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Showing All | Show by Page - caligula jones, March 17, 2024
- ENyman78 (Gold Beach, OR), October 29, 2023
- Kastel, May 23, 2023
3 of
3 people found the following review helpful:
He never would have made it past the rats. He hates rats. , March 17, 2023Playing a tomb raider is a perfect setting for a text adventure, and there’s so many things about this game that Infocom got right. Unfortunately, I just didn’t have a lot of fun while playing.
You wake up in a abandoned encampment off the Nile River; during your expedition to uncover a pyramid and hopefully gain the fortune and glory you’ve always deserved, your paid Islamic crew has left you for dead. Why were you abandoned? Because — as the feelies and the introduction to Infidel so clearly state — you’re a racist, narcissistic jerk. Thankfully, your character’s personality doesn’t come out a lot as the game progresses, but it’s still a disconcerting character to play in the second person.
The game begins as you search for supplies your crew didn’t take off with before taking on the entire expedition yourself. Finding the pyramid is fairly simple and the rest of the game is essentially recognizing booby traps and gathering treasure. A significant portion of the puzzle-solving involves finding and deciphering ASCII hieroglyphics. While it turns out not to be a terribly complicated process, it’s an uneven design choice.
Some of the puzzles can be solved using basic deduction skills (and satisfyingly so), but if you’re able to read the glyphs the answers are given away. Never mind that it doesn’t make sense for the Egyptians to have written such helpful instructions around the pyramid (and never mind that there would be no booby traps in the first place). But if you’ve solved the language, the puzzles are then a cake walk. This would make sense if the intent was to give the player the option of solving each puzzle the way they found the most fun. But there are a couple of puzzles (including the final one) that definitely cannot be solved by deduction; thus, deciphering the hieroglyphs is required.
There is also a thirst daemon and a finite light source, but thankfully they are very lenient and more present for realism than as a puzzle. There is an inventory restriction as well but it’s also quite reasonable thanks to a knapsack you carry around. Stupidly, the game requires you to take off the sack every single time you need to get something from it, which becomes quite obnoxious after the thirty-fifth time you’ve had to do it.
The writing is average quality. Some room descriptions are quite evocative and you definitely begin to feel like you’ve traveled to the past. But many object descriptions and action responses are terse and lifeless. For example, in one room you find a golden cluster, and when you try to examine it, the game responds with, “There is nothing special about the golden cluster.” Well, sure. But what is a golden cluster? As it turns out, knowing what the game thinks is a cluster is very important to a future puzzle, and only through the process of elimination was I able to figure out what clusters were for.
That being said, compared to most Infocom games Infidel is rather easy and it took me only a couple of days to beat it. I required one hint due to having difficulty conceptualizing what a specific door looked like, but otherwise I found everything else to be pretty straightforward.
My apathy towards the game is in no small part to the character I was playing. There was little joy in helping him towards his goal. Perhaps if he had done some soul-searching as the game progressed, it would have made advancing more exciting. But the ending you’re playing towards is never not obvious and always not motivating (Spoiler - click to show)(I would have much preferred his comeuppance to be a painful life spent without fortune or recognition, rather than death), so the game relies squarely on the puzzles to keep the player going. And the puzzles are only just okay. And so it goes with Infidel.
2 of
2 people found the following review helpful:
Strong theme, yet somewhat unsatisfying, September 30, 2022I remember loving this game when I played it back in the 80s.
The theme is strong - the find-the-pyramid start to the game has lots of flavor and excitement as we establish our character to be a selfish jerk. Once we get into the pyramid there are florid descriptions of paintings and a wonderful sense of place as we explore deeper underground.
I loved Indiana Jones movies so all of the traps that lead to instant death are fun and thematic.
The hieroglyphs ... well, they add to the setting, but they don't make much sense. Why are they there? It's like a D+D dungeon with signs on the walls telling you how to avoid the traps or what to do to kill the dragon and get the gold.
I remember the gripping ending from my youth. It's both satisfying and unsatisfying.
I appreciate how this game broke some of the Infocom conventions of the time but I wouldn't recommend it for a modern gamer.
