Curses
Whew! The very last game, and the one I’ve claimed for years is my favorite!
I haven’t replayed it very much since I was in my mega-walkthrough phase. I did go back in November 2023 (maybe when I was replaying all games with 100+ ratings) and made invisiclues for it. They were super-helpful this time specifically for telling me all the ways I could lock myself out of victory (and one more that I added).
This was a completely new experience for me. Since the beginning, every time I played Curses I just hit a point where I used the walkthrough straight through. The first time, I used it even to get the dumbwaiter to work. Later, I started using it well before the croquet puzzle. And so on.
This time, I didn’t need it at all except for the language numbers (I got them wrong) and the tower.
Something’s changed in my brain in the last three years where I can actually play these old adventure games and figure things out. Obviously I’m cheating by remembering past playthroughs in my mind, but that didn’t use to help me.
So Alexandria, the church and the villa were like playing a brand new game for me. I had never gotten anywhere close to playing those without the walkthrough. It was a way better experience than I thought. For instance, I was able to see why we swap scrolls for the scholars, by giving them to them in the ‘right’ tubes and watching what happened. I was surprised at how fair most things were. (I did at one point see the name of an invisiclue topic that helped me, as well).
I noticed that the clues to things were often very close to or strongly associated with the place they were used, which I hadn’t expected. The history of The Meldrews, the prayer book, and the classical dictionary gave me a lot more insight into why I was doing all these crazy shenanigans. For once everything made sense.
I loved this game when first playing because of the sense of endless wonder. So many things to find. So many side quests. I loved the little quotes that appeared when I played (so sad Glulx makes these impossible, except I figured out bisquixe can do them by just removing the css from the quote box so it floats in the middle. Regular quixe or parchment could easily do this too).
But now, instead of endless wonder and a sense of never comprehending it, I finally comprehend it, and I think I love it even more. It was awesome when the two puzzles I was stuck on at last resolved each other (the tower and the knight). So many things became clear. The reason we knew to bronze the mural. How to get Austin in Alexandria if we can’t enter it twice. Lagaching for fun.
I guess what I realized doing this is, it isn’t that I like text adventure games, and Curses is a particularly good one. It’s not, really, if you started on pretty much any other text adventure; it lacks the gentleness and smoothness of later games (amusingly, influenced by Graham Nelson’s own player’s bill of rights) and is perhaps too self-amused and has too many literary ambitions for players of earlier type-ins and such (though I suppose many Infocom fans like it).
No, it’s the other way around; I like Curses, the game, and text adventures remind me of it, so I like those as well. I picked up choice-based games to be polite to the community, and they’ve become interesting in their own right, but for me Curses defined what I wanted a text adventure to be.
It’s still solidly my number one, and I don’t anticipate that changing.
Next, I’m going to gather my thoughts and whittle down to top 25, then I’ll figure out a way to narrow again to top 10. I might do a brief explanation of why some games I highly regard don’t enter in.
Edit:
Coming back to add more of this, I think I loved this time, with how much I saw messages about the family and back rooms, how we’re never in the real manor, never with the family outside our lovely aunt. We’re always on the edges. That’s how I liked it growing up, being in a big house and knowing people were nearby but not needing to see them.
I liked the mythological and literary references as well. I felt like the game loves and rewards reading. I also like how the ending recontextualizes everything you’ve done.
I did borrow from this game in Never Gives Up Her Dead. The tool in that game is essentially like all the rods combined in one. The greek mythology reference in Absence of Law were also partially inspired by this, I think.
I’m not sure that I read the ending as all magic leaving the world, like I discussed with people before. The druids enchant the hill to be protected by the Meldrews, and (I just realized that Helene was looking for ‘the perfect blue’. the blue stone!). Actually, moreover, they enchant the Meldrews to be druids by seeking after the stone. It never really says the stone itself is magic. And several of the meldrews did seem to learn druidic things by seeking for it. This leaves open several possibilities. One is that the character learns druidic magic by seeking the stone and then remains an expert (the rod of infinity can still be stricken after getting the euro note, for instance). I guess the position others have put forward though is more likely, that magic just ends, since that fits with Spellbreaker and with Lord of the Rings’s books (which were popular when this game was written).
I swear I wrote more about the game’s themes at one point, at how prominent resurrection is. I’ll try to find it.
Edit:
Some of my past writing on Curses: