Game 51: Journey: the Quest Begins (1988)

This is easily the most terrifying adventuring party I've ever seen.

        

Journey

United States

Infocom (developer and publisher)

Released in 1989 for DOS, Amiga, Apple II, and Macintosh

Date Started: 20 March 2011

      
I fired up Journey, which I knew nothing about, and found myself delighted to be playing another Infocom game! This was, in fact, the last Infocom game, and only the second I'm playing as part of this blog. The first was Beyond Zork.

Journey shows Infocom's dedication to quality prose. I don't know who they had as writers for their text adventures, but they were good at their craft. More important, the company recognized that good writing was the very key to a "text adventure." If you're going to be mostly staring at text for 13 hours, you want to make it gripping. But reading on screen is a different experience than reading a book, and the text also has to be concise.

The game is not really a CRPG, and it doesn't seem to contain all of the three elements I outlined yesterday. There are no attributes, no hit points, no levels or experience. There is some non-puzzle-based inventory, in the form of spell reagents, but the spells themselves are generally puzzle-based. Journey is an adventure game, and the only reason I could think that someone at MobyGames tagged it as a CRPG is that you have multiple characters and a basic inventory. The game lets you buy things but doesn't even bother to tell you how much gold you have! Nonetheless, I'm going to play it for one posting given my fondness for Infocom's previous work.

The backstory: the characters come from a medieval village that has experienced five years of fouled water and failing crops. On the brink of starvation, the village has sent a party of four warriors across the mountains to beg help from a powerful wizard. Unfortunately, they never returned, and so the village convened a second party--a ragtag bunch composed of a carpenter (Bergon), an apprentice wizard (Praxix), a doctor (Esher), and an apprentice food merchant (Tag, though you can change the name) to try again. The story is told in the past tense from Tag's point of view.

The game uses an innovative but simple interface in which you choose from a list of available commands for each character at the bottom of the screen. As you do, the upper right portion (the largest) narrates the result. Even simple commands like checking inventory are fully narrated in prose.
     

I decided to play the first game "badly," choosing what seemed like idiotic options just to see how quickly I could make it end. This was the basic sequence of events:

• Stopped in the Village of Lavos on the first day. The party made some noise about buying food or visiting the tavern for news, but I just chose to blow on through. (In doing so, I missed the opportunity to recruit a fifth party member.)

Note how the image corresponds with the text.

• Came to a fork in the path. Took the left road and was set upon by bandits at night. Esher the physician died immediately. (If I had brought the character from Lavos, he would have warned me about the bandits.) Tried to parley with them to no avail. Fought them off and was surprised when Minar (who I was suppose to have picked up in Lavos) approached me on the path and joined me. Apparently, the game helps protect you against completely missed opportunities. I told him to get lost.

Combat is based on command selections and not tactics or statistics.

• Kept following the mountain path and ignored opportunities to detour. Came to the Old Forest and then a river. Gathered materials to build a raft and launched it. Kept paddling downstream until we came to a waterfall. Tried to cross the river at that point but ended up tumbling down the waterfall. Had to climb back up to get out of the basin. Built another raft and crossed the river.

The village begins to regret sending this party...

• Arrived at Sunrise Mountain. Started following the path up but it forked so many times that the adventurers got hopelessly lost, fought among themselves, and eventually gave up (I think I needed a map from the store in Lavos).

When you "lose" the game, Tag gives you some "musings" about the experience that give hints for playing it more successfully next time. Among the ones I got were: should have had a map of the mountain, should have been more cautious crossing the river, should have taken Minar, shouldn't have been surprised by bandits.

Bergon gets advice from his party members.

Before I play the game for "real," let me note some other features of the interface. There are some commands that the characters almost always have. Bergon can "get advice" from his party at various points, Praxix the wizard/scholar can "cast" a spell or "examine" either his inventory or things in the area, Minar can "scout," and Tag can view or drop inventory items. Occasionally, Praxix also has the option to "Tell Legend" which fills you in about the game world's story.

This came shortly after I rescued a party member from nymphs.

Praxix also has a number of spells at his disposal, most of which are the solution to some puzzle or another. The "Glow" spell was necessary to find my way through a cave, for instance. Other spells could be used in combat to end it more quickly and without losing a party member.

I just hope I get to cast the "mud" spell at some point.

There isn't much else to tell you about the game except how the story goes and how it ends. Fortunately, the game gives the option to run a script of your adventure. I'll post it tomorrow with some comments.

Before I sign off, though, let me just cover two highlights. First, take a look at this picture, which occurs while my party is trying to cross through an underground dwarf kingdom on the way to a tower:


Doesn't that look pretty much exactly like the path to Khazad-dûm in The Fellowship of the Ring? (Albeit with the party approaching from the other direction.) It seems unlikely that Peter Jackson's animators were aware of Journey: the Quest Begins, so I can only imagine that both this image and the model were adapted from some other Lord of the Rings source (this game is full of borrowings from LOTR--more to come tomorrow) or else it's just a coincidence.

Second--and this is big--according to Infocom's own text adventure, grues are the same thing as orcs and goblins! Check it out:


This is monumental, and yet no one else online seems to have noticed this. Frankly, it's hard to believe this is canon. I've always thought of a grue as a wormish creature, and the Wikipedia entry on grues notes that some Infocom games describe them as beasts with fangs and fur.

I suppose the latter description doesn't rule out orcs, though. In fact, one day we need to have a talk about exactly what an "orc" is; for such a ubiquitous foe, each game seems to treat him very differently. For this game, though, orc=grue. Keep a torch handy.