(no subject)

[prog]

Finished Zarf's new game The Dreamhold last night. It's his first new text adventure in over four years, and as good as I'd expect: a tight, thoughtful, and somewhat tragic fantasy. The big draw is that it's meant to serve as an introduction to the whole medium of interactive fiction by way of a "Tutorial Voice" that accompanies you and offers you help and hints proactively as you play and explore.

I can't speak for how well that works, because I played in "expert mode", where the Voice shuts up and some of the puzzles are harder. And I found that it plays great that way; at no point did I feel like I was running a newbie obstacle course, or anything. My total play time was probably around 12 hours and I needed nudges from rec.games.int-fiction to figure a couple of things out (one of which is an arguable, if minor, flaw that Zarf has said he'll soften up in the next release). I was quite absorbed into the world from start to finish. (Sign that I enjoy an adventure game: when I'm done using something in-world, I feel compelled to return it to its case instead of just walking around with it, even though it doesn't technically affect game play either way.)

Even though I didn't play with the tutorial mode on, I will take the chance it affords me to once again shout into the wind at alla y'all that you really ought to give this a try, because it's lonely being the only person I know personally (besides Zarf) who (correct me if I'm wrong!) regularly plays and enjoys modern text adventure games.

The easiest way to start playing is probably the online version.

You could also download the game file, and then open it with a Z-code interpreter for your computer. Z-code is the machine language that this game (and many others like it) is written in; an interpreter is a program that turns this into machine language that your own computer can understand. (Click on your operating system's name on the left side of that page, and then choose a program from the resulting list. This is the best page I could find on the subject, and it took a while. I wonder if this somewhat esoteric two-step process necessary to start playing interactive fiction games makes the medium all the more inaccessible... I ponder making a very short version of this same website, listing on one page only the three PC OSes that most of the world uses, with the two or three top interpreters under each one.)

(Look for cthulhia's name in the credits!)

Comments

[popecrunch.livejournal.com]

This was very enjoyable, the only place I got hopelessly stuck was due to my own stupidity (Curving hallways, you know, curve. In parts of the endgame, the tutorial voice gives story flavor text, which I'm not sure appears in expert mode, so.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Flavor text beyond the italicized flashbacks and commentary?

Also, did you get all three endings? (One is significanty harder than the others...)

[popecrunch.livejournal.com]

I got two of them, oddly, I missed the easiest (judging by the walkthrough). And no, the flashbacks and commentary were what I was referencing. :)