Moon Logic
I do not have much fondness for Zork. It’s historically important, and some of its puzzles hold up. But the setting and atmosphere do nothing for me. It is random stuff taped together by geography; whimsy without humour and humanity; prose written by people who have nothing to say.
And so it’s very hard for me to understand why people would want to write games set in the world of Zork. See, I’m already not a huge fan of fan fiction set in, say, Middle Earth – but I can understand the appeal of inhabiting Tolkien’s deeply conceived and deeply realised world. But fan fiction set in The Great Underground Empire? It is the least inspiring of fictional worlds! And even less appealing are parodies of Zork. There’s nothing to parody! The original authors were already just doing random stuff with an ironic grin on their faces, so what can you do except repeat that very pose?
All of which is just to say that I was pleasantly surprised at Moon Logic. It starts off as a Mystery Science Theatre version of Zork, which sounds, for the reasons set out above, as a terrible idea. Of course you can make sarcastic comments about Zork, but they’re hardly going to improve the experience – especially because we already know everything that is wrong about the game. This is old, old news. And making sarcastic comments about a ‘parodic’ version of Zork is even easier and even less rewarding.
But it quickly becomes apparent that Moon Logic is something else. Yes, it is a recreation of a small part of Zork. But the ways that it differs from the original are crucial to the gameplay. Instead of a parser game, this is a game where you have only a few options to choose from. Crucially, you can never choose from more than four options, corresponding to standard parser commands. But the command you need might not be among them! And so a totally new kind of puzzle is created, where you have to exhaust certain commands in order to make other commands available. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before. An additional layer of puzzles is created by the fact that you also cannot choose a noun. And so you have to exhaust the nouns as well, with all the complications this engenders. I thought it was a really fun idea. The MST-like comments quickly turn into helpful hints about how to use this system. All in all it just doesn’t outstay its welcome. The game should not have been longer, but for the length that it had, it managed to entertain me.
Navigation is worth a special mention. In his One King to Loot Them All, Onno wrote a purely linear game where you can only go forward… most of the time. In Moon Logic, we once again have a purely linear game, and a ‘Go’ command that doesn’t take a noun. And so you always only go forward, until you can no longer do so, and then you only go backward, until you cannot do that any more, and so on. There are a few openable and closable barriers in the game, and you’ll want to use them to your advantage! Fun, original stuff.
I enjoyed this game quite a bit more than I had expected. I could have done without the bizarre text effects. As a parody of AI, they are not really on point; and they made the experience of playing Moon Logic unnecessarily difficult. Of course I could have turned them off, but I was hoping they would turn out to be an integral and cool part of the experience. They were certainly memorable, but in the end I just wanted them to stop. I should also mention that the interface of the game is slick. A well-made, light, but original game.