Beyond the Tesseract

Moby ID: 16070
TRS-80 Specs

Description

Early (1983) TRS-80 BASIC text adventure game, the middle in a forgotten trilogy (sandwiched between "Project Triad" and "Codename Intrepid"), remembered for its no-holds-barred approach to math and logic concepts informing game settings and puzzles: in one section, sparking a genre cliche, one has to play a text adventure game inside the text adventure game; in another, one falls asleep and in a dream constructs a proof utilising physical representations of various components of symbolic logic; additional game areas are accessed by pushing and popping the stack, objects extruded from 2 to 3 dimensions by _y_ing them.

The supporting documentation understates when it claims the scenario for the adventure is meant to be vague -- searching for a 12-word code phrase (unlocked in chunks upon completion of certain puzzles) is just an excuse for sending an unwary player through an alien and abstract setting two words at a time (using VERB NOUN gameplay with a vocabulary of about 200).

Later (1988) versions of this game were ported in C to Solaris, Atari ST and MS-DOS environments; more recently, in December 2003, Andrew Plotkin ported it to the interactive fiction standard of machine-independent Z-code.

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Average score: 50% (based on 1 ratings)

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Trivia

Inspiration

How many games include a recommended reading list? In the game documentation, David Lo states The following books and reference works were used at one time or another as a source of information and/or inspiration:* The Beauty of Fractals. * The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought. * The Fractal Geometry of Nature. * Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. * The Heritage Illustrated Dictionary Of the English Language. * Mathematics: The New Golden Age. * The New Lexicon Webster's Dictionary, Encyclopedic Edition. * The Penguin Dictionary of Science, Fifth Edition. * Roget's International Thesaurus. * The Science of Fractal Images. * The VNR Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics. * The World of M.C. Escher.

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  • MobyGames ID: 16070
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Pseudo_Intellectual.

Additional contributors: Patrick Bregger.

Game added February 8, 2005. Last modified October 9, 2023.