Planetfall

aka: Planetfall - a science fiction story, Sole Survivor
Moby ID: 51
DOS Specs
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Description official descriptions

It all started with your great-great-grandfather who was a High Admiral and one of the founding officers of the Patrol. All generations since then have served in the Patrol. Now it's your turn and two years into you are still a lowly Ensign Seventh Class. Your direct report, Blather, is really making your life miserable. Are you really Stellar Patrol material?

Spellings

  • プラネットフォール - Japanese spelling

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Credits (DOS version)

Interactive Fiction by

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 81% (based on 10 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.8 out of 5 (based on 97 ratings with 7 reviews)

Top ranking, text-only, text adventure

The Good
There is some good drama in this relatively short game, especially the friendship with Floyd the Robot. There's some good problem solving, the difficulty level I'd say is just about right, it's certainly easier than some of the Zork games. I particularly liked the laser battle with the microbe inside the computer and discovering the way to beat it. It's interesting piecing together the fate of the people of the planet you crash land on at the start, how you and your crewmates on the space patrol ship got caught up in it and that you, a low ranking crew member, play a big part in saving the planet.

The Bad
Well being short isn't necessarily bad, but it seems unfinished i.e there are rooms you can't access and important looking items that you don't need. There is also a trap that I found particularly cruel, you need many magnetic access cards to get to new areas in the game, but you may find, when you come to use them, they've been ruined somehow, making it impossible to progress and win the game. Of course you could easily have saved your game since unknowingly ruining your cards and have no prior saved games to fall back on, finding that you have to restart.

The Bottom Line
I think it's one of the best adventure games, including graphical text adventures and point & click adventures. The problem solving isn't as demanding as some of the Zork problem solving and when you've completed it, it's still something you can have a fairly quick, satisfying game of.

DOS · by Andrew Fisher (697) · 2018

Not impressed.

The Good
Floyd seemed like an interesting character; he was very lively and interacted with the world around him.

The Bad
The game's geography is sprawling. I play through my text adventure games by first exploring all the rooms I have access to and getting a "lay of the land", and then I start thinking about solving puzzles. Most Infocom games I've played separate the geography into nicely manageable "chunks" of 5-10 rooms that are separated by puzzles, so you can't explore further than your current "chunk" unless you solve a puzzle. As such, there's a constant stream of exploration intermingled with puzzle-solving, which is fun. Even the games which defy this and place you in large environments, such as Trinity, are still fun because the geography is interesting and unusual.

Planetfall's rooms, however, feel utterly uninspired. It feels like generic science fiction, and many rooms are replicas of other ones; there's tons of restrooms, for instance, and they all have the exact same descriptions. On the one hand, this adds a sense of space to the facility you're exploring, but on the other hand it makes it feel a lot more monotonous, overwhelming, and boring. So I found myself essentially making a map for way too long and wandering through rooms that all seemed the same (for the most part).

Not only were the rooms boring, however, but the objects and puzzles were too: doors were locked by means of padlocks, number dials, and keycard slots; the facility was littered with elevators and vending machines and other generic, uninteresting interactive objects.

You need to eat and drink in this game to stay alive. In The Lurking Horror you have to drink caffeine to stay awake, but this adds to the tension of the atmosphere; here it serves no purpose that I can see. They might as well have modeled biological functions as well, at least that way the bathrooms would be useful for something.

This game is a parody, and one of my problems with this style of story is that it essentially beats you over the head with comedy. It's very similar to the way some ultraviolent movies can get tiresome; Planetfall just threw so many jokes at me so frequently that I quickly got desensitized to it. Even Douglas Adams' humor has this effect on me to some extent, but what makes his jokes more interesting is that they often double as social commentary or are interesting in some other dimension, whereas much of Meretsky's humor is just general silliness. It often feels like he's trying a little too hard to be funny, and many of the jokes fall a little flat or are too similar to each other, as opposed to, say, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in which there's a much better diversity of humor and most jokes are laugh-out-loud funny.

This isn't to say, though, that there aren't any utterly hilarious jokes in Planetfall; it's more that it just gets tiresome pretty quickly.

Being one of Infocom's earliest titles, the parser isn't as good as the one in later games like Wishbringer or Trinity. Most annoyingly, it won't disambiguate between nouns (it just picks the first one it finds if there's any ambiguity).

The Bottom Line
Please take all of what I say with a massive grain of salt, as I haven't actually finished this game; in fact, I didn't get very far at all, not because I got stuck, but because the game just got very boring and playing it felt more like a chore than a game, even with Floyd by my side.

If you're looking for a funny, unique sci-fi adventure, I would recommend The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy instead; although I did find that game to be a little on the frustrating side at times, it was consistently funny, interesting, and challenging.

DOS · by Foopy (10) · 2004

The best IF game I every played, and the only one I solved by myself.

