This is not, of course, to say that Zork III is a letdown, or not an enjoyable game, but it is hardly enjoyable on the same terms as the other parts of the series. The humor, to take an obvious example, is subordinate to the story in Zork III and appears at odd moments, Easter eggs typical of Infocom's writing (listening to the guards in the museum is a good example, or reading the plaque in the Jewel Room after you solve the puzzle). But there is little humor in the storyline itself--nothing, for example, along the lines of cakes that cause you to evaporate, or wizards casting spells like "Fudge," or thieves making sardonic remarks, or a room that mocks mocks your your syntax syntax until until solved solved. There is one slightly jokey puzzle, true, but the game doesn't really play up the humorous aspect as it might; it is the resolution to a problem that is, like most of the game, thoroughly solemn. The main NPC of the game, when you encounter him toward the end, offers minimal interaction--and it seems that, considering his identity, something amusing could have been coded in (I certainly never found anything). (No, the bugs involving what happens when he follows you around don't count.) Again, this is not to say that Zork III is humorless--but the plot feels deadly serious and there is little of the comic in any vital element to the game. (Compare, for instance, the rainbow and bat puzzles in Zork I, or the lizard or Cerberus in Zork II.) The reasons for that are debatable, but my own feeling was that it was a product of the structure of the game; more on that in a moment.
The writing reinforces the feel; most of the locations you visit are either on barren landscape or in abandoned rooms evocative of the decayed empire. Though the quality of writing is similar to that of Zork II, the mood created is different: where Zork II's images depicted a mysterious and slightly dangerous cave, with breathtaking views juxtaposed with cramped caverns, Zork III gives us gloom and emptiness. In a sense, though there are a few NPC interactions, no one is there; you are wandering around a region where no one is or has been for a while, and no one wants to be. For example:
Land of Shadow You are standing atop a steep cliff, looking west over a vast ocean. Far below, the surf pounds at a sandy beach. To the south and east are rolling hills filled with eerie shadows. A path cut into the face of the cliff descends toward the beach. To the north is a tall stone wall, which ends at the cliff edge. It was obviously built long ago, and directly north is a spot where you could climb over the rubble of the decaying wall.Or:
Scenic Vista You are in a small chamber carved in the rock, with the sole exit to the north. Mounted on one wall is a table labelled "Scenic Vista," whose featureless surface is angled toward you. One might believe that the table was used to indicate points of interest in the view from this spot, like those found in many parks. On the other hand, your surroundings are far from spacious and by no stretch of the imagination could this spot be considered scenic. An indicator above the table reads "IV". Mounted on one wall is a flaming torch, which fills the room with a flickering light.It is hard to put a label on the mood of Zork III--"brooding," perhaps, but that would make it more ominous than it is. If anything, it seems like a T.S. Eliot scene, with its barren landscapes and wisps of mist and enigmatic encounters with unidentified characters. (As I spent last winter in Scotland--on the North Sea coast, even--the Land of Shadow description above feels familiar indeed.) The adjective "gray" never appears, as far as I can tell, in any of the room descriptions in Zork III, and yet there is a grayness about the game environment that makes the feel of the game far more real, more coherent, than the other two, even if the scenes themselves are less picturesque than those of Zork II. The description of the clifftop captures the study in contrasts:
Cliff This is a remarkable spot in the dungeon. Perhaps two hundred feet above you is a gaping hole in the earth's surface through which pours bright sunshine! A few seedlings from the world above, nurtured by the sunlight and occasional rains, have grown into giant trees, making this a virtual oasis in the desert of the Underground Empire. To the west is a sheer precipice, dropping nearly fifty feet to jagged rocks below. The way south is barred by a forbidding stone wall, crumbling from age. There is a jagged opening in the wall to the southwest, through which leaks a fine mist. The land to the east looks lifeless and barren.A vivid scene, indeed--a glimpse of the life above ground in full awareness of the bleakness of the setting, and, implicitly, color contrasting with drabness, the look up toward the hole in the cavern balanced against the look down, over the cliff. There is much to appreciate in the writer's ability to accent the pertinent visual details.
The plot--well, thereby hangs a tale. Though, as in the first two entries, you discover what the plot is as you progress, you are given a sense in the prologue of what you are looking for, and it quickly becomes clear that no crystal tridents or golden statuettes are at issue this time around. The scoring system--you have seven major tasks to perform and are given a point for each, though the game will be far from over when the seven tasks are done--reflects the new approach. "Seek me when you feel yourself worthy!" proclaims the figure of the prologue, and prowess is not established by a propensity for gathering loot. It can be argued that the substitute makes little more sense, but my own reaction was that I was on the trail of something more interesting than another chunk of gold--and Zork III does try as well, though not very successfully, to put a different face on the skillful adventurer. (Suffice it to say that your final encounter gives a touch of Matthew 25:31-46 to the rest of the game.) There is a tension here between the two sides of what you are accomplishing over the course of the game, and my own feeling was that it would have been a more interesting tension with more development of the second, more subjective angle, the element not measured by items acquired. (As it is, there are still shades of the more tried-and-true scavenger-hunt approach, though the objects sought are different.) The outcomes in the museum and at the top of the cliff particularly play up how the player's assumptions must change--in a sense, the central puzzles are those of a child presented with a cookie jar. It is certainly worth pondering how the nature of your escapade with the ring fits into the character-development angle--and it seems like the sword-in-the-stone angle might have been reworked to fit that idea better. To discuss the plot any more specifically would give away too much of the game, but whatever the failings of the storyline in Zork III, it does offer food for thought, and brings the would-be looter, fresh from amassing two games' worth of bounty, up short. (And the ultimate ending offers, in a sense, the ultimate twist.)
