A Worthwhile Little Gem
When I began playing ZorkQuest 1, I thought it was just going to be a bit of a curiosity, something that I had missed in my devouring of all of the Zork universe games in the late 90’s. But as I started moving through the parallel stories, I realized what a great concept the Infocomics were. The basic mechanic is to tell a story from one character’s perspective. But there are moments throughout the game when you can change perspective and get the same story’s timeline from another character’s point of view.
The first “play through” I decided to just let the story play out, without checking out any of the background bits (sometimes hitting “enter” at one of the diverging points merely gives you a bit of background on the current character). I stuck with the main character right through. The story was simple enough, and I was done in about ten minutes. The second play through though, I hit the background stories at the beginning, and then branched off to the apprentice character. I was so pleasantly surprised by this story (and the totally casual and “not a big deal” nudity which shows up in this character’s perspective), its twists and turns and fleshing out of the main character’s story line, that I was eager to check out the third bit.
Without going into every storyline, the game/comic allows you to check out just about every character that you come in contact with. It’s surprisingly satisfying to see events unfold from different perspectives, something that even some of the most modern and advanced games today struggle with. Themes of mistaken lesbianism, sexual abuse, greed, and pride are all woven in together in something coming close to masterwork for such a fledgling medium.
The graphics are, of course, painfully primitive, even for 1988, and the animations are painstakingly slow. But the ability to fast forward, bookmark, and rewind your game allows you to move through the story, skip between characters, and easily suck the marrow out of this great little forgotten gem.
Taken for what it is, a rather successful attempt at something that people still talk about doing today, interactive comics, the first ZorkQuest game is pretty great. More than once I saw a scene from one character's perspective and thought "Oh, that's crazy that they would do that" and then saw the scene from another point of view and realized that my assumptions had been totally wrong (viewing the harem scene from the apprentice's viewpoint first definitely makes one jump to terrible conclusions).
For people who adore the world and tone of Zork, I have to admit, there isn’t a whole lot of that there. The Flatheads are mentioned, and Egreth Castle is the setting of the game, and other Zork-esque locals/staples are mentioned (GRUE’s, Quendor), but the game doesn’t quite have the amazing mix of ridiculous and weighty that the text adventures do.
All in all, if you can get your hands on a copy of ZorkQuest and DosBox, I would recommend spending an hour or two with this great, and mostly forgotten, curiosity from the late days of Infocom.