I’ve been playing Infocom‘s Planetfall lately, as it’s the game of the month for the DOS Game Club. I’ve only ever given interactive fiction cursory glances over the years; the first time as a kid on my uncle’s Olivetti business computer, to most recently (before Planetfall) when I made a valiant effort to port King’s Quest I to a text adventure during COVID.
Usually when I attempt these, I begin with the best intentions. I used to make hand-drawn maps with plenty of space to annotate any oddities in each area (for Planetfall I’ve been using the wonderful Trizbort in a Windows virtual machine), I kept notes in a separate $gamename.txt file, and I’d play in fullscreen to remove any distractions. Even with all this, I’d rarely put in more than an hour or so before losing interest. I don’t know why – some of the IF I’ve attempted have been really great, and I like to think I’m decent at converting words on screen to pictures in my head. I suppose it’s likely just the problem of too much choice – Steam and GOG libraries with way too many other, more stimulating, options.
Planetfall, though, has got its hooks into me and I’m pretty confident that this will be the first one that I actually finish. With the exception of one (so far), the puzzles have been pretty straightforward and seem to rely more on thorough world exploration to find items than they do on stretching item usage plausibility.
There’s a food/sleep and day/night mechanic that doesn’t really add much to the game besides opening yourself up to walking dead situations but that’s been my only real complaint. I’m hoping to get a couple hours this weekend to put towards this and, who knows, maybe even complete it.