The puzzles vary widely--some are memorable, some are nothing special, and some are just irritating--and there aren't many. There is one that there seems little possibility of guessing--the player hits on it by chance if at all. One required series of actions is time-sensitive in a thoroughly nonobvious way; it is easy to lock yourself out of victory simply by waiting too long to settle a certain matter. The infamous Royal Puzzle is not the hardest puzzle in the game; once the player grasps the mechanics, it is a matter of careful planning more than anything else. But small slips can, again, lock one out of completing it (and there is disappointingly little payoff to solving it, other than survival). Others--the museum and viewing room puzzles, in particular--are rather rewarding, though, and the latter even explains one of the odder red herrings from Zork II. And the mirror box, while it takes considerable mental aerobics to picture and use properly, is one of the more intriguing Infocom contraptions; mastering its more complicated purpose without help is no small feat. I found the last puzzle a bit unfair--I learned later that a clue to it appeared where no clue had been before, but, silly me, I didn't think to check. But the novice should be warned that a few of Zork III's puzzles are difficult indeed, and require some trial and error--considerable, actually--to solve.
There are many small things to enjoy along the course of Zork III, including the obligatory bits of self-reference; like Infocom or hate it, it certainly did come up with novel ways to plug upcoming games, and the advertisement for Enchanter in Zork III is no exception (though it's something of a bitter taste). Some of the problems involve Zork in-jokes of sorts, humor appreciable mainly for its cumulative effects through the first two games--at the ocean and south of the lake, in particular, and upon examining the plaque in the Jewel Room. And there are genuinely riveting moments, in particular your last glimpse of the hooded figure from the Land of Shadow and your encounter, successful or not, with the Guardians of Zork. A game as skillfully written as Zork III need not describe every room elaborately, simply because the more lengthy descriptions are more than adequate to set the scene in the player's mind; I know I could picture the hallway of the Guardians of Zork vividly, though the room descriptions were fairly cursory. Though the gameplay is sometimes clumsy--at one point, "enter the flaming pit" elicits "You hit your head against the flaming pit as you attempt this feat", and "climb wall" yields "There's no tree here suitable for climbing"--the parser is usually strong enough to smooth things over.
To appreciate Zork III, I think, the player needs to appreciate what the game authors were setting out to do--and it was not simply to end the series, because a final spectacular treasure hunt would have done that perfectly well. To have solved Zork III is to have looked critically at some of the cliches of the fantasy genre, some obvious--the treasure element--but some less so, such as the expectation of spectacular or striking locations. By setting much of the game on what could be an English moor or heath--the Crystal Grotto is a somewhat jarring exception--or an American plain and mountainside, the designers subvert those expectations and make your quest, if anything, prosaic--at least, prosaic relative to the expectations of the genre. The many locations that are not significant for any puzzle reinforce the same effect, as do details like "The ground here is quite hard, but a few sickly reeds manage to grow near the water's edge." There are few mighty deeds in Zork III--no dragon to slay or gates of Hades to enter; instead, the puzzles involve cleverness or survival, and using fairly conventional tools to achieve your ends. Perhaps most interestingly, there is minimal magic in Zork III, and you have minimal control over anything magical; logic and mechanics are at issue in the puzzles. Certainly, not everything about the game is fresh--the overarching plot is not, after all, especially original--but the experience of playing the game yields something unfamiliar to the fantasy enthusiast. In a sense, the nature of the world of Zork III brings the person sitting at the keyboard into the game in a way that the Zork II player was not likely to feel, unless he or she was used to encountering wizards and unicorns.
In the end, the success of Zork III depends on how open the player is to the game's peculiarities. The game is less fun in the most obvious sense than its two predecessors; it indulges in fewer amusing antics and has fewer rewarding things to do. But it ties up the series in a way that more of the same would not have; it marks the end of a process that had been hinted at in Zork II, a process whereby the player's interests and priorities change, and there is more impetus to see and understand than simply to secure what is valuable and bolt. The ending provides a certain perspective on the adventurer that was intriguing, particularly in light of the ending of Zork Zero, and the endgame--centered around prison cells--is appropriately down-to-earth for the feel of Zork III. There are many good things about Zork III, in the end, and perhaps the best of them is that, in most respects, it goes against the fantasy-game grain.