I’m doing a playthrough of some games in the Infocom series this spring / summer and having a great time.
But… I know some of the puzzles are dependent on the feelies.
Would anyone be able to tell me if any of the following have feely-dependent puzzles?
If you can tell me how / point me towards a place which helps to get past any (without spoiling the rest of the game), that would be awesome.
Thanks again.
Ballyhoo, Trinity, and Plundered Hearts have copy protection in the feelies.
Really, the feelies are almost always part of the story (with the exception of the Zork trilogy reissues), so they are usually worth a look. The manuals often contain verbs that you otherwise might not try. A lot of “guess the verb” accusations directed at Infocom games are usually read the manual problems (reading manuals is not an intuitive choice for many experienced players).
The feelies are all available at Computer Game Museum Collections - Infocom Gallery (mocagh.org) and The Infocom Documentation Project - Manuals (plover.net).
MoCAGH is more comprehensive for research purposes, but if you just want to find what you need IDP is probably better.
If you use a screen reader, some games have been transcribed but many have not.
I am kind of living and breathing Infocom games and documentation these days, so let me know if you have other questions.
Thanks - these are great links - I’m keen to play Trinity but seem to remember that you may need to do something with the physical sundial in the box to get a code (?) … but I may have misremembered this… can you get through just on the readable parts of the manual / feelies?
Same question for any of the others - if it’s in the documentation, I’m happy to seek it out but anything that I might not pick out from there would be great to get a flag on…
Really enjoying the podcast series that you’re running at the moment - a great listen!
You definitely do not need an assembled sundial. If you needed to, you could just print the scan of the sundial and make one (this is actually what the sundial feelie is). But it isn’t required.
The MoCAGH scan from Lost Treasures seems to be the highest quality version
There is no Infocom text adventure that cannot be completed using only community resources (feelie and document scans), so you should be able to play the entire catalog.
Thanks for checking out the podcast!
I’d say you don’t actually need the sundial. Sure, together with The Illustrated story of the Atom Bomb it will give you a hint about where the different white doors will take you. But I don’t think I even made that connection the first time I played the game, I just mapped it out on my own. Even if you do make the connection, there will probably be some learning-by-failing.
So I doubt it was even meant as copy protection, any more than - say - the match book in The Witness.