PC Magazine, v3(5)

~4 minute read

20 Mar 1984

PC ARCADE: Greek And Egyptian Adventures

Infidel

Phil Wiswell

A six-page, handwritten diary and an unfinished four-page letter on stationery from the Hotel Americain in El Menhir, Egypt, set the stage for Infidel, a modern day archaeological adventure. These preliminary materials explain the predicament that you will soon Find yourself in.

Once you've booted the game, you'll discover that, as the unsung assistant of a successful archaeologist, you have gotten a lucky break. A woman whose father came close to unearthing the last great pyramid has given you his map, some hieroglyphic drawings, and a partial hieroglyph dictionary. She has financed your expedition to the Egyptian desert.

Your goal is to locate and enter the lost pyramid, explore the rooms, solve the puzzles, and acquire enough information to Find the sarcophagus.

As the diary makes clear, things went downhill from the moment you entered Egypt. First, the navigation box you need to locate the buried pyramid site falls off a truck and breaks. Your workers don’t really like or respect you, especially when you try to make them work on a holy day.

Abdul and the boys poison your koumiss (a drink made from fermented mare’s milk), clean out the camp, and leave you, a worthless infidel, for dead.

The game begins with on-screen text that describes you waking up, groggy and all alone on the cot in your tent, to the sound of the desert winds. Then, in the distance you hear a plane. Like manna from heaven, it drops a crate by parachute — the long awaited replacement navigation box.

Of course, you're going to need much more than the box to stave off death from hunger, thirst, and heat. Most of what you'll need can be found in the 16 scenes that map the square encampment. (Be sure to draw your own map to chart your progress and detail important items.) You will need water, something to carry it in, some food, and a shovel, of course. Unfortunately, Abdul and the boys have nearly stripped the camp of useful items; those that remain are hidden or locked inside your own footlocker, and Abdul has taken the key.

Once you figure out how to find half a dozen items in camp, you’ll probably head into the desert at random. Don’t. Remember: It’s about 106 degrees in the shade, and there’s no shade anyway. The map that comes with the game shows a mark where a cube containing hieroglyphs was found circa 1920. If you have the cube itself, use the navigation box to get to that mark, then think for a few minutes.

The buried pyramid, if you find it, is huge, with enough chambers, secret passages, treasures, and pitfalls to keep you hunting for months, Along the way you will probably find a lot of hieroglyphs, and it is a good idea compile a "dictionary" of them. You must solve their meanings to solve the game. You use the keyboard to input your commands and make your moves, which are limited to eightt compass directions in addition to up, down, in, and out. The real beauty of Infidel is the breadth of its vocabulary (over 600 words) and its ability to understand full sentence commands with adjectives, rather than mere two-word noun-verb sentences.

This "interlogic development system" also permits the game to string two separate commands into a single sentence, which speeds up the game. For instance, you can enter a command such as: Walk up the Winding Stairway, Then Drop the Shovel in the Doorway. If your PC does not understand a sentence or a particular word, it will tell you so and give you a chance to try synonyms. Some of the words the game understands are given in the manual — which is written in the style of an adventure magazine — but the majority of useful words are left for you to discover. Infidel requires common sense, logic, intuition, and often trial-and-error.

My best advice is to explore and examine everything you see or suspect you might see and not to overlook the obvious. It's also a great idea to save your position in the game to a blank disk just before exploring dangerous options. Then, if you die, you can reload your saved position and try something else. If you really get stuck, you can write for playing hints to Infocom's fictitious "sanity insurance" company, Bilk & Wheedle.

Michael Berlyn, author of the critically acclaimed Suspended, wrote Infidel. His prose style is exciting and fast-paced, with occasional bits of humor. And most of what you read accurately represents ancient Egypt, using research by Patricia Fogleman, a Harvard graduate student.

On PC's scale of one to six, Infidel rates:

This article appeared in
PC Magazine
20 Mar 1984

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