Beyond Zork: The Coconut of Quendor

The Good
Back in the '80's, I used to worship at the throne of Brian Moriarty the way kids today worship at the throne of Sid Meier or the Blizzard gang, and this game is one of the reasons why. Forget all the "innovative" stuff like the automap and the (basically inconsequential) RPG elements in the game; Beyond Zork is essentially about two things: great writing and great puzzles. First, the writing.

As anyone who has actually tried it knows, it's very difficult to write good descriptive prose for text adventures (especially back in the day when the whole game had to fit into 256K of memory). A lot of information needs to be conveyed as concisely as possible, and with an artistic flair that makes it an enjoyable read for the player. It may sound easy to do in theory, but it's devilishly hard to bring off successfully in practice, even for talented and accomplished writers. Yet Brian Moriarty makes it all seem so easy. Witness the opening room description from Beyond Zork:

Hilltop: The horizon is lost in the glare of morning upon the Great Sea. You shield your eyes to sweep the shore below, where a village lies nestled beside a quiet cove. A stunted oak tree shades the inland road.

Now, compare that to the usual kind of schlock we get in text adventures:

Hilltop: You look across the valley and see a village sitting on the shore of the Great Sea. There's an oak tree next to the road.

'Nuff said. I'll only add that while many text adventure fans feel that Brian's best writing was done in Trinity (which I certainly loved as well), the prose in Beyond Zork is every bit its equal in my book, and this game is worth playing if for no other reason than to experience it and savor it.

But there's another reason to play as well: the puzzles. As in so many of the Infocom fantasy games, Beyond Zork's puzzles are often satirical takes on everyday themes and cliches, or reference jokes and in-jokes between the author and his audience. This is not only what makes them so much fun to solve, but this familiarity also gives the player some built-in clues as to how he might actually go about approaching them. That's not to say that they're easy--not by any means. Beyond Zork sports some of the hardest puzzles in the whole Infocom repertoire. But they're not obscure or unfair puzzles, either, and that's what ultimately makes them so satisfying when you do finally crack them. There are also quite a lot. This game is pretty long, and it has a lot of content.

The Bad
If you don't like puzzles, you probably won't like Beyond Zork. Just a warning up front. It's a lot like Spellbreaker in that regard. Also, it's possible to get the game into an unwinnable state and not realize it, which is a major strike against it. It's one thing to get a game into an unwinnable state, but to struggle with one for days on end only to find out from some third party that you've been trying to go up a dead-end alley is unacceptable. Still, this game was made in the days before it was set in stone that games just couldn't do that, so I tend to cut it some slack in that regard. But be forewarned anyway. If you get stuck to the point where you think you've tried everything, you just might have.

The Bottom Line
Beyond Zork is one of the best text adventures of all time by one of the few true masters of the genre. It features outstanding writing, clever puzzles, zany, off-kilter humor, and tons of atmosphere. If you liked Spellbreaker and/or Trinity, then it's a fair bet you'll like Beyond Zork too.