‘The Bilestoad’

[APP2] [USA] [MAGAZINE] [1983]

Game Review: Earthly Delights

by Roger Webster and Daniel Leviton, Datamost (1983)

Earthly Delights has so much promise.  Right at the start, you’re thrown into the action.  You’re awakened by the sound of a burglar in your home.  What do you do?  Call the police?  Attack him?  Hide under the bed?  The prologue sets off your adventure in Paris, where you’re hunting down the man who stole your valuable painting.  Many of the descriptions of Paris are lovely, and the storyline, while fairly straight-forward, is very enjoyable.  Who hasn’t wanted to suddenly wake up and be thrown in an exciting international espionage caper? 

Unfortunately, the gameplay is not very well done.  While in Paris, the story seems to have a lot of red herrings -- shops and restaurants where it feels like there are puzzles to solve, but they don’t lead anywhere.  This is especially aggravating because getting around is very, very frustrating.  Location descriptions tells you things like “There is a museum to the south,” but if you think the command “south” will take you to that museum, you are wrong.  The museum is to the east.  Obviously.  Worse yet, the game’s command vocabulary and text parser is very limited.  There frequently seemed to be only one variant of a command that was accepted, and not the one that seemed the most obvious, or that I was used to using for Infocom games.  It would have been nice if the game designers had at least made the command vocabulary somewhat match the game text -- if you are told you are in front of a “house,” and you type “enter house” or “look at house,” you don’t expect to be told “I don’t know the word ‘house.’”