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 69 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.

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).

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 scrolls bearing spells around the place:

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.

I've found the following objects other than scrolls:

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.

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).

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.

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.

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