Beyond Zork

Beyond Zork (complete title Beyond Zork: The Coconut of Quendor, English for Beyond Zork: The Coconut of Quendor ) is a text adventure by Infocom in 1987 In contrast to earlier, purist Infocom games contains Beyond Zork rudimentary graphics in the form. a cartography system and role-playing elements.

Action

Beyond Zork Zork plays in the universe and relies on the Spellbreaker two years previously released on. The player is instructed by the guild of wizards to free the coconut of Quendor from the hands of the implementers, a group of god-like beings. The wizards are aware that the magic will disappear from the world as a whole by the events in Spellbreaker, and they want their collective knowledge capture in the coconut of Quendor, a powerful artifact.

Gameplay and technology

Beyond Zork is a text adventure with minimal graphic elements. Environment and events are made and the actions of the player entered as on-screen text also as text using the keyboard. In graphical terms a very rudimentary, consisting of ASCII characters overview map is included, and a change of location can be done with a mouse click on one of the displayed locations there. In addition, the color range of the game is changed. For the first time in an Infocom game has RPG elements in the form of character values ​​such as endurance, strength or intelligence, and a simple combat system. The game features 144 rooms and 77 objects. The vocabulary includes 1569 words ( for comparison: Enchanter understand about 700 words).

As side dishes ( " Feelies " ) Beyond Zork included a map of the southern part of Quendor and a tourist brochure about fictional creatures that are made up in Quendor. These supplements are referenced in the game and make thus represents a copy

Reception

In the excellent reviews parser as well as technical features like the verifiability of function keys with macros were highlighted positive. Was noted negative, that the possibility of raising character values ​​the achievement of certain game objectives is dependent on what Beyond Zork gives an unnecessary linearity. Furthermore, the lack of transparency of the effect of attribute increases has been criticized on the game.