The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

So, on my twitter feed, one Jeremy Parish threw up this little tweet. It was obviously meant to dissuade me from checking out Legends of Zork. But dammit, I like KoL. It honestly inspired me to create an account on the spot. After a day or two of playing, I admit at being intrigued, but dammit, this game has a lot going against it.

The first thing that will happen to you is that you will go to the website and expect text. Glorious text! It’s a Text Adventure Game property, surely there will be tons of text! Text oozing out of all pores!
There’s no text in this game.
Or, instead, the text is extremely minimal. There are no grand descriptions of anything in the game, for instance. Locations are just a picture and a title. Enemies are a picture and a scrolling stat display. There’s nothing particularly text-y about this game. And that’s going to turn off the people who wanted to play it almost immediately, I would bet. Because they’re coming to this game because of the license, right? That’s why you have a license attached to a game. And the game is designed to turn those people off.

This game shouldn’t be a Zork game. It should exist, but it shouldn’t have this name. That’s what I’m saying.

I was immediately turned off too, but I decided to give it more of a try. Over a few days of playing, I got to see what this game is actually trying to do, and it’s something I can get behind. It’s a shame most people are going to be totally turned off to it.

Basically, do you remember Ogre Battle? Were you one of those people who were completely frustrated with not being able to control your characters in battle? A lot of people were, and they stopped playing. But some people, like me, found the real game. It’s all in the setup. In the pre-battle strategy, and in the maneuvering around the map. That’s where the real fun is, not in the battles. You can get really deep into that part and have a lot of fun, if you want.
Legends of Zork seems to work the same way. All battles and adventuring is automated. You just get a result screen. Then you decide whether you keep adventuring (which is a risk: if you die, you drop all the loot you’ve collected since last you banked it back at your base) or waste a turn heading back to camp to heal and put away what you’ve earned. At camp, you adjust your equipment and your “battle stances” to set up how your character is going to automatically act in battle. You buy more shit. Then you set your person to go and the adventuring happens again. Automatically.
It’s actually kind of like Progress Quest with strategy. You just watch your character increase in strength with little input, but then you have decisions to make. You have to balance your encumbrance, and make sure you can carry all your loot back to base. You have to balance your HP, and make sure you go back before you die, but that you don’t waste turns healing pointlessly when you didn’t need to. You have to learn what stances the enemies in an area use, so you can set yourself up with appropriate stances to counter them when you send your person in.

There are benefits to the game being built like this, too. A whole day of KoL or Twilight Heroes can actually take quite awhile to play out. There is no way a day’s worth of Zork turns will ever take me more than 15 minutes to play. Most days it’ll probably be less. That’s a benefit, to me anyway.
Also, it allows them to put in co-op, of a sort. You can take quests and join parties in this game. Once in a party, you set aside a certain number of adventures per day to spend on your party’s adventures. Then you all go out as a team and split the goods, slowly completing the quest. This is the kind of thing I had envisioned for my armchair browser RPG, and so I’m very interested in it. The fact that you can also auto-join quests to always be working on one, even without friends, is a bonus.

I originally didn’t mention their “premium” content, but I can’t really avoid it. KoL, Twilight Heroes, Forumwarz, etc… they want you to donate. Oh yes. But they don’t constantly bother you with it. Every time I am low on turns, it tells me I really have to spend some money to get more turns. Why do I want more turns? I have too many turns to play in these games as is. I want something that makes the turns I do play more fun, and there is nothing like that. I don’t appreciate it pushed in my face. I donate to these other games because I want to support the awesome people making them. This is a clear signal that I should never donate any money at all to Legends of Zork.

Anyway, that obvious problem aside, Legends of Zork isn’t quite the instant throw-away game it seems to be at first glance. It manages to be mechanically interesting, at least to me. I will keep playing for awhile longer. However, it really could use some text. Some Zorkness. With this exact same gameplay, some sort of AI that would generate text and descriptions for these battles, and a more respectful to the player plea for money, the game would be a very easy recommendation. As it is, it’s probably a game for people who enjoy planning more than actually acting. And for the stupidly curious. Like me.