My Rating: 3 / 5
After many failed attempts at Zork I before finally completing it, I was very eager to jump into Zork II for the first time! I was expecting more of the mysterious and vibrant, yet utterly abandoned world that the first painted such a glorious picture of. Zork II has shades of that world, but is so much more surreal and less consistent that it feels less like a world to explore and more like a loose collection of puzzles strung together.
In contrast to Zork I where you really only had a couple different locales (forest, cavern, river, mine) and they were all mostly consistent with each other, each room in Zork II feels like it was glued together from a collage of different ideas. One minute youâre standing on a bridge in a great marble hall, then youâre in a frozen cavern with a glacier blocking a path, then youâre on a spinning carousel that fills an entire room, then youâre at the bottom of a giant well in a magic bucket, then youâre in a pool full of tears that are pouring in from the ceiling, then youâre in a machine room with whirring gears and steaming pipes while you bark commands at a robot. You never know what the next room may hold.
There is some excitement in being able to find just about anything around the next corner, but what made the world of the first game so engaging is that it was realistic. You start next to a house in a forest, then descend through a trapdoor into a non-descript cavern. Every step along the way, what you find may be fantastical but is grounded in a pseudo-modern pseudo-fantasy setting that is very consistent and believable. This then facilitates solving the puzzles you find as you can mostly just try taking actions that you would reasonably take if you were in that world, which is not a stretch to imagine due to how immersive the setting is. Zork II on the other hand, due to its strange and inconsistent environments, makes it much more difficult to consider how you would interact with the world if you were really there. Because the world feels like a game board rather than a living, breathing place, it causes the player to think of actions in terms of locks and keys - âDo I have the specific item I need to âsolveâ this room?â rather than the first gameâs âI want to do a thing, is there a tool I can use to do that?â.
This mindset change, unfortunately, also breeds frustration as unlike the first game there are a significant number of red herrings and items that while seemingly important actually serve no purpose. This then compounds against the player when combined with many puzzles having very unintuitive solutions. For example: At the top of the magic well (which has its own unreasonably cryptic solution) you enter a room with four cakes themed very obviously around Alice in Wonderland. One of the cakes is labeled âEat Meâ, the tiny writing on the others is unreadable. Eating the cake shrinks you down and allows you access to the aforementioned pool of tears. There is a flask of poison here you can take, and there is a shadow of something in the pool. These two rooms are the only ones you have access to. With nowhere to go and nothing else to interact with, a player will likely take one of two actions at this point: Restore and come back later, thinking they may need an item they donât have yet for this, or try eating the other cakes to see what happens. If the player does the latter, they will discover one of the cakes makes them grow, the other two kill them. Solving a puzzle by trial-and-error is never satisfying, but the intended solution I would suggest is one I think it unlikely a player will think of. The player is supposed to use the flask as a magnifying glass to read the tiny writing on the cakes. This is actually necessary to some degree, as the player needs to throw the cake labeled âEvaporateâ into the pool to acquire the critical item there. While the flask is mentioned as having a clear liquid in it, there is no mention of it distorting the room as you look through it. A student who happens to be currently studying the properties of light in fluids might think to use it in the intended way, but the average player is likely to think it just a flask of poison to be used elsewhere, especially as you can identify the âEnlargeâ cake by just trying them all and be able to leave the room with your new flask in tow.
In the first game, the playerâs frustration could be curbed somewhat by the knowledge that if they couldnât figure out how to solve a puzzle, it was likely because the tool they needed was elsewhere and they just hadnât found it yet. Then, when the player got stuck, they could focus in on things they hadnât solved or items they hadnât found a use for. Unfortunately Zork II also throws a wrench in this process. Not only do a number of items just have no use (e.g. the perfect rose and wooden club - granted this is supposed to be a clue to the nature of the Oddly-Angled Room, but itâs a poor clue and has no physical use) but from very early on you are introduced to the wizard who periodically appears and casts spells on you. This quickly gives the player the thought that they might gain the ability to cast spells themselves, which they do, but now it becomes very tempting to attribute any elusive solution to âI guess I need a spell for thatâ. In my playthrough of this game I specifically forbid that thinking from my approach as I didnât want to be wandering from unsolved puzzle to unsolved puzzle thinking I just couldnât solve them yet, but I had no way of knowing if that approach would pay off or doom me. Thankfully it paid off.
I could go on about a number of other puzzles in this game I thought unfair, but this review is long enough already and I think Iâve gotten the point across. Overall, this is not a bad game. I still had fun playing it and the world portrayed here is definitely creative, if less immersive. I donât know how many of this gameâs issues come from mainframe Zork being split into three parts and just not translating well and how much of it is just it being less well designed than the first game - the lack of many of these issues being present in Zork I leads me to think the latter. I do hope Zork III, which I move on to now, will be more like the first and less like the second. Either way, I am looking forward to finally experiencing the conclusion of this trilogy that I have held in such high regard for so long!