Journey: The Quest Ends

As far as I got.

Wow, was I cocky two days ago, thinking I would win Journey: The Quest Begins that same night. The game lured me into a false sense of security, though. The early puzzles were really easy. Later ones...well, I should have realized that this is the same company that made Zork.

The difficulty of the puzzles doesn't bother me so much as the linearity of the game. You need to do specific things in a specific order, and the game doesn't bother to tell you when you screw up. About an hour later, you realize you were supposed to explore that nymph cave more thoroughly, and you missed a key item. Helm talked about this yesterday. I went through a lot of "walking dead" moments before I finally found one I couldn't defeat and gave up.

Losing Hurth apparently broke the game, but I didn't know it at the time.

At first, I thought the game was a lot like Beyond Zork, with the ability to use multiple means to solve the same puzzle. But later I realized the game is deceptive in that way. If you use a spell to solve a puzzle when you didn't need a spell, for instance, you are liable to find yourself lacking crucial reagents at a later date. (This ultimately sunk me.) Beyond Zork gave you greater freedom of movement throughout the game world and more freedom to make mistakes.

To take an example, early in the game you are given the choice between a right and left path at a fork. If you take the left fork, you run into some bandits, but you can prepare yourself for the combat and come out well. Nonetheless, you much later realize that by not taking the right fork, you missed out an a crucial bag of spellcasting elements as well as the solution to one of the game's mysteries. In that sense, the game's "choices" are all mirages. You either have to keep reloading or save the game at every crucial branch so you can reload when it becomes clear you did something wrong.

The party loses.

Here's another example. At one point in the game, if you ask a dwarf named Hurth to tell you a story about the elves, you learn a few Elvish words. Shortly thereafter, you encounter an elf whose support you need to get a magic amulet. In order to convince her you're a friend, you have to say some of the words you learned. But if you misspell them--even capitalization--she runs off and you don't get the amulet. Beyond Zork wouldn't have had such dire consequences for misspelling a word.

The game also lacks the sense of humor of most Infocom games. At times, I tried to cast spells or use objects in unusual ways. The Zork series would have eaten it up. For instance, there's this one episode where some elves' trees catch on fire. The only way to solve the puzzle is to cast the "rain" spell to put out the fire (which in turn depends on having stopped at a river to collect water essence in the middle of a storm).


Zork would have had a field day with this. Cast "Wind" and the fire grows worse. Cast "Elevation" and you levitate one of your party members in the flames. Cast "Mud" and the elves get stuck while the fire surrounds them. Cast "Lightning" and just exacerbate the situation. You'd have a humorous account of just how and why and how badly you screwed up before you died. Journey just says that your wizard couldn't figure out "how it could possibly help." Laaaaame.

I solved a lot of the puzzles through brute force. Since there are a limited number of options at any given moment, you can usually keep trying various spell and action combinations until something works, then reload and do it for real. And yes, I did break my "no reloading" rule eventually, because I was sick of starting the game completely over from scratch just because I made one bad decision. The game is merciless. At one point, you find yourself at a tower and you can go up or down. If you go down, you find a chest of jewels with no obvious function. For reasons that escape my understanding, you have to mix some powder with some fire essence and cast a spell on the chest to find a particular gem. That's hard enough, but what makes it even harder is that if you leave the room to go explore elsewhere, the game doesn't let you get back to it again.

Nonetheless, I persevered through a couple dozen puzzles, solving each the best I could, maximizing my conservation of reagents and only using spells when they were the only option. Then I got to what I think (actually, a walkthrough confirmed) was pretty much one step from the end of the game, and I didn't have enough "wind essence." I don't know where I could have saved any, but there it is. I'm not starting over again.

This isn't even remotely a CRPG, so I have no idea why I played it as long as I did. The writing was good and the story decent and the puzzles were interesting, but a good game gives you more options for solving them and is less obnoxious about ensuring that an extra spell cast in the first five minutes keeps you from winning in the last five. Maybe this is par for the course in "adventure games," but I'm not an Adventure Game Addict. Might & Magic II is coming up, so let's plow on forward.

***

A long time later--more than 8 years--I did return to the game and win it. See my updated entry.

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.