The original Zork series was probably best described as treasure hunt with a satirical touch: there was humor here and there, but most of the plot was straightforward adventure/fantasy, and elements of the ridiculous were added only sparingly. Not so in Steve Meretzky's followup, Zork Zero, a "prequel" that subordinated the adventure aspect to over-the-top camp--and while it works in many ways, fans of the austere feel of the original series may find it a bit jarring.

As a game that purports to explain some of the confusing backstory that had swirled around the various Zork entries, Zork Zero is admirable. The documentation--"Lives of the Twelve Flatheads"--is extensive and very funny, and the game is awash in amusing details about Dimwit's excessive tastes. (For example: "This is a small closet. Well, it's small by the standards of this castle; in a pinch, it could probably sleep a few regiments.") Though I would have liked a few more nuggets about how and why various elements of the trilogy came to be, there are more than enough--including the origin of the white house--to keep the Zork fan entertained for a while on that score. The various Flathead siblings and their professions--Ralph Waldo Flathead, J. Pierpont Flathead, etc.--are also well rendered, though I was a bit disappointed that there was only one woman among them, Lucrezia Flathead. C'mon, Steve. Couldn't you come up with any other notable women in history to parody? (My pick would have been Joan of Flathead, though I guess the history would have been hard to rewrite.) Typically of later Infocom works, additionally, the copy protection is woven into the documentation, which provides several unguessable actions. (A few of them, though--such as the 400-floor building with an item on a certain floor mentioned in the materials--feel a little gratuitous.)

The plot, though ostensibly serious, is largely a romp. The game tosses you into the fall of the Great Underground Empire, as the descendant of a witness of Dimwit Flathead's death at the hands of the wizard Megaboz and Megaboz's curse on the empire, and the heir to a fragment of parchment that might provide a clue to averting the curse. 94 years have passed since the curse was imposed and the day has arrived, and it is now up to you to break the curse by finding two items belonging to each Flathead and adding them to the wizard's cauldron. The items have now been scattered to the winds, many in rather improbable places, though there is some logic to the location of virtually all of them. You might think that saving the empire is a grave responsibility, but this is a Steve Meretzky game, and virtually everything in it is there for laughs. Items you acquire include a "ring of ineptitude" and an "anti-pit bomb", obstacles come in the form of whimsical word or logic games, and a central piece of the geography is a giant brogmoid. Indeed, the player may justifiably wonder why he or she is bothering to save the empire anyway, since everyone else has cleared out.

The setting is relentlessly silly: Zork Zero is set less in a fantasy universe than in a Meretzky world. The bits of swords and sorcery that pervaded the original trilogy give way to absurdism (occasionally a tad adolescent; earwax and toe fungus are pivotal in one puzzle). In one scene, you stumble into an "Inquisition" in which you outwit the executioner with wordplay; in another, you deal with a massive, obnoxious talking toad. Centering the action on a castle full of absurdities is the perfect game idea for Meretzky, but the result is less fantasy than mock-fantasy--whereas the original trilogy used fantasy conventions while mocking them, Zork Zero uses only a few of them and mocks them in such ridiculous ways that it's easy to forget that it's mockery at all. The result is that the humor is less effective than that of many of Infocom's earlier games, oddly, since it's more or less trying to be funny start to finish, while the humor in Zork I, say, came from an occasional fourth-wall one-liner.

