External Links


huntdark.z5
Requires a Z-Code interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links.
HuntDark-R4.hqx
Mac OS Application (Encoded in Macintosh Bin/Hex format.)
huntdark.z5
original competition entry
Requires a Z-Code interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links.
huntdark-src.tar.Z
(Compressed with the Unix-style .tar.Z "tarball" format. Free unpacking tools are available for most platforms.)
huntdark.sol
solution

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Hunter, in Darkness

by Andrew Plotkin profile

Fantasy, Game
1999

Game Details

Off-Site Reviews

SPAG
Hunter... isn't just an in-joke, though; the real joke that it plays on the source material is that it turns one of the most tersely described caves possible ("You are in Room 1. Passages lead to Room 2 and Room 3") into one of the best-described settings imaginable. Not only is the cave vividly rendered, but the PC's experience of it is thoroughly, and harrowingly, done; no "cave crawl" in IF has ever taken such a toll on the PC over the course of the game. As in the source material, you're hunting a Wumpus, but here the player suffers at least as much as the Wumpus over the course of the game, and the cave is just as much an enemy as the Wumpus itself; finding a safe way down a pit and surviving a tight crawl are some of the problems at hand. It's worth noting that the caves of the classic cave crawls were largely innocuous; the danger in Colossal Cave, Zork, and others came largely from sentient enemies scattered around the landscape, not from the geography itself. Here, surviving the cave is most of the challenge.
-- Duncan Stevens
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>VERBOSE -- Paul O'Brian's Interactive Fiction Page

This is a game that clearly took great care with its design, extending the illusion of freedom a long way while maintaining a fairly specific structure. Also, several rooms have initial descriptions which describe the experience of arriving in the room, and the features that are most salient at first. Once this description has been displayed, further looks at the room will stabilize into a more settled description, one which takes details into account and bears reading multiple times. Attention to detail like this just permeates the game, and makes it one of the most engrossing competition entries I've ever had the good fortune to play.
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Page Update History

v.6: 12-May-2013 09:39 - Paul O'Brian (Current Version) - Edit Page - Normal View
Changed external review links
v.5: 23-May-2020 22:07 - Zape
Changed download links
  v.4: 12-May-2013 09:39 - Edward Lacey
Changed external review links, cross-references
v.3: 07-Nov-2010 01:20 - Zarf
Changed author
v.2: 02-May-2008 12:47 - Paul O'Brian
Changed external review links
v.1: 16-Oct-2007 01:49 - IFDB
Created page