REVIEW

Spellbreaker

Greg Knauss

by Dave Lebling
INFOCOM, INC.
125 Cambridge Park Drive
Cambridge, MA 02140
48K Disk $44.95
Also available for 520ST

The people are mad. Magic is failing all across the land, and a meeting at Borphee has been called.

One by one, the head of each Service Guild stands and gives a personal view of how this or that spell has gone haywire. People have been hurt. Time has been lost. And the people are mad.

You attend the meeting as Guildmaster of the Circle of Enchanters at Acardii, a position you inherited from your mentor Belboz, and listen patiently to the stories-stories that slowly become charges...

The word traitors pops out of nowhere, and, just as you think the meeting is going as badly as it can, everybody mysteriously turns into... well, they turn into frogs. Frogs, newts and salamanders -- the entire amphibian phylum seems to be represented.

Your keen mind quickly decides that something is wrong. Through the rainbow of hopping, slithering and croaking colors, you notice a black-clothed figure slip out of the room and into the street. You give chase.

The figure turns. Though you strain your eyes in the bright sunlight, its face lies hidden in deep shadow. It jumps, backflips and, in a bright orange explosion, is gone...

So begins Spellbreaker, the last chapter in the Enchanter series of Infocom's all-text interactive fiction.

Once again, you take the guise of the rapidly maturing young enchanter, who has become famous throughout the land for defeating both Krill and Jeearr. Once again, you must venture into the labyrinthian passages running beneath the surface world that you know best. Once again, the future of Frobozz is in your hands. Who is the mysterious, black-cloaked sorcerer? What is becoming of the magic? These are dangerous questions that only one person can answer, only a Spellbreaker.

Infocom, as tradition dictates, ends each of their series with the hardest, most fiendish puzzles lumped into one game. This is the case with Spellbreaker. I've spent many an hour torturing my mind in various ways, trying to get a new idea to pop out.

In fact, Infocom held a tournament between three groups of college students, to see who could solve the game first -- without dying once. The first and only group to finish took twenty (count 'em, twenty) hours! Spellbreaker is by far the nastiest, most complex game from the Cambridge, Massachusetts company so far. People who breezed through the Babel Fish situation, rejoice.

One of the problems of the game, not necessarily a puzzle per se, has to do with the game's "inventory" feature. There are several objects in the game identified only as "a featureless white cube." How does the game know which featureless white cube you mean when you type Throw cube?

It doesn't. It assumes that you mean the first cube in your inventory, whether this is the case or not. It is, to say the least, very frustrating, especially for beginning players (but then, beginning players have no business messing with an Expert level game.) Though there is a device that allows you to determine which cube is which, and using the wrong one is never deadly, novices are forewarned.

The prose of the game is excellent. Descriptions are detailed, but not overly lengthy. Continuing tradition, there are several very funny moments for folks who sidetrack from the main plot.

Obviously, you're the major character, but you're also the only character who's more than one-dimensional. Though Spellbreaker is chock full of objects with personal pronouns for names ("people"), they are but frames -- no substance aside from a handful of random, one-sentence responses. This is a magic-and object-manipulation game with few verbal interactions, following in the footsteps of Zork, rather than Deadline.

Magic is bountiful in Spellbreaker, and as a Guild Master you have access to more powerful spells than in either Enchanter or Sorcerer. This magic, however, doesn't always work. Due to the previously mentioned mysterious force, many a time your spell will misfire, causing distant thunder, temporary blindness, green balls of light and, to the gamer, inconvenience.

Though the spells always work in situations where your life is at stake (this is a selective mysterious force, no doubt), it can be a royal pain typing Learn malyon. Malyon angry Ogre four times before it works.

The game's cosmetics have changed considerably since Zork. First, the screen is totally redesigned. With Wishbringer, Infocom made several cosmetic changes to their games. The changes remain in Spellbreaker.

The familiar white block has been replaced with a flashing black underline of a cursor. The location line at the top of the screen has become permanent. It no longer scrolls off with the text, only to be redrawn. The keyboard handler has been redone. This remedies the break problem of earlier games (when BREAK was pressed instead of BACKSPACE, the game would crash). but has some new problems of its own.

The CAPS/LOWER key is totally ignored. When I play adventures, I like to upper-case my commands, to separate them from the text of the game. The new handler prohibits this.

You also cannot use the cursor keys. I am not the world's most accurate typist. When I mistyped a word, I used to simply "cursor up" and change the old line. No more -- alack and alas.

Another minor gripe about spells: one oft-used spell, inconveniently named Blorple, involves four keypresses with the last two fingers of your right hand in rapid succession. It's Mistype City.

The map of the game is very strange. There are no connections between major scenes. You have to teleport. This disjointed terrain will provide a challenge for mapmakers, and the teleport availability always gives you a convenient, immediate exit, in case you did something that someone bigger than you didn't like.

The ending is the most climactic anticlimax I've ever seen. The idea is catastrophic, even apocalyptic -- the whole universe is at stake, but it just doesn't pack the whallop its potential promised. Still, after such an exciting, riveting game, topping it would have been difficult, if not impossible.

Though the magic is rapidly diffusing from the land, and the Enchanter's powers fail, the wizards at Infocom grow continually stronger. Spellbreaker is a vast, sprawling game, finely detailed, intricately designed. It can be easily and wholeheartedly recommended, a grand conclusion to a great series.

Greg Knauss is a senior in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. He's involved in journalism and drama, as well as computers.

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