Infocom Spellbreaker

This is the third part of the Enchanter trilogy, following on from Sorcerer.

You are in the Council Chamber of the ancient Guild Hall at Borphee. To the south is the entry of the Guild Hall. There is a meeting of the guildmasters going on. You are standing among a group of about ten sorcerers, each the master of an Enchanters Guild chapter somewhere in the land.

I have so far found 98 locations in Spellbreaker.

It's quite a hard game even to get started in. At first you are restricted to one room. Soon you can get to two others (although visiting the third one traps you there for a few turns), but getting anywhere beyond these three places is non-trivial.

Once you work out how to navigate your way around the different "areas" of Spellbreaker, though, you discover that it is actually a very linearly-prescribed game, with little opportunity for the player to wander around an ever-increasing map, and choose where to go when, as with most other text adventures (and, indeed, the rest of Zork itself).

The mechanism for navigating is quite a neat variation on standard text adventure movement, but I think it would have been a lot better if the designers had allowed more freedom in terms of which places you can choose (or need) to visit when. As noted above, the sequence is very prescribed.

On the other hand, this method of navigating does avoid the tedious trudging around from one part of the map to another, as is common in many text adventures, and indeed in the main Zork series, for example. It rather reminds me of a game whose name I currently forget but in which you could walk around as usual, but also use a special "teleport" command to get to (almost) any location provided you had previously visited it by the normal means.

Aside regarding room names.

Rather than the 400 points of Enchanter and Sorcerer, Spellbreaker has a maximum of 600 points (so, why didn't Sorcerer have 500?), and with the first 15 points you are a Charlatan; this is already familiar. You still return to graduating your way through different levels of "Enchanter" however, which feels wrong considering your previous accomplishments.

265 points make you an Expert Enchanter (which, strangely, is what you would be in the original Enchanter story with anything in the range 250 - 299 points).
Once you get to 315 points you become a Novice Sorcerer, which is a decent step up from any sort of Enchanter.
365 points are enough to be a Sorcerer.

You start out with the following spells in your book:

* The blorple spell isn't actually in your spell book right at the start, but it automatically gets inserted before you can really do much, so I've included it in this list.

Later on you can find the following spells around the place (mostly on scrolls of one type or another):

Spells marked with an asterisk * in the list above are too long, complicated and powerful to be transcribed into the spell book using the gnusto spell, therefore they can only be used once.

Spellbreaker makes extensive use of "featureless white cubes" which it is a very good idea to find some way of labelling early on in the game.

They are the primary means of navigation between different areas of the Spellbreaker world, and you get 25 points for picking up each one (which, given how many of them there are, contributes significantly to the ultimate score of 600). Why you get points for picking up items which are so essential to making progress in the game, I'm not sure - you want to pick them up anyway, even without getting any points for them, and it's not as though you need to see that you got points, so you know the object must be something significant; that's just obvious after you got the first one.

I have so far found the following 10 cubes:

Here you can easily see some of the forced linearity of the game:

So, there are three branches from the Ogre's Lair, but two of them end up at the Plain, leading to the Dark Room, and the other one leads to the Roc's Nest, from which it's not yet clear to me what you can, or need to, do from the String Room.

I've found the following objects other than scrolls and cubes:

Points might be for finding the thing, picking it up, or doing something with it. I haven't yet come across an object (anywhere) which you get points for dropping or throwing away.

Spellbreaker is a very frustrating game because there are many different "areas" (a few interconnected locations, but no opportunity to go very far) where you clearly have to achieve something, and it often turns out later that you needed a specific object, a specific spell, or to have been somewhere else already, before you can achieve the thing you need to do, and in the meantime no amount of thinking about the puzzle or trying different things will either work, or give you a clue about what you ought to be doing instead.

The game is also excessively linear - you can only get to one location once you have been to another one, and many locations have only one thing to do (or, usually, get) in them, so there's no point in returning to them (if it's even possible) once you have done or obtained that thing. For example, without giving too much away, I think it's almost certain that you will encounter the following locations in the following order: Belwit Square - Packed Earth - Soft Room - Packed Earth - Water Room - Hall of Stone - Changing Room - Temple - Air Room. This is not a game to "wander around and discover things, find puzzles, and work out what solves which puzzle" in anything other than the prescribed order.

This is very much a game where you need A in order to get to B, where you find C, which enables you to go to D, where you find E, which you can take back to B and do something new which gives you F, which… etc.

There are no problems (that I've come across) with food or drink in Spellbreaker (unlike its two predecessors), although you do still get tired from time to time and need to sleep (which appears to be entirely safe in all but the obviously silly locations).

I have definitely needed to resort to Invisiclues in dealing with this game.

Excessive fussiness

Be very careful to type "ne" or "northeast" and not "north-east" (etc.) There is one area of the game in particular where using the hyphen can make things very confusing (and misleading).

If you happen to come across a large opal embedded somewhere (you have to be very quick to spot it being mentioned; if you come back to the same place later, and the opal is still there, you won't get told this) and want to try to get it out, you have to use precisely the right verb to achieve this. Apparent equivalents such as "get", "prise" or "remove" don't work.

In another place, you have to get from being on top of one thing to being on top of another thing just next to it. Getting down from the first and getting up onto the second doesn't work. Jumping from one to the other does work, as does simply getting onto the second thing without bothering to get off the first one first. Bah.

There are several points in the game where you may well have the right idea about how to solve a puzzle or deal with a situation, but the timing is critical - one move too early or too late and the thing you're trying to do just doesn't work (and you might die, as well). This is a good example of it being impossible to solve a game without repeatedly saving and restoring, or dying and reincarnating (if the game supports that). It's not an indication of a well-designed game.

Sorcerer contained a "moldy scroll" which cannot be referred to as "mouldy", and now Spellbreaker contains another mouldy item which you have to refer to as "moldy" if you want to do anything with it. Fortunately you don't need to talk about it much before you're done with it and it disappears.

Spellbreaker contains a "zipper" which has to be referred to in full - you can't just call it a "zip" as most people would.

Gotcha

Once you get the hang of navigating between the different "areas" in Spellbreaker, you'll probably make the mistake sooner or later of going to a location and then immediately trying to go to another one, without moving to a different room first. You'll find that "nothing happens", and it's not because your spells have stopped working, or because the thing you're trying to cast the spell on really does nothing. Just move to another room nearby and try again.

Extreme annoyance

After 584 moves (certainly more than necessary, but that's the way these things go without a walkthrough) and 390 points (so, 65%) I found myself in a situation where I died because of something I did as soon as I had left the Guild Hall / Belwit Square area at the start of the game. I cannot think of any way to undo it, therefore I need to start the whole game from the beginning again and do that thing differently. If you want to know what I got wrong, push this through rot13: "Qba'g sebgm lbhefrys."

The game creators clearly thought of this specific eventuality, because the message you get as you die makes it quite clear what mistake you made some 570 moves previously.

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