Text-based adventure game inspired by the cult classic British television show about a former spy who is abducted and sent to a resort-themed "prison" where his captors attempt to get him to reveal why he resigned from his classified job. The game takes place on "The Island", where the player travels from building to building, each hosting a metaphorical quest in which the player's creative thinking skills are tested. Players demonstrating individual thinking eventually gain access to the Island's "Caretaker" and their ensuing conversation (using a language parser) can lead to the player's freedom.
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As an Adventure game The Prisoner continues the pure bloodline of Atari's Adventure which harkens closer to the esoterism of text-adventures rather then the action focus the genre would take following The Legend of Zelda. This esotericism is fitting considering its source material is the equally esoteric TV show The Prisoner.
As a game with sparse text its unable to replicate the depth of character and theme found in the show, but the game excels at creating the same diversity of set pieces which made the show enjoyable in a moment to moment basis. Some of them like the wild -> train station -> to city side quest are ripped directly from the show while most are entirely new. The game is set up as a series of mini games which often have meta or outside the box solutions and either lead to a false escape method, a hint, or the true escape.
What is most impressive here is how outside the box many of the game's tricks are. Years before Metal Gear would demand players turn off the console, this game tells you to unplug your computer. When trying to extract your resignation number the game will through some abstract tricks at you. In one minigame you have to memorize strings of numbers and repeat them back, but will though in your own resignation number within those lists. At random times the game will through up a fake crash telling you to input your resignation number as an error code decades before Eternal Darkness. There is a level of meta and playing with the players expectations here that wouldn't be seen in mainstream gaming for decades later. Text--adventures and its immediate adventure game precedents really are a lost art of gaming, a genre which evolved narratively and structurally faster then the genres which have survived today, to point of where games in the past decade have really only begun reaching this sort of structural playfulness regularly.
The major flaw here and the one which leaves the game unfinished for me is how slow the game is. Anytime you are caught and fail in an escape you must sit through a minutes long load screen ontop of the loading for each individual screen. All text in the game is unskipable and proceeds at a snails pace, which make the trial and error gameplay necessary to finish the game too tedious to truly recommend finishing.
As a game with sparse text its unable to replicate the depth of character and theme found in the show, but the game excels at creating the same diversity of set pieces which made the show enjoyable in a moment to moment basis. Some of them like the wild -> train station -> to city side quest are ripped directly from the show while most are entirely new. The game is set up as a series of mini games which often have meta or outside the box solutions and either lead to a false escape method, a hint, or the true escape.
What is most impressive here is how outside the box many of the game's tricks are. Years before Metal Gear would demand players turn off the console, this game tells you to unplug your computer. When trying to extract your resignation number the game will through some abstract tricks at you. In one minigame you have to memorize strings of numbers and repeat them back, but will though in your own resignation number within those lists. At random times the game will through up a fake crash telling you to input your resignation number as an error code decades before Eternal Darkness. There is a level of meta and playing with the players expectations here that wouldn't be seen in mainstream gaming for decades later. Text--adventures and its immediate adventure game precedents really are a lost art of gaming, a genre which evolved narratively and structurally faster then the genres which have survived today, to point of where games in the past decade have really only begun reaching this sort of structural playfulness regularly.
The major flaw here and the one which leaves the game unfinished for me is how slow the game is. Anytime you are caught and fail in an escape you must sit through a minutes long load screen ontop of the loading for each individual screen. All text in the game is unskipable and proceeds at a snails pace, which make the trial and error gameplay necessary to finish the game too tedious to truly recommend finishing.