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Discworld

Now that I've got that off my chest, let's talk about what happens in Discworld once you've got past all those stupid little animations.

Discworld is a very funny game in which a sorcerer attempt to do a whole bunch of stuff involving a dragon and some secret society and whatnot. The sorcerer is voiced by Eric Idle, of Monty Python fame, and he's great. The dialogue is hysterically funny, except for the oft-repeated line "did someone get the number of that donkey cart?" which isn't funny the first or the fiftieth time you hear it.

But I am probably never going to finish this game. (That's the nice thing about not being a professional reviewer. If I want to stop and review half a game I can). Because in terms of gameplay "Discworld" is tedious in the extreme.

Discworld is an inventory-based game, which means you find things and pick them up and use them on other things. There are a lot of things in Discworld, and a lot of places you can use them. So many, in fact, that this is less a test of ingenuity than it is a test of memory. You need an amazing memory to play Discworld. Yes, you could write down everything, but there's so much stuff to write down. Not just the inventory: when you are told something you must do to finish the game, it will not be repeated. Ever. I had to use a hint file just to keep track of what my goals were at any particular point in the game.

But even with my UHS cheat, this game is so convoluted and tedious that it boggles the mind. Puzzles are all an interlocking mass of puzzles. To do this you need that, to get that you have to do this, after doing this it still won't work until you do the other thing. And all the things you need are far apart. You have to travel all over, you have to travel through time. Over and over and over again.

I also kept getting stuck because I couldn't find places on the map that the UHS file said I needed to go to. They just weren't there. I think a lot of places don't appear until later in the game, but I was rarely clear on why they suddenly appeared when they did.

And just as a little extra annoyance, just for one more unnecessary aggravation, the inventory system sucks. You carry all your belongings in a walking suitcase. When you go someplace, the suitcase follows you. Sometimes it doesn't feel like following you, for some reason, and you have to shift around a bit for it to turn up. And it's very hard to get it to open while it's moving, so you have to wait for it to stop. A walking suitcase is cute, but not worth this aggravation.

I would really like to finish this game, because it is so very, very funny -- as funny as Sam & Max Hit the Road. But every time I start up the game and see what I have to do next I think, I am just not up to this now. I just cannot go through these dozens of steps to get through one complete puzzle and then keep doing that over and over. I just can't.

What Discworld needs is a way to just skip through all the stupid puzzles and listen to the great dialogue. Perhaps I would be better off reading one of Terry Pratchett's Discworld books. If only I could get Eric Idle to read one to me.

-- Charles Herold -1999