- Stu Dobbie, July 15, 2022
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
An "important" game that may or may not be for you, March 19, 2022Infidel is a rather humorless game that finds its protagonist exploring a previously undiscovered Egyptian pyramid in search of treasure and fame. It's a perfect setting for that oldest and most thoroughly explored adventure gaming oevure: the treasure hunt. Even by Infocom standards, the setting is quite deadly. This is a game that assumes frequent, unmotivated saving. That was a norm in 1983, and contemporary gamers/readers will be frequently frustrated if they are not willing to adopt the habit.
That is something students and enthusiasts of older texts (in a technical medium, 4 decades feels more like 4 centuries) must do, isn't it? Meet them where they are. Or were.
Mechanically, the "hook" that makes the deathtraps of Infidel unique is the system of hieroglyphs used to provide clues and identify the names--or even, sometimes, the significance--of objects and locations in the pyramid. Over the course of the game, the player's "codebook" will grow as they find and decipher new glyphs. These symbols are displayed as ASCII characters, so be sure your interpreter (if you are using one) has a properly selected fixed-width font (IMPORTANT: as in other games, use of these characters poses an accessibility problem for players who use screen reader applications). While I did like Infidel on a mechanical level, players who either don't or can't enjoy the codebreaking metapuzzle will likely have a less interesting experience.
If that were all, Infidel would be a nice, little game--short for an early Infocom puzzler but diverting enough. That isn't all, though. Persons interested in artistic or literary craft in interactive fiction--especially its history or evolution--will find its critique of the adventure game genre and its gamification of colonial plunder interesting. Reviewing the game's packaging and documentation is essential to understanding this facet of the game.
Infidel's initial critical reception is interesting to consider as well. Several persons have written about it in detail over the years.
My rating is highly qualified. If the codebreaking element sounds appealing, you will likely find this game satisfying mechanically. If the historical or craft elements interest you, Infidel offers a lot to think about. For those interested in neither, Infidel is a bit of a hard sell.
- cgasquid (west of house), February 13, 2022
- Lance Campbell (United States), December 24, 2021
- NorkaBoid (Ohio, USA), November 14, 2021
- heasm66 (Sweden), August 10, 2021
- Perforation, January 14, 2021
- Anders Hellerup Madsen (Copenhagen, Denmark), April 10, 2020
- Mikalye, November 15, 2019
- Vigorish (Bradenton, Florida ), November 15, 2018
- nosferatu, July 28, 2017
- Spike, February 26, 2017
- Christopher Hall (London, Great Britain), October 27, 2016
4 of
4 people found the following review helpful:
Wonderful Infocom puzzlefest in a pyramid with coded language, February 3, 2016I loved Infidel. You play a jerk adventurer who has alienated everyone he knows as he searches for a hidden pyramid. The game has a long intro sequence in your camp before reaching the actual pyramid.
The game is very Indiana-Jonesish, although there are no NPC's. Every few rooms, there is a death trap waiting to destroy you. Hieroglyphics on the wall tell you how to avoid some traps, but they sometimes describe things far away, and you have to puzzle out the meaning of the hieroglyphics yourself.
This game is advanced, but I got much further between hints than I usually do in an Infocom game (although Emily Short mentioned two guess-the-verb problems in her review that I found helpful before I even played the game).
This game has a great flavor and style, similar to Ballyhoo's dark circus theme. I strongly recommend this game.
