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Return to Zork   Manufacturer: Activision In Brief: Lesser entry in the Zork franchise.
Infocom's Zork series must have been popular, since it's a series, but the old Zork text games I played never grabbed me the way other adventure  games have. I'm not a real sword and sorcery type, and while the original text adventure "Adventure" was a lot of fun when I'd never played another game, once you've played Bureaucracy and Trinity and Leather Goddesses of Phobos then attacking elves just seems a little silly. My games-writing friend tells me that the Zork games got funner and harder as the series progressed, I don't even know which ones I've played.
When text adventure games were pushed out by graphic adventure games, the Infocom Zork franchise was over. But Zork, and the old white house that is the first thing you see in the first game, are fondly remembered by old-time gamers, and so Infocom became Activision (or was bought by Activision or whatever happened) and put out a graphic adventure continuation of the series, Return to Zork.
Having played this game years after it came out, it's hard to judge how it looked when new. The graphics all look like they're in EGA mode and when characters talk their lips don't move with the words, but some of the performances are good and it's a chance to have Rayanne from My So-Called Life pull a gun on you.
It's not a bad little game, I suppose, but at times you just wonder what they were thinking, most notably with an old drunk who says "want some rye? 'Course you do" every time you enter his cabin, which means that by the end of the game you've heard him say that several hundred times. But also, a lot of the puzzles are just plain nasty. Even my games-writing friend, who got through Riven without cheating once, got stuck on this one and stopped playing. He's thought about going back to it, but it's just not quite exciting enough to pull him back into it.
Me, I cheated my way through it. Unfortunately I used a walkthrough instead of a hints file (big mistake). The thing is, even after knowing what the solution was I didn't always know why I'd done it. The puzzles don't always make as much sense as they ought to, really.
Some interesting puzzles, some good acting, worth a pat on the back but not a great game. -- Charles Herold -1998
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