DOS

Journey: The Quest Begins

Journey is one of several "experiments" in formatting that Infocom undertook around this time (some others being Nord & Bert, Beyond Zork, Border Zone, and of course the infamous Infocomics). This is one of their less successful attempts. The game is fairly enjoyable to play by itself, makes a nice change of pace, and presents the gamer with a new way of doing things to try to assimilate, but ultimately the reduced interaction, and the difficulty of doing challenging, interesting puzzles with this parser would have made a whole line of such games rather less interesting.

I was surprised how engrossing the story was, although nothing very original, the usual sword and sorcery affair. The puzzles aren't that easy, but if you have the patience to retrace your steps and try every alternative, you'll have an adventure to remember. For rating purposes, I'd like to choose 3.5, but this isn't possible for reviewer ratings, so it's a 3.