~3 minute readSoftware Review
Infocom's Sorcerer adventure game leaves you spellbound
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Sorcer. Infocom. 55 Wheeler St., Cambridge, MA 02138. (617) 576-3190. $49.95. Available for most popular personal computers.
Trapped in the Chamber of Living Death, you feel as if you’re floating in the center of an infinite void. Hideous parasites are tearing at your flesh. Amazingly, you don’t die.
Neither did we and thus can tell you about Sorcerer, an Infocom adventure game that has caused us equal amounts of amusement and aggravation.
The beauty of Sorcerer, and other Infocom games, is that they allow you to interact with your computer by typing in what feels like complete sentences. Much of the time the Infocom game "parser" will correctly interpret what you are saying, or if it doesn’t understand will respond unpredictably. (This can be amusing.)
We don’t want to give away too many of the details of Sorcerer. Besides, we might mislead you since we haven’t gotten beyond the Chamber of Living Death which admittedly isn’t very far.
A brief message from Karza of Thriff (we never found out what a Karza is supposed to be) on the first page of the "Popular Enchanting" document enclosed with the game explains that the adventure is based on the saga of the young Enchanter.
The Circle of Enchanters has dispatched a "fledgling Enchanter" against unknown evils. The Karza concludes, "In this time of crisis do we have the protection that only a Sorcerer can provide?"
In this Infocom adventure, you are the young Enchanter who has achieved fame in the Circle by defeating the evil warlock Krill. Now you must seek out new evils and destroy them. Thus, the game begins.
It's not easy. You move through rooms in the Hall of the Guide of Enchanters and through a fantasy land by typing instructions.
We did manage to get past the first section of Sorcerer, in which you are either struck by lightning or devoured by a hellhound.
We sauntered down the hallway through the darkness into Frobar’s headquarters. Hmmm. No clues here.
The folks at Infocom have a sense of humor as you'll discover when you enter the quarters of Belboz, the most powerful of all Enchanters, who has vanished.
His disappearance is what makes you the hope of the Circle. Perhaps Belboz’s parrot can offer some clues to his disappearance and the pending evil:
"Squawk! You should never have let down your mindshield, you doddering old Enchanter, Squawk! Now where can I hide this key?"
As you move through the game, you'll have to learn to make good use of your magic spell book. And don’t try to be clever and think you can solve this aventure without pencil and paper. Begin work on your map immediately.
One of the joys of Infocom games is the attention to detail they offer. In one room we found an old matchbook cover that offered a special spell that could be ordered by mail.
In a brass container in the lobby of the Guild Hall we found a copy of "Popular Enchanting" magazine that contained stories on the explosion of the spell scroll manufacturers and the coming shakeout in the magic potion industry.
What's the future of adventure games? Some time ago Infocom ran a catchy advertising campaign based on the slogan "all the graphics are in your head."
This was a reference to the fact that, unlike many other game companies, Infocom has so far bucked the trend toward mindboggling graphic displays on personal computers.
We hope that they continue to focus their attention on the insides rather than the appearance of their games. Adventure games that offer you a graphic display of each sequence as you move from room to room or place to place miss the point.
The pleasure of an adventure game is that it can potentially free your imagination in much the same way as reading a novel. It is easy to lose yourself in a well written adventure game.
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