Flying home from Cairo, danger awaits, but the world has not reckoned with your Grandfather and the mysterious secret his enigmatic tome holds. Your clothes are rumpled, and eyebrow makeup ruined, but at least you have an apple and the inflight magazine for company.
This is a Glulx’d game by Ivan R., though I’m not sure these smaller z-code games really need Glulxing, and it prevents it being migrated out to the older 8-bit platforms. Action begins with you gazing up within the black abyss and an infinite sky. I wasn’t sure if I was on the Jolly Roger or on a space odyssey, but it seemed a bit odd to me to find myself on a commercial airflight; it didn’t seem to quite marry up to me. The flight itself was a bit clunky: you can’t GO TOILET you can only GO LAVATORY, and you still have to GET UP before you can get in there. It was also a bit off-putting to have some semi-sacrilegious comments upon examining my cap. There is a distinction of course between player and character, but in adventure games this line is blurred, so it’s a bit unpleasant to hear the character I’m playing moaning about dumb rituals. I think this is something that media in general suffers from these days: cynical and complaining central characters are not really heroic. Worst of the worst was trying to get out of the toilet. LEAVE BATHROOM. Nope? LEAVE LAVATORY. Nada. OPEN DOOR. Nothing doing. Then came into my mind the escapade of a Spectrum game which Mike Gerrard was reviewing many moons ago. He tried multiple entries, until finally inspiration came. “O-U-T spells OUT”.
We have some flashback goings on, and it’s all a bit plodding, with messages like “you can’t go that way”, even though it clearly stipulates that the road continues east. Equally GO HOUSE is “not something you could enter”. There are delicious smells, but you smell nothing unexpected, and so on. Typical entries like SHOUT, SCREAM or YELL are not included. EXAMINE ME during the opening seemed to imply I might be female, but a cursory examination seemed to imply I lacked the female appendages. But apparently I was wearing a disguise so that might explain it: but I wasn’t quite sure why. Conversation lacks a bit of finesse. With Grandpa I quickly felt like I’d exhausted the inane conversation thread. Grandpa’s patience was beginning to wear thin – and so was mine.
Now some of the best games I’ve played have incredible frustration involved, but this has it in the wrong places, and also a lack of coherence to motivate you to go on. I didn’t notice any bugs that were gamebreaking, but there are minor irritations. You can’t use the abbreviation MAG for MAGAZINE, when you try to THROW it, even though you’re carrying it (and light years away from the plane) you should “grab the one by your seat”. POKE SERPENT WITH PEN: “You can’t see any such thing”. And CUT APPLE WITH KNIFE, “You’re hesitant, both of violence and of breaking your weapon”. A personal irritation was that HELP directs you towards a walkthrough: those things seriously damage your adventuring health.
The serpent was where I found my interest had very much waned due to the lack of response to what seemed the more obvious input. For me there’s just an absence of the necessary connection between author and player that even the most simple of text adventures carry.
Reminiscences It Gave Me (which are much more appealing)
Operation Stealth, Leisure Suit Larry 3, Borderzone, The Last Express, WC Escape
