The Lurking Horror

One of Infocom’s most overrated titles, The Lurking Horror is essentially the company’s only foray into the horror genre. Unfortunately, it feels more like a Lebling Zorkian dungeon crawl than an atmospheric mystery. While there are some creepy parts to this college campus caper, it is mostly a disjointed puzzlefest with a smattering of Cthulhu mythos.

Admittedly, I played both Theatre and Anchorhead first, which had the advantage of better development systems. With that in mind, I'll give the simple NPCs here a pass. But the things that annoy me the most about this game have nothing to do with technical restrictions. There's a hunger daemon, which is the slider puzzle of text adventures. There are several illogical walking dead situations. And while I can deal with inventory restrictions (oh how I miss thee, bottomless trenchcoat), even here I felt like I could reasonably carry more than the player character.

Ultimately I would have forgiven all this if I had been immersed in a scary story. But I found the writing mediocre and the ending abrupt and unsatisfying.

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