There’s quite a few ways to strand yourself in the dark. Descending the trap door without the lamp is the first and easiest. (I suppose you have a small chance of getting above ground if you know the route, but in practice, you die.)
You can’t eat them, at least not in R63: Such rich food would probably not be good for you.
Though returning to the Alice area reminds me that I need a “misusing the cakes” line item
The trapdoor is a great catch, I think one-way exits can cause a lot of trouble (by design, I’m sure)
Just to keep things straight, I’m going to edit the OP if new items are suggested.
In Zork II, asking the demon to move the menhir should be a separate bullet point, I think. It lets you continue and make progress, but without the wizard’s wand, you can’t actually finish the game.
By the way, most of our readers will understand this, but I should note for context: Infocom almost certainly never made this catalog during development!
The designers would have been fully aware of all these failure states, and were happy to leave them in their games. (And some of them, like “asking the demon to move the menhir”, were deliberate red herring solutions to puzzles.) But there was no concept of “too many” or “gee, that’s an awful lot of ways to get screwed” or even “more than the last game?”
Yeah, that’s a good point. It’s not obviously a mistake based on the feedback (IIRC). According to the Invisiclues, early versions didn’t require the wand? Not sure how early.
Right. This all would have been typical game authoring stuff for them and others, too. It’s interesting to me for conversations about play experience for a given work. I don’t criticize authors for this kind of thing.
In Zork I, You can destroy the lamp by throwing it at something. Giving the Lamp, Egg or the Painting to the troll.
Some states depend on the game version - In an early version of Zork I you can give the troll himself and the game becomes unwinnable. A definite bug.
Not what you want, but still neat: In Zork release 88 you can (sometimes) automatically defeat the troll by giving him your sword or the knife (you lose the item in the process). It seems random as to whether the troll is hungry.
ok, yes! giving required things to the troll. A small number of possibilities, unless you manage to knock out the troll rather than kill it… the troll can be knocked out, right? I know the thief can, but can’t recall
e: OK, I don’t read ZIL but I see there is some code about the unconscious troll
If memory serves, back in the very beginning, this was the intended solution. If you throw something to the troll, he eats it; if you throw something deadly, he eats it and dies.
But then they implemented the D&D-inspired randomized combat system, and removed that puzzle to make the troll feel more like a living thing and less like a puzzle. (With mixed success.)
I’ll spend a little time adding in some Trinity items this morning (though I’ll try to come up with more Zork ones)… I never realized you didn’t have to feed the ducks. You can just drop crumbs anywhere (the important thing is attracting the roadrunner). Makes sense.
E: Trinity might have the most one-way exits of any Infocom game (that are high-stakes, anyway). That’s probably going to drive most of its list
E2: Even though the Trinity list is long, most of them aren’t going to surprise the player or go unnoticed
An astounding number of actions in Trinity can never be repeated, by the standards of modern games, and I’m not sure how feasible it will be to list them all! (But that’s one of its themes, of course.)
