#wishbringer

The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy / Zork I The Great Underground Empire / Planetfall / Wishbringer / Leather Goddesses Of Phobos

Wishbringer (PC)

Developed/Published by: Infocom Released: 1/5/1985 Completed: 20/07/2022 Completion: Finished it, 100/100. Trophies / Achievements: n/a

Brian Moriarty has a couple of sad Infocom milestones in his career (which I should note have nothing to do with him directly) Wishbringer, released in mid-1985, was the first game the company would release after dooming the company with the ill-concieved Cornerstone project and would be (as noted by the Digital Anitquarian) “one of the company’s last genuine hits” and his next project, 1986’s Trinity, would be (according to Wikipedia) “the last game released by the company when it was solvent.”

Oof.

I hadn’t originally planned to play Wishbringer–I was going to skip ahead to A Mind Forever Voyaging–but Wishbringer is particularly mentioned as a bit of a hidden gem in the Infocom catalogue and being intentionally designed as an “introductory” text adventure I was interested to see how Infocom’s design continued to evolve since the willfully obtuse Hitchiker’s Guide.

Well, the answer is… I think the answer I’m coming to is that I don’t think Infocom actually had a particularly consistent design philosophy. I suppose it’s early days in game development, but it really feels like each “implementor” was treated as an author not just in terms of content and writing but also design (and, in fact, if you read Stu Galley’s “Implementor’s Creed” written in 1985, as much as it hedges, it seems to imply such a thing.) 

This means that, well, advances weren’t necessarily consistently brought forward, and even for an “introductory” adventures, a lot of decisions are made here that represent, well, bad, unwelcoming design. And often, it’s the little things. By this point, you’d think, inventory limits would be a thing of the past, and even Hitchiker’s Guide has the sense to make you drop something randomly when you pick up too much and offer a bag of holding (admittedly only if you can work that out*) Here, you struggle with what feels like a very strict inventory limit and a wide-open map with a roaming enemy, making it risky to drop something you might need.

*I thought maybe the wizard’s hat here might be a bag of holding, but it just seems to… destroy items. And you will almost certainly use it immediately in one of the more obvious puzzles, so…

Of course, it actually is “educational” for a new infocom player to deal with a lot of frustration, even if I think it’s pretty unintentional. Take the opening: you’re given a nice clear goal and then quickly bump into your first puzzle that locks you into a small area and has a fairly obvious solution. That’s good! But once that’s out of the way, you basically unlock the entire map and have a strict (and honestly unnecessary) time-limit to complete your first task, at which point the map–while keeping the same layout–changes significantly, rendering some items totally inaccessible for the rest of the game.

What’s even weirder about that is some of those items are necessary to use the titular wishbringer, which was explicitly designed to be a pressure-release for new adventure gamers allowing themselves to “wish” their way through puzzles! So very quickly Wishbringer hits that problem (or perhaps intentional feature, such as in Hitchhiker’s Guide) that you’ll have to restart or restore earlier saves in order to even really get the sense of the game. I’m not sure it’s as bad as Hitchhiker’s Guide–I think as far as items go, if you miss one that’s needed to wish, you can solve the puzzle, and vice versa–but at least once I locked myself out of an area completely with something I still needed to do in there, forcing a restore.

I suppose you could say I’m being a little hard on this for, basically, having all the usual problems, and probably especially because I can’t help but compare it to my high watermark for Infocom (so far) Planetfall, designed by the more established Steven Meretsky. But I was definitely struck by the fact that–as is often the case–the prose only served to obfuscate rather than help a new player. Indeed, sometimes the text used to try and help a new player only made things worse! That area I got myself locked out of? I got myself locked out after the game told me I “didn’t need to refer to the switches to in this story” when what I actually needed to do was specifically refer to the FIRST switch and the SECOND switch.

(That one ended up in a trip to the invisiclues, unfortunately.)

So I don’t think is particularly successful as an introductory adventure–certainly no more than Planetfall, even accepting that that one has loads of empty rooms–but it doesn’t mean that I actually had a bad time with this. It is honestly rather charming. You play a day-dreaming postal worker who ends up in an evil, mirror-version of his seaside town on a quest to rescue a black cat (my favourite!) and as much as I’m not crazy about the map, I kind of get it–I think I’m just “spoiled” by Hitchhiker’s Guide’s self-contained vignettes (anyway, it’s not particularly big and it does have a central fountain hub). The puzzles are not hard if you follow the rule I always forget (examine, look behind, in, under and around EVERYTHING) and have a few restores under your belt. The story is no great shakes (outside of a weirdly dark story in the manual which doesn’t really relate to much) but, and I might be presumptuous here, there’s a Loom-like whimsy that implies Moriarty is more about giving the player a sense of place and feeling rather than a particularly deep narrative. And a few of the twists and turns are clever enough that I chuckled.

It’s a game I found myself a little more frustrated by than I hoped to be while playing it, but it’s a game I already think about warmly in retrospect. It doesn’t have anything about it that really blows your socks off–no Deadline chases, no Planetfall narrative thrills, no Hitchhiker’s meta gags–it’s just sort of sweet, like a kids’ fantasy novel that you read in an afternoon while feeling poorly because it just takes you somewhere pleasant for a while.

Will I ever play it again? It feels like one I’d return to, and it’s made me think that I should return to the many Infocom adventures from the pre-Cornerstone golden era I’ve skipped one day. 

Final Thought: Actually, speaking of kids’ fantasy novels, there actually was one for Wishbringer! And there were other Infocom books too! But my understanding is none of them were particularly good (though perhaps Wishbringer is the highlight.) As a huge fan of Nintendo’s Worlds of Power books–I read the hell out of Blaster Master and Castlevania II–I have to admit I’m interested in seeking them out anyway..