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Gateway   Released: 1992 Manufacturer: Legend In Brief: Smart sci-fi with some clever puzzles.
The full title is "Frederik Pohl's Gateway: The Animated Interstellar Adventure", although it's not actually animated, so let's just call it Gateway. You're an astronaut-prospector, out to make your fortune (even though you save the world in this game, I think success is really determined by how much money you have at the end).
This is very much classic science fiction, well thought out and detailed. Earth is searching for remnants of an advanced civilization's technology, and prospectors like you risk life and limb to find that big lode of hardware that's gonna make you rich. Along the way you read the news and meet some robots, and everything seems about as likely as sci-fi ever does. It is a very believable future. This is about as intelligent as adventure games get.
Like Legend's Eric the Unready, "Gateway" starts with overly easy puzzles and then skips to some very difficult ones, and I did cheat a number of times. But this is one of those games where, for the most part, once you hear the solution you think, "I should have got that on my own." I think I'm just too damn lazy. For me to be better at solving these things I don't think I need to be smarter: I just need a higher frustration tolerance. I have to tell myself, it's okay to spend more than 10 minutes trying to solve a puzzle before you cheat." Anyway, I did solve a few of the more difficult ones.
This is one of Legend's text-game-with-pictures, so you don't have the slick graphics of later adventure games, but with a game this clever it doesn't matter a bit. -- Charles Herold -1999
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