I wanted to try playing an Infocom title! The only ones I’d tried before this were Zork I and Hitchhiker’s Guide, both quite a while ago. The choice of starting with Planetfall came from seeing it mentioned a couple times in a recommendation thread on this forum (I’d link the thread, but I can’t seem to find it! oh well). I played release r39, which is apparently an unreleased build with a bug in it, so there might’ve been other small changes from other official releases.
I knew basically nothing about Planetfall going in. The short review is, I expected to find it at least a bit more antiquated and difficult, but I actually found it quite playable! The parser was generally user friendly and didn’t give me any trouble (with some caveats that I’ll get into), all the deaths I encountered were telegraphed, I understood what was going on, and I always had some idea what I wanted to do or try next. This seems to me like it’d serve as a pretty good introduction to Infocom, for anyone with a bit of parser experience. But then I also feel like the idea maybe wouldn’t be to just pick the easiest and most palatable Infocom release as an entry point. Shouldn’t it also give at least a bit of the feeling of friction and the design sensibilities that makes it a bit different from parser IF today? I think I got just enough of that from Planetfall, while still feeling like it was still fun to explore and solve puzzles as well.
For background, I started playing parser IF around 2000-ish, and that included going back and playing some mid-90s fare, so I’ve played other IF where you can starve to death, and also games with inventory limits. I was anticipating a more sprawling map and much harder puzzles based off of basically… extrapolating from what a game released between Zork I and an early 90s game like Curses might be like. But Planetfall has pretty straightforward and logical puzzles, and a map that was easy enough for me to keep track of. I assumed the Zarfian cruelty scale was basically built on what Infocom era games were like, so I was expecting Infocom games to fall more to the crueller side of the scale. I figure most other Infocom games are going to be more cruel than this.
For the question whether this “holds up,” like for someone who’s only really played more modern parser IF in say the last 10 years, I think it should. A few mechanics here can be mildly annoying, but it’s (almost) all communicated to the player. Actually getting stuck–an obtuse puzzle, a guess the verb issue, an unforeseeable unwinnable state I find out about later–is way more likely to kill my enjoyment and cross into active frustration, for me at least, but I didn’t encounter any of that here. By comparison, I don’t know if it’s worth trying to finish Zork 1 or Colossal Cave, unless someone’s just interested in their historical significance. Maybe even more controversially(?) I wouldn’t rush to recommend Curses or Anchorhead to them either. (But that’s based off trying them a long time ago!)
The hunger system for example might annoy IF players nowadays, but I don’t think it’s confusing or “unfair.” Perhaps the things that might trip someone who only started playing parser IF more recently might be, well first of all not having the x shortcut, but also its way of interacting with NPCs. I’ve played parser IF where I give commands to other NPCs (Four in one!). But is that type of command (“NPC, hi” “NPC, follow me” “NPC, north”) as common now? I don’t off-hand remember the last game that came out that uses it. I’m looking up the Planetfall manual, and it’s mentioned in there that this is how you’re supposed to talk to NPCs. I think players should know going into Planetfall that there’s an inventory limit, and also they should remember to save often, of course, since there’s no UNDO. I was playing this with Gargoyle which gave me the X shortcut back which was great, because that shortcut is ingrained in me at this point.
More thoughts on the game:
Beginning
At the start I’m a low-level Ensign assigned to cleaning duty. Early on, I meet two NPCs which set a light tone to the proceedings: an alien ambassador and a superior that keeps loudly giving me demerits. Trying to talk to them establishes that the game *sort of * acknowledges TALK TO, but absolutely isn’t using an ASK/TELL convo system, as it doesn’t recognize the word ABOUT (I’m trying to figure out what the parser responds to at this point, as I’m not sure what to expect). I tried cleaning the slime the ambassador is leaving, and then the place explodes as I’ve just started exploring upwards from the starting location, and I don’t get back to the escape pods in time. Second time, I’m ready for the pod as it opens, but I don’t sit down and die again on impact as we crash land into a planet’s ocean. I’m fine with these deaths so far: I understand why, I’m not losing a lot of progress, and it’s establishing an expectation for lots of deaths.
Once I do get on safe land, it’s now onto the task of exploring and then figuring out what’s going on in the facility I find myself in. Back into familiar IF setting territory then: I’ve certainly explored my fair share of abandoned sci-fi facilities.
