TRS-80 Model I, III; TI Professional, 994A; Osbourne; MS-DOS 2.0; Kaypro; $49.95 retail; Infocom, Inc., 55 Wheeler St., Cambridge, MA 02138; (617) 492-1038.
The game`s documentation takes the form of a "magazine" called Popular Enchanter which lists commands and instructions for playing the game, and the "Infotater," a sleeve containing a cardboard disk which, when lined up with particular names of characters, gives descriptions of characteristics and capabilities. For further background, about Frobozz and its inhabitants, you can enter the library at the beginning of the game and pore over the Encyclopedia Frobozzica.
Like Enchanter, Sorcerer is a game of puzzles. Playing it involves collecting objects and information and exploring until you think you`ve found a puzzle and a way to solve it. Incorrect solutions are not without their consequences, many of which can be both nasty and frustating. If you fail to uncover and solve the first key puzzle, for example, you invariably experience the ultimate bad dream, The Chamber of Living Death, which goes something like this:
"The very walls of this room seem to soak up all light, so it seems as though you`re floating in the center of an infinite void. Hideous parasites descend upon you and tear the flesh from your bones, gnaw your eyes from the sockets and feast upon your very brain tissue. Amazingly, you do not die, and your body regenerates itself as you await the next attack."
Sorcerer derives much of its entertainment value from its text-only format, which allows the player`s imagination to run rampant, transforming, for example, The Chamber of Living Death into a personal nightmare that goes beyond anything that could be depicted by even the most sophisticated graphics. Any graphic approach to such rich imaginings would be necessarily limited, and the amount of computer resources needed to accomplish even limited graphics limit the number and complexity of puzzles to solve.
Infocom tries to strike a balance, of course, so the puzzles in Sorcerer are hard enough to be challenging yet not so hard you want to toss your diskette to the wind like a frisbee. Internal testers and adventure game experts as well as general consumers test the games before release to make sure they deliver the optimum degree of difficulty, which translates to a 30-hour playing time for a person of average intelligence and game-playing experience.
Part of the challenge is telling the game what you want to do. Although there is a certain amount of arcane lingo that you`ll pick up during the game, you will enter most of your commands in plain English. That can be more difficult than it sounds, since the program`s vocabulary is by necessity limited, making it important to hit the right combination of nouns and verbs to make the game progress. However, Infocom games in general, and Sorcerer in particular, do better than any other games we`ve seen in understanding our English. Whereas the very successful Zork and Enchanter games had vocabularies of 600 words, Sorcerer understands over 1000.
Nevertheless, it can be frustrating when you tell the game to do something and it fails to comprehend. When you cast the spell that allows you to see into the future, for example, and the screen describes some ancient runes on which words of wisdom are written, quite naturally you want to know what those words say. If you type "read words", however, the game responds with: "I don`t understand the word `words.`"
Often, as in the case of the above example, the lack of understanding is not due to a failure on the part of the program. Rather, you are simply trying to do something the game`s author didn`t want you to do. Your control over the flow of the action is limited to paths the author has sketched out for you. This need to find a "correct" path is alternately frustrating and challenging.
But there is an enormous amount of satisfaction in solving a tough puzzle, and that is what makes Sorcerer worthwhile. Some of the puzzles that await the adventurer who tackles Sorcerer are first-rate. Should enchanters in glass mazes throw stones? What does it mean when the magic amulet`s lovely blue jewel glows? Is the dragon in the Hall of Carvings just a diversion, or should you spend a lot of time trying to learn something from it? Can you communicate with the ghosts in the haunted house? Why does the spell that is supposed to transport you to the location of a particular person take you to the same place whether you specify Belboz or Jeearr?
For anybody who likes to wrestle with puzzles, Sorcerer will be a delight.
(By the way, Infocom`s technical support line doesn`t usually provide clues for Sorcerer over the phone, but so many players have called asking for help to escape from the Chamber of Living Death that Infocom does offer this clue: Put together a code word in a journal and an object in the cellar with the Infotater information wheel and you`ll never have to deal with those pesky and quickly boring brain-eating parasites.)
Thanks to André St-Aubin for transcribing and donating this article.