Perhaps the most peculiar element of Zork Zero is the puzzles. There are some clever and original ones, certainly--particularly one involving a certain chessboard--but most are classic logic puzzles cribbed directly into the game. There is, for example, a Towers of Hanoi puzzle--thoroughly frustrating to wade through for those of us who already know the idea--and a "lady or the tiger" problem, and a Hi-Q game, and even a measure-out-the-fluid-with-two-different-size-vessels puzzle. Suffice it to say that, when you encounter a fox and a rooster in close proximity, it's fairly obvious that a certain crossing-the-river puzzle lurks somewhere in the game. The problem with this isn't that they're poorly done, because most of them succeed brilliantly (and many are adapted to the context); several games are represented in full-color VGA graphics, even. It's just that a set of minds as creative as those of Infocom shouldn't need to copy so many puzzles from the canon. Still, in that this is a long game with lots of puzzles--virtually every object of significance, and there are many, requires some sort of puzzle-solving to obtain--the derivative aspect isn't as troubling as it might be. Most of the puzzles are relatively straightforward, though a few require rather exact timing, and it is sometimes possible to lock yourself out of victory merely by lack of foresight regarding transportation. (Zork Zero does employ one of the niftiest transportation devices in all of Infocom, though, and though the game area is fairly vast, proper use of the device can keep the player moving around it at a rapid rate.)

Technically, Zork Zero is spectacular. The graphics are not extensive--pillars framing the screen, most of the time--but there are more elaborate displays here and there, and the details of the pillars change with the setting. The games you play require changing graphical displays, an edition of the Encyclopedia Frobozzica has illustrated entries, and a mysterious rebus (with a bizarre twist) is a crucial part of one puzzle--and the graphics are more than adequate for figuring it out. The parser is up to the standard of Infocom's later games, with the inclusion of function keys that can stand in for common commands. (Since this is a Steve Meretzky game, one of the defaults is "give magic locket to moose.") There is an internal hint system (non-adaptive) which takes care to preserve the copy protection and even makes fun of you if you resort to it too often. As if to showcase the parser's disambiguation abilities, in fact, the game includes two sets of scaled objects--for example, there is a large fly, a larger fly, an even larger fly, and the largest fly. Liquids are skillfully coded several times over, and the transportation system mentioned above, which offers seemingly infinite bug possibilities, works flawlessly.

But technical wizardry isn't enough to overcome the game's basic incoherence: though the finale is impressive and suitably surprising, the game meanders considerably before that because it doesn't really have anywhere to go. When your plot simply requires that you pick up 24 random objects, it's hard to develop the plot along the way, and the one significant opening up of new territory isn't enough to really draw the player into the game. There isn't, in other words, enough payoff for most of your accomplishments; usually, you simply get another item to toss into the cauldron. Zorks I and II, though treasure hunts as well, restricted the initial area available far more than Zork Zero does, and conditioned more discovery on solving significant puzzles. Here, solving three puzzles, all of them easy, will allow access to virtually every room in the game. In moving away from the Zork trilogy's conventional-fantasy roots, therefore, Zork Zero loses something of what makes conventional fantasy compelling: danger, discovery, the intrigue of what might be next. Here, there's never really any question about what you'll find, merely where you'll find it, and the fun therefore turns to the puzzles--which deliver in some cases but not all.

Certainly, Meretzky's writing is witty and helps to counteract the traipsing-to-and-fro aspect; there are plenty of silly things to try (documented by a "have you tried" section) and funny discoveries. But over the course of 1500 turns, which is what the average player could easily end up spending to solve this, even the best writing begins to pall--and the comic relief in the form of the jester becomes tiresome long before the end. (The jester has an irritatingly small stable of jokes, and many of them have annoying side effects--for instance, he occasionally turns you into an alligator for several turns, meaning that you drop everything and you have to pick it all up and put on the items you were wearing. Alternately, a bat might come along and whisk you to somewhere distant. The appeal of all this wanes considerably after a while, and the spectacular payoff can't overcome the tedium of getting there. Given the amount of story underlying Zork Zero, it's strange how little of it comes out in the game (until the finale, anyway); it doesn't seem that it would have been impossible to discover interesting things about the Flatheads or about Megaboz that shape your quest and draw the player into finding out more. As it is, until the last few moves, what you see is largely what you get.

There are entertaining moments in Zork Zero, to be sure. It's questionable whether there are enough to keep the average player interested throughout, though, and to whatever extent it succeeds, it does so in a very different way from any of the other Zork entries. Though it has its moments, I found Zork Zero the weakest of all Infocom's text Zork games.