The Good
Floyd the child like Robot! The science: magnetic cards (that can get wiped!), circuit boards, flashing lights.... The Story: You start as a lowly Ensign 7th Class scrubbing spaceship decks for your evil overseer Blather. An alien Ambassador makes you life more difficult by leaving slime all over the desk. There is an accident and you have to scramble to the escape pod before the ship explodes. The pod takes you (hopefully in one piece) to a strange deserted alien planet. You get to wonder through dorms, canteens, rec rooms, admin corridors and the engineering unit where you find Floyd your robot Pal. Find magnetic swipe cards to operate lifts and a tram that takes you to Lawanda complex were you must battle disease, radiation and mutants. Fix all the systems and save the 'inhabitants' from hibernation earning you a big fat promotion. The Goodies: All Infocom games came with a manual, transcript of sample game (see my site for a working version of this and 3D Maps) and various objects. You get a Stellar Patrol ID Card, Postcards of an alien world and a diary.

The Bad
Parser problems. Extending the ladder across the rift and killing the bacteria with the laser were real problems to phrase.

The Bottom Line
Great game. Spent hours playing it.

DOS · by David Ledgard (58) · 2005

[ View all 7 player reviews ]

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Planetfall appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Accardi-3

Accardi-3 is named after Gabrielle Accardi, Infocom's Marketing person.

Cancelled sequel

A third sequel for Planetfall was planned and almost released in 1995. "Planetfall - The Search for Floyd" was supposed to take place 100 years after Stationfall, and dealt mainly with the resurrection of the beloved Floyd thanks to an alien device. A full design doc and storyline was completed circa 1993 by Steve Meretzky and the game was supposed to start development for the Return to Zork engine by late 1994. The deal went sour however, and all that survives of the game are some conceptual screenshots.

Easter Eggs

If you add a six to the beginning of the ID number on the enclosed card and space out the digits appropriately, you'll get the phone number to The Tech, MIT's official newspaper.

Legacy

The sci-fi based janitor turned hero theme of Planetfall was also used in later adventure games such as the Space Quest series and Future Wars.

Novel

A novelisation (perhaps better termed a cross-promotional tie-in loosely related to the original property) of the game was produced by Byron Preiss (with a grey-striped cover design emulating Infocom game packaging), published by Avon Books. It was written by Arthur Byron Cover and first published in August of 1988. Its ISBN is 0-380-75384-7 and the rear cover blurb reads as follows:

"Arthur Byron Cover combines the antic sense of Robert Sheckley, the far travelling of A. E. Van Vogt, the deadly serious wry whimsy of Kurt Vonnegut... with a fresh, invigorating talent all his own." - Harlan Ellison

THE PATROL'S LOOKING FOR A FEW GOOD ORGANISMS

The recruiting poster said, "Join the Stellar Patrol and visit exotic worlds!"

Homer took the poster's advice and signed up for service. His heroism on the planet Resida quickly earned him a promotion, and Homer was assigned to the most important Diplomatic Conference in the history of the Third Galactic Empire.

Then Homer got lost. Really lost.

Fortunately, Homer was accompanied by his loyal robot Oliver and the ghost of his beloved robot Floyd.

The fate of the empire depended on the Stellar Patrol's finding Homer--the only man in the fleet who can play the soprano saxophone!

Packaging

The old "Folio" packaging of Planetfall consisted of a folder containing "Today's Stellar Patrol" - recruitment brochure, a Special Assignment Task Force I.D. card, three postcards (Ramos II, Nebulon, and Accardi-3), and a personal diary (4 pages, 1 empty).

The re-release of Planetfall used the standard box format which consisted of a grey box with colored horizontal stripes. It contained "Today's Stellar Patrol" - recruitment brochure, a Special Assignment Task Force I.D. card, three postcards (Ramos II, Nebulon, and Accardi-3), and a personal diary (4 pages, 1 empty).

The Science Fiction Classics collection consisted of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Planetfall, and A Mind Forever Voyaging in a specially designed trilogy slipcase.

Statistics

(From The New Zork Times Vol.3 No.2 Spring 1984)

Some statistics about Planetfall:

  • Number of rooms: 105- Number of different ways to die: 41- Number of words in vocabulary: 666- Number of takeable objects: 49

Working title

(From The New Zork Times, Vol.3 No.1, Winter 1984)

Planetfall was titled Sole Survivor by its author, Steve Meretzky, and later shortened to just Survivor. When Infocom discovered another game called Survivor, they decided they'd rather switch than fight. Infocom's ad agency, Giardini/Russell, submitted a list about 30 long, their favorite of which was Lost Planet. Reaction was less than enthusiastic, not the least because it reminded two of Infocom's employess of the TV series, Lost in Space. Marc Blank suggested Planetfall during a long, frustrating meeting - he thought he had seen it once in an SF book as a word meaning arrival on a new planet (much like landfall). Nobody really believed him, but it was never improved upon.

Information also contributed by Adam Baratz,Belboz,Pseudo_Intellectual,Ricky Derocher,Tony Van, and Zovni

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Brian Hirt.

Commodore 128 added by Trypticon. Commodore 64 added by Quapil. TRS-80 CoCo added by Slik. PC-98 added by Infernos. Apple II added by Droog. Amstrad CPC, CP/M, Atari 8-bit added by Kabushi. TRS-80, Amiga added by Martin Smith. Macintosh, Commodore 16, Plus/4 added by Terok Nor. Amstrad PCW, Tatung Einstein added by Игги Друге. Atari ST added by Belboz.

Additional contributors: Trixter, Jeanne, Alaka, Pseudo_Intellectual, David Ledgard, mo , c64fan, Rik Hideto, FatherJack.

Game added March 1, 1999. Last modified March 8, 2024.