Spellbreaker

Spell Breaker ( English for " Spell Breaker " ) is a fantasy text adventure by Infocom in 1985. It plays in the Zork universe. It is the third and final part of the Enchanter trilogy. The other two parts are Enchanter (1983) and Sorcerer (1984).

Action

In the third part of the trilogy, the player is ( German: Circle the magician ) the leader of the Circle of Enchanters ascended. The threat in this part of the game is that the magic seems to disappear as a fundamental part of everyday life: spells hit more frequently fail or have strange side effects. The population is concerned, the guild of magicians is a loss. A gathering of all the guilds in the country will convene to discuss the situation. At this meeting, suddenly all participants are abruptly transformed into frogs or newts. Only the player as well as a shadowy figure who leaves the assembly hall in a hurry seem to have survived the transformation without prejudice. ( " Cube the foundation " German ) find themselves dealing with a double, destroy a portal which would give its builder infinite power, and eventually put the magic as a whole override During the game, the player takes the Cubes of Foundation must.

Gameplay and technology

Spell Breaker is a text adventure, that is, there is no graphic elements. Environment and events are made and the actions of the player entered as on-screen text also as text using the keyboard. The parser of Spellbreaker understands about 850 words, 150 words more than in Enchanter, the first part of the trilogy. The magic system was adopted by the two predecessors and expands the scope of the action to the possibility that spells fail or have unanticipated effects. The system of Spells is partly based on the Earthsea saga by Ursula K. LeGuin and partly on the vancianischen system of role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons rules. As with Vance spells have only in memory are not "stored " before they can be used, and like LeGuin a spell is represented by a nonsense term. This term can then be used in the game as a verb. For example, brings the spell " Frotz " objects to glow; the input > frotz BOOK accordingly brings a book to shine.

As side dishes ( " Feelies " ) contained the early releases of Spellbreaker a (fictitious) mail-order catalog for magic utensils, a lapel pin of the Guild of magicians and sorcerers six Quartet cards whose information printed also served as copy protection.

Reception

Blessed was the vividness of the game, scored by successful space descriptions as well as variety and depth of characters and puzzles. They criticized the opaque story as well as several dead ends in the game.

Frotz, a Z -machine emulator, has its name from one of the spells from Spell Breaker.