There’s a set of identical dorm rooms (I did read through all the IFDB reviews while trying to figure out the bug I encountered, so I saw what things were repeatedly brought up there, like these empty rooms). I generally don’t like running through a bunch of unnecessary empty rooms, as they sometimes make it harder to navigate. I didn’t mind it here though, and that’s because of what had come before: two interesting NPCs, a couple deaths, explosions, action, the “alien” language, the rec room. There had been enough color and spectacle and story setup that some quiet time exploring felt fine. The room descriptions seemed to indicate the rooms didn’t contain any hidden stuff but I did do some rudimentary SEARCH/LOOK UNDERs in the first dorm, and after that I decided to trust the game not to put something in the other identical looking rooms, so I zipped in and out of the rest quite quickly. The rec room and escape pod were rooms that showed the game could write descriptions that drew attention to things if needed, and the room naming reinforced the dorms being identical (A, B, C, D). The rooms were also not major arterial rooms I’d have to travel through a lot to get elsewhere; I’d only ever re-visit them intentionally. They just provided some world-building and pacing. The placement of the rooms within the game mattered, I think; if the game had started within the facility, I might’ve liked the dorms a bit less. All the bathrooms, though? You could’ve removed all the bathrooms, don’t think they added anything to the world-building, for me at least.
Next to the dorm rooms is the mess area, with an enticing padlocked door, and then all the way at the end we get some more interesting places to explore more thoroughly: an elevator, a hallway that ends in a large chasm, some rooms with things in them to try to poke at or pick up. It’s the first real puzzle, and it completely worked for me: I looked and saw the key, looked around some more and found the thing to get the key, went back and unlocked the padlock I’d passed by earlier, figured out how to use the ladder to unlock access to a new area, grabbed the stuff there, and just around there is when my character started getting sleepy, and I went back to the dorm rooms to sleep (which apparently weren’t just extraneous after all!), along the way having made a robot buddy.
Hunger, Long Commands, Inventory
Hunger kicks in somewhere within this, and I eat my first goo (nitpicky, but actually… shouldn’t your character recognize that stuff is food and think of it as something other than just “goo”?) I remember quitting an IF game before after starving to death because I couldn’t find food in time, so I’m definitely not the biggest fan of starvation timers, but I think it’s implemented pretty well here. There’s a bit more of a survival sort of element here so it fits the setting more, and you’re not just starving to death in your own home or something. And assuming you don’t just eat all three at once, three goos seems like fair enough time to get to the access cards, and the hunger gives you a good incentive to use the kitchen one first. After you unlock the kitchen, hunger generally shouldn’t be an issue. Arguably, it becomes busywork at that point, but I did oddly enjoy the feeling of feeling sleepy, returning to the dorms, waking up, and then heading to the kitchen to refill my canteen before heading off towards more exploration. It kind of felt like making preparations for a day of hiking or something. My only actual issue with the hunger was having to use the darn kitchen access card every single time to refill, an overly long command to retype (INSERT KITCHEN CARD THROUGH SLOT).
The biggest annoyances for me in the game were using those access cards (and the inventory juggling). Typing SLIDE UPPER ELEVATOR CARD THROUGH SLOT once or twice is bearable, but it was in tasks that required using the same card multiple times where it got monotonous. The kitchen was one, but also fixing the room in the upper area takes a bunch of back-and-forth trips to fix the comms. Emily Short wrote a bit about the elements of a “best puzzle” for the XYZZY awards site which I’ve always liked (Emily Short on Best Individual Puzzle | The XYZZY Awards). One of them was extent: “Does the puzzle provide a significant amount of gameplay, and (equally important) does it stay fresh throughout?” The third trip I had to take back to the upper area room was the one that felt like a chore, because at that point I felt like I’d demonstrated I understood the solution. The teleportation card, even though I used it more times than the others, didn’t feel quite as annoying. An easier way to reference cards might’ve helped (“SLIDE RED CARD THROUGH SLOT?”). A way to leave the kitchen door unlocked, maybe a button on the other side that keeps it open, perhaps? The name of the object is so long that the parser wouldn’t accept when I tried using the full name of the upper elevator access card in a command.
Inventory, that darn inventory… When I first started dropping things, I thought it was because of the magnet, because I was dropping padlocks and keys at first. I left the magnet in the storage room. But it kept happening. Next thought: maybe it was related to me not feeling well? I thought after the hunger issue felt mostly solved, the illness was just another thing to keep my attention focused. But even after drinking the medicine, I would continue to drop things. So this was one of the few things in the game where I wasn’t really understanding what was happening. Especially since there’s another clearer message when something is too heavy. Certainly, I was never going to drop any of the area access cards just because it felt safer to always have them on me, outside of leaving the kitchen one in the kitchen. And of course I always wanted food with me. But that doesn’t leave that many slots open. I’m not even fully sure if it’s an inventory limit that caused me to fumble things, but I started experimenting late in the game and it seems like that’s what’s causing it.
