REVIEW

Four Funerals and Wedding

Activision Takes Venerable Text Adventure Franchise into Mysty Waters

Charles Ardai

WARNING! This article contains spoilers. Avert your eyes!

First things first: I promise that for the remainder of this review I won't bitch about how remote the connection is between Zork Nemesis and any of the classic text adventures that proudly bore the Zork name many years ago. What's the point? It's like complaining that they don't write novels any more the way Trollope used to, or that roadways sure were safer before you had all these horseless carriages zooming across them. Time moves on, and so must we.

Modern gamers want (or at least game companies think they want) to play Myst over and over again. Give 'em a gorgeous photorealistic environment full of fantastic landscapes, some quasi-liturgical groaning on the soundtrack, and a simple puzzle every so often to keep their brains engaged, and you'll be off to the bank to count your riches. Throw in some ghostly visions and a hint of the horrific and you can snall the 7th Guest crowd, too.

Anyway, that's how I explain Zork Nemesis. The story here -- part fantasy, part horror -- is that a quartet of alchemists has been murdered and is now in some sort of magical suspended animation, being tormented by a demon called "the Nemesis." The alchemists ask you to go on a series of quests to free them. Along the way, you get to chop the head off a corpse, handle a severed hand, receive shock therapy and watch some acts of really awful violence. You get to soar over a waterfall, race through a rocky trench, drive a tank and ride a mine car. You get to explore catacombs and corridors, conservatories and caves. And you get to face off against four or five dozen of the tamest puzzles it's ever been my pleasure to encounter. Mostly what you do is unlock doors. This is usually a matter of lining up a pair of astrological symbols, or something similarly uninspired. You've also got the usual sorts of adventure game effluvia: pull the levers in the right order, push the buttons in the right order, turn the knobs in the right order and so on.

What I want to know is, when did adventure games become so beautiful and so dull? Over the past 10 years we've gone from Dorothy Parker to Pamela Anderson. Do we really have to abandon the cleverness, style and wit of the former in order to get the voluptuous visual appeal of the latter?

RETURN TO ZORK

The last time we saw the Great Underground Empire, it was in the clutches of a fiend called Morphius. The game was Activision's Return to Zork, their first revival of the then-moribund Zork franchise. That game had some pronounced design weaknesses -- navigation was choppy and disorienting, the scheme for communicating with other characters by clicking on "emotion icons" was indecipherable -- but it was visually stunning and developed quite a following. So what if no one could make sense of the story? This may be the picture-postcard way of looking at things, more graphic design than game design, but heck, millions of postcards are sold every year, so it can't be a bad business to be in.

For Zork Nemesis, Activision has kept their "pretty pictures uber alles" philosophy, but they've eliminated or smoothed over all the problem areas that made the earlier game such a chore. For instance, movement is now more fluid than before: each location allows the player to view the surroundings in a fluid, 360-degree pan. Forward movement, from one location to another, still occurs in discrete leaps, so this is not a Doom-style (or Under a Killing Moon-style) environment that you can explore freely, but it's still a great improvement over Return to Zork.

As for character interaction, there isn't any. There are barely any characters other than the four alchemists, and they're dead. While they still talk to you from time to time, it's only in non-interactive video segments that play when you click on their carcophagi. You do meet a few other stray characters -- such as a monk in a monestary who goes made before your eyes -- but they aren't characters so much as set decoration.

What Zork Nemesis does have is graphic excellence. The five main areas for you to explore -- the lair of the Nemesis and each alchemist's demense -- are beautifully rendered. Every room in every location, including the secret passageways and laboratories they all seem to conceal, is like a miniature painting. It's all rendered with great care and skill, down to the smallest architectural details. And when the occasional animations kick in -- for instance, when you soar from one of the major locations to another -- your heart races.

The only downside to the abundance of graphic detail is that it's sometimes hard to notice everything in a scene that you can interact with. Some important objects blend into the background and go unnoticed. As in most games, the cursor changes shape when it passes over a "hot" spot on the screen, and this does help a little; but some of the critical hot spots are still too easy to miss.

A bigger problem is that, when you do find the hot spots, the interactions are very limited. Almost all the objects you pick up (and there aren't a whole lot) are used on the same screen or one of the very next screens you come to. So, when you find a coin on the ground outside the monastery, you can be pretty sure you'll find a coin slot just inside the front door. If you find a key, you can be confident the keyhole is somewhere nearby. While a little of this is good, the extent to which Zork Nemesis uses this simplifying tactic is disappointing.

When a puzzle doesn't require the use of an object, it is almost invariably a purely mechanical exercise. The game is full of very simple codes that aren't much fun to decipher and very simple processes that aren't much fun to step through. There are occasional moments of cleverness, but too few. You find a long-lost treasure by opening a coffin, lying down inside it and pulling it shut over you. (The treasure is on the underside of the coffin lid.) In the Nemesis' temple, a time travel room allows you to collect an icicle in the Ice Age and melt it in a volcanic era to get the pure water you need for a ritual. This is good stuff. But the bad puzzles outnumber the good by at least five to one.

The final element of the game is the story, which unfolds in video vignettes triggered by clicking on various objects and documents. Aside from the bad acting and the fact that they are not interactive, the video segments are fine. But the documents -- mostly personal letters from one alchemist to another, plus some diaries and books -- are far too numerous and mind-numbing. You sometimes find a half-dozen letters in a single room, and pretty much have to read all of them.

A family saga of sorts unfolds, something about how one alchemist's daughter wanted to marry another's son, but the intricate family politics the designers try to craft misfires -- you end up merely confused. Whose son is Lucien? What is Sophia's relationship to Kaine? It's all like a particularly ornate soap opera of which you have missed the first few episodes. You're continually racing to catch up and, worse still, the nice rhythm of the gameplay stops dead whenever you run across large chunks of text to read.

ZORK ETHIC

It's ironic that a perennial defender of text adventures would complain about having to wade through text. But there is a difference between text that paints a scene or tells a story and text that merely lards on extra layers of exposition, just as there is a difference between a puzzle that challenges a player's resourcefulness or imagination and one that merely challenges his patience.

Zork Nemesis is a pleasure to watch and has glimmering moments of promise, but a well-told story and a consistently inspired caliber of gameplay are two things that it hasn't got. You'll probably show off your favorite scenes to your friends -- I did -- but I doubt you'll tell them about your favorite puzzle, the way we used to talk, in the old days, about catching the Babel Fish or the death of Floyd.

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