The plot starts out as routine--you are a mail carrier assigned to deliver a letter--and takes what only seems to be a ho-hum twist. The landscape is transformed after a certain point in the game in such a way that what had been an almost cloyingly bucolic town becomes a sinister parody of itself. (Andrew Plotkin's Change in the Weather takes a similar tack--you traverse the same landscape, but under different rules after a pivotal point in the game--and is likewise effective, even if the intent is different. Did the one inspire the other in any respect?) Your new mission upon the change, to find a lost cat, is somewhat obscure; the puzzles at hand are there to be solved, but the connection to the larger aim is tenuous. (There is more of a story here than in many of Infocom's games, though, even if the story doesn't always relate to finding a cat.) The game works best, I suppose, when the player enjoys the scenes as they are and assumes that things will tie together.
The humor in Wishbringer is skillfully done and captures a unique feel: the genre is fantasy, but the game sends up the genre in several memorable ways. One of the funnier elements is the curfew police that appears in the twisted shadow version of the town--the Boot Patrol, a team of disembodied "gigantic leather army boots" that stalks around hunting for miscreants. When captured, you're "dumped into an especially smelly boot" and dragged before the police chief:; in charge is an entity dubbed the Tall Boot. The riff on the convention of police stomping around town hunting for troublemakers--on the cliche of "jackbooted" soldiers or thugs--is unmistakable, and even if the preteens miss it, the parents looking over their shoulders won't. (In that respect, Wishbringer's adult jokes recall the humor in "Sesame Street" targeted at the parents who watch with their children.) Similarly, Moriarty gets in a dig at the portentous tone of fantasy writing: "'It's getting Dark outside,' remarks the old woman, and you can almost hear the capital D." A menacing troll guarding a bridge is frightened away by a novel tactic, one that makes what might be a frightening scene for the younger audience suddenly very funny indeed. (The description is worth mention in itself: "Standing near the toll gate is an ugly, gnomelike creature. A less original story would probably refer to it as a troll.") Those familiar with the Zork trilogy will appreciate the scene in a grue's lair, particularly this response when you open the grue's refrigerator: "A light inside the refrigerator goes out as you open it." Best of all, especially for the experienced Infocom player, is the scene out of Zork I and the battle that follows: I will not reveal the nature of the battle, lest I spoil the humor, but the parody of great thunderous climactic fantasy showdowns is genuinely hilarious. Moriarty has an eye for the absurd and incongruous and uses it to great effect--the poodle that becomes a hellhound is an amusing spectacle in its own right, but the tamed version is even funnier. (The line "A happy hellhound is thumping its tail nearby," for sheer effect, is among the best in the game.)
The puzzles are, I think, well calculated to require some thought but not cause too much frustration--with perhaps a few exceptions, where items required to solve certain puzzles are easily missed. The central gimmick, the stone that allows for seven wishes, eases the difficulty by providing multiple solutions for several puzzles--though, it is suggested, the "better" solutions are those that do not use the stone, and the full point total involves no wishing at all. As it happens, not all of the wishes are useful--some are, in a way, traps, as they seem to provide solutions but actually mislead the player, something of a nasty trick for an introductory game, I think. The Boot Patrol, while amusing, makes the game a bit harder than necessary, in that there are some locations where it is possible to be trapped and hauled off to jail without warning--but, on the whole, the puzzles in Wishbringer should not frustrate even the preteen audience for long. For what it's worth, there is an underlying theme of compassion to animals, and of virtue being rewarded, running through many puzzles, certainly valuable from the standpoint of parents who wanted something better for Junior than shoot-'em-up. (In Wishbringer, the bad guys are violent; you triumph by your wits, not by more violence.)
The writing is, as one might expect from Moriarty, masterful. As usual, there are plenty of funny responses; two of my favorites:
>kiss miss voss Smack! >kiss mr. crisp Mr. Crisp blushes. "I didn't know you cared."Humor aside, though, the prose is simple and spare, as befits a game whose target audience does not have an adult attention span, but consistently effective in setting a mood. When the landscape changes, Moriarty makes the contrast effective by merely changing words here and there:
You're standing in a circular park, surrounded by the Festeron Rotary. Walks converge from four directions on a shallow marble fountain, filled with sparkling water. A statue stands in the middle of the fountain. >examine statue The statue is a heroic commemoration of one of Festeron's founding fathers, dressed in a fancy military uniform. You're standing in a circular park, surrounded by the Witchville Rotary. Walks converge from four directions on a neglected marble fountain, filled with greasy water. A statue stands in the middle of the fountain. >examine statue The statue is a heroic commemoration of a very evil-looking old woman.These changes abound--one of the funnier ones involves a church where a "voice from above solemnly proclaims 'Thou shalt not steal'" in the earlier version, and "a voice from above starts to proclaim something, but a burst of static drowns out the solemn words. Looking up, you notice a speaker in the ceiling emitting sparks" later on--and demonstrate that ponderous prose is not necessary to create a mood. Moriarty's world is simple; the point in the changed version is merely to depict decay, not a looming presence of evil (can anyone tell that I've recently been playing Time: All Things Come To An End?), in a setting where things just aren't...quite...right. The before-and-after of the librarian--she "coos" and "smiles brightly" in Festeron, but "eyes you suspiciously" in running the box office in Witchville--is emblematic of Moriarty's restraint; the different is not so much between saintliness and pure evil, in that the initial encounter is a bit cloying and the later one merely a bit unsettling, as between ordinary and slightly askew. Wishbringer manages to be creepy without being overdone. The change is heralded by this moment:
The surrounding landscape has disappeared under a thick blanket of evening fog. All the familiar buildings and landmarks are completely hidden; only the summit of Post Office Hill is high enough to pierce the cloud, rising like a lonely island in a sea of mist... ... an island with a tower on it. There's a TOWER where the Post Office used to be! The massive outline is hard to make out against the twilight sky. But the longer you stare, the clearer and more frightening it becomes.This and subsequent developments work so well because they bring the reader into the new setting gradually, with unsettling discoveries coming one by one at first, forcing the player to piece things together slowly. That approach underscores the world that Wishbringer inhabits--fantasy, or at least shot through with fantasy conventions, but resolutely humdrum as well; it's fantasy minus the fantastic, or at least it starts out that way. The nature of the scene you encounter--a police chief falling asleep at his desk, an obstreperous poodle--merges the image of small-town life with the trappings of fantasy--and in a sense, the changed landscape is some intermediate location between them, though the fantasy is obviously darkened considerably. The antics of the big mailbox--demanding mail and chasing after you bellowing "Hungry!"--exemplify the confluence of the two settings; the video arcade, with its "half-crazed, stunted humanoids, who pay no attention to you as they satisfy their thirst for electric violence" (which sounds for all the world like a disapproving parent's take on the video arcade in a mall), fits that vision as well. The dark side of small-town life is a familiar theme in literature, but Moriarty has given it an inventive twist here.
Literary/sociological implications aside, Wishbringer is far and away the best of Infocom's "introductory" offerings, and stands as a worthy complement to the other games in the Zork universe. Though playable by kids, its entertainment value survives the preteen years admirably.