- Thrax, March 12, 2015
- JAlbertzzz, August 16, 2014
- shornet (Bucharest), March 23, 2014
- Snave, March 21, 2014
- KidRisky (Connecticut, USA), December 20, 2013
- Magic Knight, June 15, 2013
- DJ (Olalla, Washington), May 9, 2013
- Puddin Tame (Queens, NY), October 27, 2012
- kala (Finland), May 27, 2012
- stadtgorilla (Munich, Germany), April 17, 2012
- Jonathan Blask (Milwaukee, WI, USA), April 1, 2012
- Nav (Bristol, UK), November 25, 2011
- André St-Aubin (Laval, Québec), May 31, 2011
- Rotonoto (Albuquerque, New Mexico), May 16, 2011
- Walter Sandsquish, February 2, 2011
- artao (SW Wisconsin), February 2, 2011
- snickerdoddle, January 27, 2011
- Narcisse, November 26, 2010
- Alder (San Francisco), August 15, 2010
- Xervosh (San Jose, Northern California), August 10, 2010
- o0pyromancer0o, April 23, 2010
- Adam Bearden (United States), January 24, 2010
- luxapan, January 3, 2010
- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), December 3, 2009
13 of
14 people found the following review helpful:
Very early Infocom, September 1, 2009Despite the presence of some modern(ish) equipment, Infidel is set in the world of fantasy archaeology, like Indiana Jones or Tomb Raider, in which ancient monuments are storehouses of fantastic treasure waiting to be picked up, and the archaeologist's task is simply to dodge all the antique mechanical traps that lie in the way.
Infidel can be rough going for a player used to gameplay refinements introduced even a few years later. It doesn't understand many common abbreviations -- most painfully, it misses X for examine. The opening phase of the game features both hunger and thirst timers. Guess-the-verb problems make at least two of the puzzles significantly harder. (Spoiler - click to show)(If you're having trouble breaking the lock on the chest in the prologue, or throwing the rope down the north staircase in the pyramid, you're probably on the right track but using the wrong wording.) The knapsack you need to carry around your possessions is especially irritating, since you'll have to wear it and take it off again dozens of times over the course of play. There is also some justice in Andrew Plotkin's spoof Inhumane: Infidel will kill you a lot, and not all of the deaths are well-signaled in advance. You'll need to keep a lot of save files, and examine everything carefully before you interact with it.
To balance this, though, there's quite a lot right with the game as well, especially once you're past the prologue. The meat of most of the puzzles involves deciphering the meaning of hieroglyphics, which instruct the player in how to get past traps. There's a lexicon in the feelies for a few of these symbols, but the rest you'll have to work out as you go along, by comparing the labels on objects or making guesses based on their pictorial quality. (The hieroglyphics are in ASCII; make sure you've set your interpreter to a fixed-spacing font in order to read them properly, because Infidel unlike many later games is not able to set the font automatically.) These puzzles give the game a feeling of thematic coherence lacking from the Zork trilogy; while the effect is not exactly realistic, Infidel at least seems to take place in a self-consistent universe.
Space was at a premium in these very early games, and that shows in Infidel in both good ways and bad. Descriptions are often terse and not every possible object is described. On the other hand, what descriptions exist are sometimes rather evocative, and the constraints make for a fairly compact game with multiple uses for some of the objects.
Infidel is famous for not following gamers' expectations for a game narrative, and opened up some new possibilities in interactive storytelling. (Spoiler - click to show)The game ends in the protagonist's death, a punishment for having been selfish and cruel to his colleagues and workers, and having driven away everyone who could potentially have saved him. This follows naturally from the premise: the feelies and the prologue of the game clearly establish what kind of person the protagonist is. In my opinion the ending works a little less well with the puzzle-solving midgame of Infidel, however; in particular, the player experiences so many meaningless deaths before the game's end as to make it hard to regard the final "winning" death as narratively significant. Later work has gone much, much further in this direction, but it's worth looking back at early efforts.
Note: it is impossible to get past the game's prologue without information from the feelies. (Spoiler - click to show)(Specifically, the dig coordinates for the pyramid.)
- Mike Ciul (Philadelphia), July 24, 2009
- John D, March 14, 2009
- Aaron Mumaw (Appalachia), December 23, 2008
- Linnau (Tel-Aviv, Israel), October 31, 2008
- Nathan (Utah), October 26, 2008
- burtcolk, September 3, 2008
- Genjar (Finland), September 1, 2008
- Nathaniel Kirby (Pennsylvania), July 7, 2008
- TCWT, May 2, 2008
- Hans Möller (Sweden), April 5, 2008
- bolucpap, March 19, 2008
- jfpbookworm (Hamburg, New York), February 28, 2008
- Matt Kimmel (Cambridge, MA), February 20, 2008
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