~2 minute readGames & Books
Leather Goddesses of Phobos
Leather Goddesses of Phobos
By Stephen Meretzky; Infocom, on disk for most 64k computers; $39.95
Once again Infocom has come through with an innovative work of interactive fiction. Although the company's particular brand of humor has been present to some degree in all of its games, only twice before —- in Planetfall and in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (both by Steven Meretzky) —- has Infocom attempted science fiction comedy. Leather Goddesses is, of all things, a science fiction sex comedy.
It's actually a spoof of the kind of superhero science fiction that was prevalent in comic books of the 1930s. (For anybody who has never seen one, Infocom has provided an example in 3-D, along with red-blue glasses to read it with. And read it you must; it contains important clues.) The story takes the hero (or heroine— the program allows the player to be either male or female) from the restroom of a seedy bar in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, to the jungles of Venus, the canals of Mars, a tiny house in Cleveland, and the palace of the Leather Goddesses on the Martian moon Phobos, among other locations. Our hero, it seems, is slated to be the subject of certain unmentionable experiments which will enable the Goddesses, after invading Earth, to make humans their sexual playthings. For some reason, this must be prevented.
As you move about, collecting the various items you need to defeat the LG of P, you encounter members of the opposite sex, and what happens then depends on your willingness to engage in... well, you know. But the author has cleverly arranged things to minimize the risk of offending anyone. At any point in the game you can switch to any of three naughtiness levels —- "tame" (about as racy as a Betty Crocker cookbook), "suggestive" (no more so than on TV's Moonlighting), or "lewd" (lewd).
Many of the puzzles you must solve in order to get to the places you need to get to and obtain the objects you seek involve wordplay: There's a word search puzzle (of a particular type that GAMES readers will recognize), a cryptogram, a riddle, and an "odd machine" whose function is a delight to discover. There's also a bi-level labyrinth full of nasty creatures; getting through it will require more than the map provided.
The level of difficulty is "Standard" -— tougher than Infocom's "Introductory" adventures but not as hard as "Advanced" or "Expert." Leather Goddesses is one of Infocom's finest achievements, pure pleasure from start to finish.
This article appeared in
Games
Jan 1987
These historical, out-of-print articles and literary works have been GNUSTOed onto InvisiClues.org for academic and research purposes.
