Family Computing, v1(4)

~1 minute read

Dec 1983

Games for Two... or Ten

Deadline

Phil Wiswell

Deadline by Infocom. available for Apple II/II plus/IIe/III, Atari 400/800/1200XL (disk), $39.95; Commodore 64, IBM PC, Osborne, TI-99/4A (disk), S49.95.

Deadline is an interactive murder mystery whose object is to accuse the correct suspect with enough hard evidence by nightfall (a 12- hour game-time deadline). As the detective, you are provided with much more than a disk — you also get a lengthy interview with the characters, including the widow of the deceased, a police memo and lab report, a coroner's report, a letter from the crime scene, and a bag of tablets found near the body. And because you will never solve this crime without serious study of all the evidence off screen as well as on, the experience feels very real.

This is an excellent puzzle requiring logical thinking and clever, sometimes intuitive, deductions, which makes solving the case easier with more than one player. The entire game consists of text — there are no graphics on screen — but it's great text! Like other Infocom games. Deadline has a vocabulary of more than 600 words it can understand, most of which you have to discover by trial and error. Figuring out which words work is half the fun.

Using short or complex sentences you can walk anywhere in the house, examine anything you find (and send it to the lab for fingerprint ing), and talk to the many suspects, some of whom hold valuable information. There are many possibilities to explore, and the game, like real life, doesn't wait for you to stumble on clues. If you aren't in the right place at the right time asking the right question, too bad — you'll have to look for the answer elsewhere!

This article appeared in
Family Computing
Dec 1983

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