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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Screenshots

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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)

Witty, atmospheric and emotional

The Good
Steve Meretzky's first game is still one of the my favourite Infocom games ever.

First of all, it's because of Floyd -- of course! Meretzky had the marvelous idea to give the player a sidekick, in form of this little robot, giving him a childish personality that you simply cannot dislike. He doesn't really become part of the plot until far into the game, but he makes you emotionally attached to the game, and he makes the exploration of the planet very enjoyable. (Besides giving some valuable hints.)

However, later in the game, he BECOMES an integral part of the plot. I don't want to disclose too much, but if you get far enough, I can assure there will one of those rare moments in computer gaming where you (if you have a heart or two) will feel truly sad and moved by the game. For this alone, this game deserves its place in the pantheon of great computer games.

But it's not just Floyd who is responsible for the great atmosphere of this game. The building complex that you'll explore is wide and realistic. First, you need to eat and sleep from time to time. (Some people hat that; I don't. I would have loved it if you had to go to the toilets too!) Then, there are lots of useless rooms -- dormitories, toilets etc. -- but they add to the feeling that you're exploring a large building that has been struck by disaster. I especially liked the native language that is used on the whole station -- a distorted kind of English, which is understandable, but only with some effort. A genial way of conveying a feeling of strangeness.

And of course, there's this great humor of Meretzky -- one of the wittiest writers and game designers in gaming history, IMO. Not that there's one gag after the other -- the whole game is actually serious and dramatic; as you get further, you'll discover that you have caught a deadly disease, and your condition will get worse and worse, unless you can solve the game. There are even some horror elements at the end of the game, when you are chased by mutants through the empty station. But still, every few minutes, you'll find some little hidden joke that'll make you chuckle.

The Bad
The only thing that I really, really didn't like is the very last puzzle -- how to escape from the mutants. Normally, Infocom gives you at least a minor hint somewhere, but here, it's all luck to find the way. Well, maybe I missed something... (EDIT: I did... still, the hint is very subtle.)

Another thing I'm not too fond of is that massive use of red herrings. I haven't got anything against a few red herrings, but here it's gotten too much. Like the helicopter -- you'll even find a manual how to operate it, but you'll never be able to.

The Bottom Line
This is a really great introductory IF adventure, especially for fans of humorous science fiction. It has everything -- a dramatic plot, a big, logical, realistic world to explore, and, best of all -- the loveable NPC robot Floyd. The game has one of the most memorable and emotional scenes in computing history. The game is very funny, dramatic, and horrible, and the difficulty level is OK (with a few exceptions). Together with Infocom's unique parser, this is definitely recommended -- nay, a must -- for each retrogamer.

And I'm sure that the Space Quest writers were heavily inspired by Planetfall...

DOS · by General Error (4329) · 2011

A surprisingly uninspiring adventure

The Good
As usual in Infocom adventures, the game has great prose, good parser, interface, & in most part atmosphere. It also starts of well, with the futuristic Captain Bligh making your life hell.

The Bad
Unusually in an Infocom adventure there are more comments about what is wrong than good. A few months back I played Starcross, which was described as one of the harder adventures, but which I mostly completed on my own, whilst Planetfall is described as one of the easiest, Upon playing this I found the reverse true.

After reaching the alien buildings you are able to move around a lot, but most of the rooms are very similar, full of corridors, elevators, dorms that it soon becomes pretty boring wandering around. There are many objects around but I have found it difficult matching them up to the puzzles, which seem to be full of locked doors/elevators with slots needing cards.

The parser on Infocom games is usually great, but to do things here is quite pedantic at times. For instance the game is full of slots needing cards, but getting the wording right to do this is ridiculous. Swipe, put, move etc, in are out, & you have to specifically 'slide object through slot', Any deviation leads to error. This the same for other actions. I also have a problem with the ridiculous childish prose around the premises, presumably representing alien language, but more like a pre version of text speech. At first I though it was something to decode like the great hieroglyphics in Infidel, but soon realised it was poor English prose like you found in Allo Allo.

Except for the beginning when you have dealings with Ensign Blather, there is little life once you get into the main game until you awaken the robot called Floyd. I had heard a lot about him, & how great & funny he was. So it is a bit hard to say I found him extremely irritating & useless, & acted like a frantic small child. Obviously the game was made for a different time, but I doubt I would have liked him much then.

The game also surprisingly suffers from death through not having enough sleep or eating, which was something early adventures had in abundance, but not something expected in an Infocom adventure. How someone dies without eating for a day I have no idea, particularly when they have had nothing to drink, which surely is more serious. Also dying because you haven't slept in a bed in dorm is hilarious.

Everything also take so long in this game., Waiting for an elevator to move to it destination takes a lifetime, Floyd keeps dozing off, reminders to stuff your face & go to sleep. This all wouldn't be so bad if you were not timed all the time.



The Bottom Line
I have heard very good things about this game, with its robot companion Floyd, that I was looking forward to really playing this, & it pains me to make such negative comments, as I know the game is well loved.

I really wanted to play & complete this adventure as a fan of the makers & lover of text games, but found it quite painful to play. Perhaps it is the setting or getting old, & think next time I will pick a more Earthbound setting when I play my next game.

I know this is isn't popular but cannot really recommend this adventure, but I expect others will really enjoy it.

DOS · by zorkman (132) · 2016

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

[ 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, Atari 8-bit, CP/M 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.