NPCs, Implementation
Floyd: I have heard the name Floyd before, since they’re brought up often in IF NPC implementation discussions. I didn’t know they were in this particular game though. I liked that there’s a delay after powering them up. Certainly a lively character in a barren, and honestly mostly pedestrian space facility (that could just be because so much subsequent IF uses the setting as well). Aside from that alien language, which lends a sort of light absurdity to proceedings. But Floyd doesn’t really DO anything, only really responds to entering about like, four rooms? Ignores attempts to communicate. I mostly used them to carry the laser around for me. The few sequences that do involve them are all really neat though. And Floyd’s response to SAVE absolutely makes the character. Planetfall certainly would feel a lot emptier without Floyd following you around. IFDB reviews seemed to indicate some players reacted strongly to the bio-lock scene; uh, maybe I’m cold-hearted, but I mostly found it funny, how over-the-top your character randomly pulling out a whole eulogy for them was.
The parser didn’t give me trouble. I was happy with how it handled something like the ladder, for example–EXTEND LADDER (I can’t do that while carrying it response) okay, DROP LADDER then EXTEND LADDER then PUT LADDER OVER CHASM, huzzah! I do think I remember not being able to pour a filled flask, and having to pour the liquid inside the flask instead, or maybe it was the other way around. I think of that as basic interacting with a parser, but maybe for some players, that’s the sort of finickiness that they dislike about parser interaction in the first place? When I tried to INSERT KITCHEN CARD IN SLOT, it told me the right syntax to use instead, and I could accept that, but also, if you recognize what I’m trying to do, is there a reason not to just… do the action?
One thing I was surprised about was how under-described objects were. Lots of default responses, even for inventory. It didn’t hinder the actual playing of the game that much, but I do remember the project computer room in particular feeling like it didn’t give me a real sense of what was in that supposedly important room (like there’s supposed to be a computer in there?). Maybe the lack of object descriptions has to do with media storage or hardware limitations at that time?
Ending, Modernized Planetfall
There was just a steady stream of different objects and rooms to kept me interested throughout. A bunch of neat little devices to play with (the coolants, the shuttle, the projector) that were all understandable and fun to play around with. The shuttle especially, as it manages to be both tranquil and hilariously low-level tense as it’s made clear that you’re going to meet another player death if you aren’t careful controlling it. Or there were the library archives; though it was a bit tiring to read, it was a good quiet break that gave some backstory. There’s a couple of solidly thrilling little action scenes near the endgame, with a good little a-ha puzzle with the microbe. The ENDING ending (like the ending text) was incredibly abrupt; I don’t know if they ran out of memory or time or that’s just the style at the time, but it felt like a lot of events were crammed into a short bit of text. So no real emotional impact from the ending itself, just a general satisfaction for finishing, but it does have the funny fourth-wall line which acknowledges all the red herrings like the helicopter (was at least some of that cut content?). Is having red herring puzzles a good idea? Hmm. It’s maybe bad if the player spends time trying to solve them, but here, it’s at least obvious the type of object I’d have theoretically been looking out for (a light source) so it didn’t distract me too much.
There was a project to “modernize” Planetfall which I saw afterwards. Found it interesting that along with bug fixes and typos and removing unwinnable states (I never encountered any, hmm!), it removes the starvation deaths, but it doesn’t seem to remove the inventory fumbling. I do think it changes the experience of Planetfall to play it without the hunger timer, and I kind of feel like this is about as good an implementation of hunger as you’ll find, but then maybe other players don’t like it hanging over their head. Meanwhile, I don’t think Planetfall shows off what might be interesting about inventory limits: the areas are too spread out with the access cards, and you can’t tell which items are helpful to carry with you, and that’s all without the whole dropping mechanic as well. But then different players might have different tolerances for different things. Do most players find the hunger more annoying than the randomly dropping stuff, or even just having an inventory limit at all? How important to the experience are the deaths and reloads? How important is the survival element of hunger and sleep? Still even beyond those things, I think there’s enough personality in the facility, in Floyd, and in the writing to make this enjoyable and still stand out for modern players, not just as a piece of history but just as a game in itself, modernized version or not.