The ZorkQuest games are among the earliest of visual novels, and while I have no interest in getting into the semantics of what is or is not a "visual novel" right now, in the case of ZorkQuest there can be no other possible designation. They are in no way puzzle games, nor are they roleplaying games or even adventure games. They are graphical, and that seems to be their primary selling point, as they do involve creative use of an Apple II's visual capabilities. They also... HAVE sound, as much as anything on an Apple II ever does.

The only interaction that a player has with the game, other than passively observing it, is in jumping between character perspectives to choose which scenes actually play along the pre-determined narrative. That interactivity is... kind of neat, but the thing must then inevitably live or die on the strength of its writing, and Assault on Egreth Castle is definitely nothing special. It's a competent but generic tale of fantasy tropes that would sufficiently entertain a child for a couple of hours.

It is a cliché to say that something is "ahead of its time," and I've been doing that more often lately than I would like, but Deadline is truthfully difficult to even believe.

Deadline, either by way of its design decisions or simply by its premise, circumvents every pitfall common to other Infocom text adventures. Unlike Zork 1, Deadline is not mimicking another existing game. Unlike Zork 2, Deadline is not riddled with bizarre logic. Unlike Zork 3, Deadline consists of a singularly giant overarching puzzle and thus does not suffer in its pacing. Unlike Beyond Zork, Deadline does not ambush the player with arbitrary softlocks. Unlike Zork Zero, Deadline is confined to one manageable location of limited scope. Unlike Planetfall, Deadline holds a player's interest from start to finish and uses its clock mechanics for good.

Deadline is, at least to my knowledge, the first game to use an in-universe clock that advances as players go about their business, with time-limited events and NPCs who operate on pre-scheduled routines. It can be completed in a trivial amount of time by a player who knows exactly what they're doing, but for someone playing for the first time, it might take a steep number of runs before successfully solving the mystery and making a proper arrest, but very little is lost when starting over. It's an opportunity to be in different places at the same time, and see where that leads.

This is... a fantastic implementation of an investigation game, commanding only the tiniest fraction of the attention given to the likes of Zork. Let's fix that.

In addition to maintaining the worst aspects of its siblings, (needless inventory shuffling, obnoxious randomization, persnickety verbiage) Planetfall just isn't interesting enough to stand with the greater pillars of the Infocom library. Its environments are as flat and drab as one might fear from a sci-fi setting, and there isn't much to make Planetfall memorable aside from the way it leverages Deadline's clock features to impose misery-spawning time limits on the player and potentially ruin their save files. Not exactly the golden child, this one.

Zork Zero is the real Zork Two. It's the size of the original mainframe Zork, which was essentially Zork 1, 2, and 3 combined. It has fancy border graphics to reflect advancement, and more visual puzzles given the new capabilities of the hardware. It's loyal to the original systems and formula of Zork, unlike Beyond Zork which is far more of a departure. It's fine. If you like the first three, you'll like Zero. If you don't, then you won't. It's consistent in quality with the rest, and there really isn't much more to say.

When Outer Wilds came out in 2019, I bought it immediately. I then allowed it to languish for five straight years as one of the only two games I've ever bought on the Epic Games Store. That's just one of the problems with me. Part of it was my desire to save a small-ish game I was excited about for a rainy day, and a much larger part of it was the fact that my gaming projects tend to be dictated mostly by the release schedules of major franchises, and it's usually difficult to figure out where to fit indie games into that agenda when they're not tied to anything else. In those five years, I polished a fair deal of hype. Majora's Mask is one of my top three favorite video games, and I have been automatically interested in any game since then to flirt with its concepts. I have been waiting for something like Outer Wilds since The Year 2000.

It is genuinely shocking to me then, that while I both like and respect Outer Wilds, I have somehow ended up among the least positive voices I know on the subject. In some respects, this has forced me to confront a simple truth: I do not actually like puzzles. There is, however, definitely more to this ambivalence.

Almost all of my first playthrough with Outer Wilds was spent frustrated, demoralized, or both. Twenty-Two minutes is, in my opinion, already too short of a cycle. In practice however, for most activities in Outer Wilds, the viable timeframe is much, much shorter. Combine this with easy failure states for many of those activities, and the fact that success does not remotely guarantee any actionable information, and you have a recipe for repetition, irritation, and exhaustion. It is in fact, far easier to have a miserable time with Outer Wilds than people would have you believe, especially for someone as stubborn as I am.

Spectating Outer Wilds discussion is incredibly strange for me. To hear others tell it, the game has some revelatory "aha" moment around every corner, but I can tell you that I felt unsatisfied with around 70% of the information I found. I struggled to find any investment in what I saw as exceptionally bland lore, and most clues felt unrewarding, as they often meant nothing to me without other necessary dots to connect, or were redundant. I constantly struggled with the choice between staying to dig deeper into an area, or going somewhere else in hope of finding a clue that I don't know I need. Both were potentially a waste of time in the face of an unbelievably irritating or demoralizing run back to whatever I was doing, triggered by the godforsaken cycle timer. Usually when my logic got stuck, the clues wouldn't have helped me anyway, because I was being thwarted by some miscommunication in game design or storytelling, not just the intended, actual puzzle. There were numerous times in Outer Wilds where I had already been given the relevant clue to overcome something, and still failed to apply that knowledge because of some other misunderstanding, and an uncertainty as to whether I had everything that I needed to know. With the clues unhelpful and that being all there was to find, I did not, at ANY point in Outer Wilds, have some glorious "aha" moment. Not one, single time. At best, I found something and thought "Okay good, now I can go do this other thing." At worst, I found what was supposed to be a huge, weighty lore revelation, and felt absolutely nothing except disappointment at another dead end.

And yet, despite this uniquely bad experience, Outer Wilds pushes the idea of "time-loop puzzle game" nearly to its limits in a commendable way. It is inspired, it has heart, and for the most part, it's rather well executed. It's just that I will never be able to have the experience now that everybody else seems to have had. Outer Wilds is a game you play once, and whether by bad luck, rough design, or simple, psychological incompatibility, I found the worst way to play it.

Sucks to suck, I suppose.