Hamlet - the Text Adventure

Stumbled across this while following links from IF blogs around the internets: Shakespeare's Hamlet adapted as IF, by Robin Johnson*. It's pretty solid as a game; the puzzles are almost all (with exception of a Macbeth-related one, which is the most I'll say about it) deductible with a bit of logic, and the parser is - pleasantly - intelligent. The interweaving of actual events in Shakespeare's play(s) with the puzzles is very neat, as well. The only complaint I have is that as a story, it was mediocre: the only highlight was recognising the references to the plays, and anything and everything else seemed to exist for the sole purpose of holding the puzzles together. Not that that's entirely a bad thing, but because the gameplay was so solid, the one-dimensionality (does text have dimension?) of the characters and clear unrealisitc absurdity of the world (Bosworth Field is a few steps away from Dunsinane) stood out all the more. It's pretty much obvious "Hamlet" was intended as a sort of pastiche of Shakespeare's work rather than an adaptation, but I still felt that the characters could have had a little more substance to them. Almost every NPC occupies only one room and speaks a limited number of lines in the game; they don't enter, nor leave the room, and barely react to the PCs actions.

Still; an interesting work, and at least good entertainment for a while.



*Note: not the same Robin Johnson as the Robin Johnson who wrote the Alice in Wonderland text game. I might talk about that Alice game some day, actually. It was my very first text-based adventure game, and it took me a good seven years to finish - because of one puzzle that by the Cruelty Scale is very definitely rated "cruel", i.e. "can get stuck by doing something which isn't obviously irrevocable (even after the act)."