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Companions of Xanth

Of course, one annoying puzzle does not make a game bad, but if you've been feeling generally unenthused about a game to begin with then one really aggravating puzzle can just make you say "screw it."

In Xanth (designed by a fellow named Michale Lindner), you are some computer geek who is tricked into entering an adventure game, not realizing the ultimate stakes, and competing with some other computer geek for a prize of some sort. You and your companion, a magical creature there to guide you, must go through a series of trials to get to your ultimate goal.

The first indication that this game isn't sticking to Legend's general history of puzzles that are ingenious and logical is the choice of a companion. You get to choose one of four mystical creatures to guide you on your quest. Three of these companions are lousy at their jobs and will immediately get you killed. But this isn't a puzzle: The only way to find the good companion is by trial and error.

Most of Legend's games start with very easy puzzle and work their way up to quite difficult ones, and I've never had to cheat at any Legend game until I was at least half way through, but with Xanth I was downloading a UHS hint file when I hit the first real puzzle (the bucket puzzle). This wasn't a terrible puzzle, really, and I'm not saying that a clever game player (cleverer than me, anyway) couldn't solve it, but it didn't have the elegance I've come to expect from Legend.

And yet, this game promises you ingenuity and elegance. It is claiming to be similar in gameplay to the brilliant Infocom text game Nord and Bert, a game in which all the puzzles were based on wordplay. But while there is the occasional pun puzzle tossed in, this is fundamentally a brawn over brains game, where there is more of searching for useful items and mapping mazes (at least in this interface you can actually see a map of where you've been in the maze, which simplifies the process enormously) than of being clever.

So I wasn't really too thrilled with this game anyway. The puzzles weren't that great, and while it purports to be from a book by Piers Anthony, there isn't really any sense of plot or story to speak of. But with an occasional hint I was muddling through until the troll gave me his puzzles.

For no good reason, except spite, this troll demands that you solve three sliding block puzzles. I've played this sort before: a bunch of different sized plastic squares in a frame that you move around (in the ones I've played the goal is to slide a block out of a slit). These seemed harder than the ones I'd played before; I moved those damn tiles all over the place but could never get the tile I wanted where I wanted. So I looked at my UHS file and my walkthrough and they both said, "there's no way around these and I don't want to get into a solve for one of them, so just see if you can solve one of the three and then you can proceed with the game."

After about 45 minutes I had had it. A game would have to be pretty damn interesting for me to be willing to go through this crap, and this game isn't worth going through much crap at all. So I said to hell with it and wrote this review.

Then a friend of mine came over who's good at puzzles and he agreed to solve it for me. He said it was an unusually hard version of the sliding block puzzle but he made it through in about a half hour and I got to finish the game.

It turned out I was very near the end, and all the puzzles from this point on where insanely easy. Well, there was one more difficult puzzle, but I solved it by accident, and had to read the hint file to find out how it was supposed to be solved.

And then it all ends with a last bit that can't even be given the name of puzzle. There is absolutely no sense of ending at all, it just ends suddenly and lamely. So I'll end this review the same way.

-- Charles Herold -1999