Return to Zork

The Good
Well there are plenty of nice photographic backgrounds and fine background music. The script is quite good, has good humour just like the original Zork Trilogy and is well acted. I also like the idea of detective work by photography and speech recording.

The Bad
Normally I complete a game before reviewing it, but Return to Zork was too much a test of my patience. So at the beginning we get to the see the white house from the very first Zork game(text-adventure, 1980). Then we're moved to the game's main setting, the Valley of the Vultures, from which we find another trapdoor entrance the "Great Underground Empire"(Zork). There appears only a loose connection to original Zork Trilogy. I felt the very first Zork text adventure had a lot of charm to it. The game was a simple treasure hunt really, but I think, done really well. Return to Zork has a plot in which a villain called Morphius is controlling the people of Shanbar through their dreams, causing them to move underground and rebuild their town. Or something like that anyway. I found the storytelling very vague and I didn't enjoy having to piece it all together from the little bits of knowledge scattered around. Not far into the adventure I got a bit stuck so I decided to check a walkthrough rather than spend my precious time scrutinizing everything to try and find the way forward. When I found out what the way forward actually was, I realized that I was not going to have the time and patience get through the game without reliance of a walkthrough. Even if I could work out some sort of objective, the game is full of strange problems and solutions that seem to require the player's utter commitment. I tried my best to enjoy the game by piecing together the plot and determining what my purpose is and I carefully checked the walkthrough to make sure I didn't misstep and screw up the whole game(there's an item at the start of the game that you have to "take correctly", otherwise I don't think you can't win the game i.e you're screwed from the start and don't even know it). But I decided that I'd given all I could when a bug messed up the game. I was in a forest, one of the game's mazes, and I'd just saved the game, only to realized that something had gone wrong and I couldn't make the mouse pointer change into an arrow and allow me move forward or change my facing. The game's puzzles are bad enough, but combined with bugs, it's unbearable. I wanted to play it, because of it's connection to the Zork Trilogy, which I'm still very fond of, but I don't think this game particularly does a service to those games. There are references to things of the Zork Trilogy of course e.g grues, the Flatheads, the GUE calendar, Frobozz Corp., but I'm still much happier replaying Zork I than this, text-only and all. The good script, sound, graphics and acting arn't good enough to sustain me through all the game's troubles.

The Bottom Line
If you loved one or all of the Zork Trilogy you'll not necessarily enjoy Return to Zork. The Zork Trilogy is very challenging just as Return to Zork is, but you could say that the games challenge and reward differently. You may like the idea of finally getting Zork with graphics, but the game doesn't really feel like an expansion of the Zork Trilogy or either Beyond Zork(1987) or Zork Zero(1989). I don't think fans of the earlier Zork games would necessarily feel as though Zork was genuinely being kept current by this game.