MARKETALK: Reviews

Sorcerer

Margot Comstock Tommervik

SORCERER. By Steve Meretzky. The strongest effect Infocom's sorcery weaves in the second of its Enchanter games is the outcome of a spell by which the enchanter can move forward in time — just a tad. But it's enough to precipitate an awesomely convoluted situation that, complex mental gymnastics mastered, is absolutely logical. The puzzle enmeshed in all this, along with its logistical substumpers, may well be the piece de resistance of all Infocom's brain twisters.

Enough said. You'll read no potential clues here that might dilute the delight of solving this one yourself.

Perhaps the most noticeable characteristic of Sorcerer overall is the variety of ambiances and tempos it encompasses. Underground and surface empires intertwine with each other and with bits and pieces of other worlds. Imagine Valley Forge on a cliff overlooking the Flathead Ocean, Johnson Wax on a turnpike guarded by gnomes. Coney Island in a giant cave.

In the last of these, Bozbarland, "a magical futuristic fantasy amusement park," resides an eloquent argument for the power of text in adventures: it's a roller coaster. Enter the car that temptingly waits on a nearby platform and the ride begins. Steve Meretzky's brief, simple, blow-by-blow account of the action is apt to have you clutching for the guardrail. In the game as in real life, the roller coaster is a diversion serving no real purpose; but it's well worth the ride.

All Bozbarland captures the honky-tonk flavor of the midway, with its atmosphere of elbow-bumping impatience, smoke-filled sleaze, and the fast breakaway speed of the rides. Yet the brush strokes are few and only detailed at their ends — the roller coaster, a flume ride, a haunted house, a carnival game complete with well-caricatured shill, and even a crooked casino slot machine. You can almost hear the tinny music.

Leave Bozbarland, and you're in a silent world of craters and chasms, where money grows on trees — until you pick it. Or tunnel up to the surface of the earth, where plagues of locusts distract from mine fields, where rustic bridges collapse in disrepair and riverbanks crumble in the sun.

Then there are the war memorials, with a different kind of silence — the turreted ruins of an old fort, parade grounds in dishabille with an ancient flag somehow flying still, an armory fallen victim to vandals and looters, a solitary cannon inhabited by forest critters. And deep in the bowels of the earth below, all that remains of the castle that predated the fort: its dungeon.

A coal mine is alive, its eternal night smacking of the nineteenth century, despite the faceless diligence of the Orwellian troglodytes that work its endless shafts.

Finally, a glass palace, Infocom's 1984 answer to the twisty little passages all alike of the original adventure. Like a labyrinth of mirrors in three dimensions, the crystal palace cannot be solved by dropping possessions. Indeed, the layout of the maze is far less complicated than that. It's just that with all the glass and the glare of brilliant light bouncing among walls and ceilings and floors, you can't distinguish anything; in essence, you can't see. It takes thinking outside this cube and clever use of resources to solve this one.

All these worlds are a long way from the monastic serenity of the Enchanter's Guild headquarters in which the game begins.

Then, when you've explored and restored a hundred places a hundred times and you finally reach the cool clean air of seashores and lazy lagoons, it's all for naught. Time, you discover, was of the essence. So it's back to the beginning, playing through with an economy of moves, to give yourself time to tackle the end game.

And what an end game it is. It gives no quarter; every move must count. Every part of the enchanter's being is besieged by needs and shortages, frustrations and threats. Somehow keeping it all together, you must solve a dozen puzzles that seem like a hundred, finally to earn the greatest possible reward as enchanter and a thoroughly satisfying intellectual reward as player.

You'll have worked hard for it. Throughout, Sorcerer is filled with puzzles that stop you but don't stump you; in almost every case, you'll feel like the answer is right there if you can just put the pieces together. The game stops you not in frustration mode, but in hard thinking mode. And that's great. That's what adventuring is all about.

And in a sense, 90 percent of this superior game is like a bonus; the altered-time puzzle is just about worth the price of admission all by itself. An inquiring mind could spend days after solving that puzzle just mulling over its implications, the possibilities it suggests.

As has become usual, Giardini/Russell's implementation of Infocom's documentation is superb. It's also essential. Not usual, but a first for Infocom on Apples, players with IIes and IIcs can opt to play in eighty-column mode with lower-case text.

Steve Meretzky's auspicious debut as a software author was made with Planetfall. Planetfall was good, but Sorcerer shows considerable development, tighter integration, and just plain polish. Keep it up, Steve, and we'll be looking for you to precipitate a Pulitzer Prize for interactive computer adventures.

Watch out for Berlyn, though.

Sorcerer, by Steve Meretzky, Infocom (55 Wheeler Street, Cambridge, MA 02138; 617-492-1031). $49.95.

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