Anchorhead

Note: This review is for the original 1998 version. I only found out the other day that the author had created a special anniversary edition, which I now have and intend to play.

I first played this game over twenty years ago, as a messed up teen. A friend told me about this after we discovered that we both had enjoyed some interactive fiction games over the years, and really built up my expectations, letting me know that, although we didn't know each other well, she thought this was the sort of game I would really like. Lovecraft's name was mentioned in the conversation, and yes, that probably got my interest up, since I'd been a fan of his stories since the age of twelve or so, but hadn't yet discovered other of his weird fiction contemporaries or any of the practitioners from more recent times who imitate his work with varying degrees of success.

Well, she was right. I played this game through one night in, I think, '98 or early '99. It got pretty intense by the end and I was immersed in a game the way I don't think I'd been since I was really young. While I'm not that experienced of a player, and can't go out on a limb and claim that this is the best game out there, it's the one I have the best memories of playing. I was too young to get into Zork et al in the '80s, and my poor Apple II E with comparatively primitive text to speech capability couldn't handle much. I believe even the Apple II version of Colossal Cave or whatever that one's called had a nasty habit of crashing into the monitor if you made a typographical error, and Eamon, while really fun, was a bit flaky.

Anchorhead is a cursed town. Not in the conventional sense of a curse, but in the sense that it's got a sort of old, malevolent character to it. The author conveys this really well with the text, and it's easy to get a haunted feeling that begins pretty early on in your play and only grows as you continue. There are things that will instantly remind you of Lovecraft stories, if you have read him, particularly "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" and "Shadow over Innsmouth" -- but there are other reminiscences as well. A fun thing to do, if you are weird like me, is to find as many of the various ways your character can die horribly as you can. There are a lot of them, and of course you should save often.

That said, and maybe it's in part because of my familiarity with this kind of storytelling, I didn't find the game particularly difficult as such. Oh, there were moments, but I found all the puzzles to be extremely logical and most were easy to guess, except for one thing near the beginning which had me stuck for a while -- the solution maybe should have been obvious to some but simply wasn't for me at the time. There are unsettling character interactions aplenty, and changes that occur in the environment and situation over the several-days-long period during which the story takes place, which are interesting and troubling in equal measure. There are a few time-dependent things near the end and those things can be maddening, but again, if you save often, you should be able to quickly handle them once you figure out what you need to do.

I've noticed this is a really popular game, with many reviews on the site already, so I don't expect mine to make much difference. I'll just say that I think the praise for this one seems justified, although I can't really call myself a dedicated IF-player and so don't quite know what other games to compare it to. Not only is the gameplay itself very smooth, but the writing is great! Extremely atmospheric and chilly, which is what you want from a game like this, but you also get glimpses into the sort of melancholy thoughts of the character you are playing, and I think this makes some of us more invested in trying to beat this thing so that she comes away unscathed. Of course, being a game inspired by an author who wasn't too inclined to give most of his protagonists a happy ending, there is a certain amount of troubling ambiguity even if you succeed, and that's also as it should be.

Really looking forward to playing the 2018 edition soon and experiencing the Anchorhead nightmare all over again.

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