Shouldn’t Parc be on that list too?
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It should yes; that is a real tough one from the Cambridge gang. To be fair you could put all of those Phoenix games on the list I suppose but you would probably end up in a strait jacket.
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In terms of puzzles to solve, which one is bigger? Arnautov’s adv770 or Malmberg’s Humongous Cave?
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I’ve only played the first one to completion myself and that is very very large. It consists of 476 locations and just about everything is examinable. When you consider it is the result of at least five expansions from the original ADVENT you get some idea of its size and sheer weight of puzzles. Others will know Malmberg’s game better than me.
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I don’t know if this is too late to suggest, but if you liked Infocom’s Enchanter trilogy, Daniel Stelzer’s Scroll Thief practically qualifies as a faithful sequel set in that universe.
Emily Short says:
… But Scroll Thief is better than the average entry for this kind of thing, relying less on nostalgia or goofy parody and more on actually designing cool puzzles of the kind that made me like Enchanter in the first place.
I imagine there are people who won’t care for the old-school style, or for the various ways in which (as far as I can tell, anyway) you can make the game unwinnable. But I enjoyed the style of puzzle design: scrolls! cute joke messages for using the spells on the wrong things! scrying orbs that let you see into other locations! things where you get an NPC to do stuff that you can’t do yourself! bits where you have to understand the map as a three dimensional space in order to understand where something is likely to be coming out! Meta-spells that modify the effects of other spells!
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I could have sworn I just heard someone running away from some angry sounding geese…maybe it was my anserine machine.
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I just realized that quite a few games mentioned in this thread are on this list:
I might add some of the other mentions on this thread to this list, it’s been very helpful!
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Thanks to all for the continued suggestions! There are more suggestions here than I will probably ever manage to play in hintless, hardcore solve mode. So I will surely take a look at more of these games sooner than finishing Muldoon/TBD…
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Well, a bit late to the conversation but Milliways is massive and has a lot of puzzles. I’d wait a bit though since it’s still got some very annoying bugs.
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(On this, I just updated its page, so it’s now fully playable from start-to-end. For those who don’t know, this game is severely cruel and some puzzles are really hard, so… Some people have finished it in nearly 3 hours though, even if it is bigger [in size, locations, and the rest] than Hitchhiker’s. It’s here: Milliways)
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To be honest, I haven’t played either of them…yet. When MALM1000 was written, it was believed to be the biggest text adventure that had ever been written. However, this did not take account of some of the mainframe monsters.
Both of these games are extensions of extensions [that’s not a typo] of Crowther & Woods’ Adventure. Some stats may help:
- Adventure has 15 treasures and 130 locations resulting in 350 points for a successful game.
- Adv770 has 41 treasures and 478 locations resulting in 770 points for a successful game.
- Adventure in Humongous Cave has 37 treasures and 298 locations resulting in 1000 points for a successful game.
So, I think Adv770 may have more puzzles. This also has the advantage of being more ‘modern’ and playable on multiple platforms. In fact, it was updated just a week ago. Here’s the link: Adv770 downloads.
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I have been hacking my way through Weird Wood II which allegedly weighs in at over 500 locations according to Mark Cox. I recently escaped from the opening section - the prison which encapsulates three floors so I suspect he is correct. In the nature of Supersoft games it is very difficult.
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Another two that just came to mind are World by J D McDonald and Castlequest by Michael S Holtzman and Mark Kershenblatt.
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World was mentioned, but I downloaded it and couldn’t get it to run on my Mac!
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If you have tried the World1.07_OSX.sit file, Unarchiver can expand it (you should set the executable flag on the world file afterwards). But the resulting executable is for PowerPC architecture. So emulation is necessary for new(i386 or M1/2) Macs.
Alternatively you can run the executable from world106.zip in DosBox (emulation again).
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Castlequest is distinctly odd. While it has many of the tropes of its era (softlocks galore, endgame) it is decidedly more off the wall than other fantasy games of its time. I particularly like the world’s largest contact lens owned by the world’s most short-sighted cyclops and the butler. There are a few bugs and one puzzle, rather like the secretarial pool in Warp, that was clearly meant to be developed but ended up being abandoned half way through but left in the game, either absent mindedly or deliberately to faze the game player.
World is a bit of a classic old DOS game. It reminds me of T-Zero somewhat but has a superb back story and is another very hard game. Shades of the Doom trilogy by Peter Killworth.
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If you are looking for really really arcane challenges you could try Quest by Roger Plowman which dates back to 1979 in the original first guise. I have only had a cursory glance so far but I have put it up on IFDB. Don’t use the save slots in DOSBox-X as it corrupts the gameplay file but the built-in SAVE command works correctly.
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I’ll try that, thanks!
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If you are of a nautical persuasion and enjoy vast landscapes with oceans, islands and whirlpools to be sailed around (and often into) then try Warp or the RISC OS version of Gateway To Karos.
If you prefer games set in large, wacky buildings then you really can’t go wrong with Mulldoon or Cottage.
And if you want to play the hardest game ever written try Quondam. I guarantee you will still be at it this time next year.
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Hardest ever, eh? I’m sorely tempted to undertake that after Muldoon, but I might defer it a little more… get some solid victories under my belt.
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