By the AcornGamez News Desk
Mirror of Khoronz is a text adventure originally designed for the
BBC Micro, but more recently expanded and revamped, with a
graphical interface, for RISC OS. It is available to download
for free from http://www.boulsworth.co.uk/intfict/ where there is
also more information about its background.
In this short article I will be giving some of my first impressions
of the game, running on a Risc PC.
The application !Mirror comes in its own self-contained directory,
accompanied by an HTML file "Instructions". Installation is simply
a case of dragging it to an appropriate place on your hard disk.
There is no !Help file within the application, which is a pity,
especially as the Instructions file itself is essentially raw text
with HTML used to add a heading and sub-headings.
!Mirror loads onto the iconbar, and gives Info, Help and Quit
options. The Help option doesn't appear to do anything under
RISC OS 4, even with a web browser loaded. The Info option
describes the program simply as "Adventure".
The main game window provides a large scrolling pane for the main
activities of the game. This contains what you would normally expect
to see in a traditional "full screen" adventure. So for example
the prologue, room descriptions, commands you enter and their
results all appear here.
The immediately obvious additions over traditional adventure games,
in addition to the multi-tasking format, are a supplementary pane
to the left of the main window, and a text entry bar underneath it.
Neither can be detached from the main window.
The pane to the left allows you to use the mouse to enter common
commands such as forward, backward, left and right, up and down,
moving via compass directions, looking at the location you're in,
and listing your inventory.
These commands are entered, with immediate effect, exactly as if
you'd typed them into the text entry bar. The directional ones are
particularly useful if you want to explore quickly without reading
the location descriptions fully; the valid exits are highlighted,
including a red colour to show which way you are currently facing.
The left hand pane also provides an indicator to show whether your
light source (if any) is currently lit, along with options to
repeat the last command, a toggle for whether you want to see the
full descriptions for locations you've already visited, and a save
button.
One advantage to the multi-tasking format is that, as you leave
one location, the description does not disappear, just gets added
to the scrollback in the main window. This allows you easily to check
where you've just been - and what you did there - without retracing
your steps. Clicking Menu over the main window allows you to save
this history as a text file.
The main window makes some use of colour for distinguishing
different sorts of text; blue for the names of objects and some of
the extraneous messages, red for events happening around you or
to you, and black for everything else. Unlike the attached panes,
everything in the main window is displayed in the System font. The
text uses block capitals for emphasis sometimes, it might have been
better to take advantage of the desktop format to use bold, italics
or a different colour instead.
There don't appear to be pictures associated with any of the
locations. Whilst this may partly explain Acornsoft's reluctance
to publish the original version of Mirror of Khoronz, it is no great
loss. Early adventure games that trumpeted their use of graphics
(like The Hobbit) mostly provided amusement and frustration by their
slow redraw times. The more sophisticated graphics
on some later disk-based adventure games would require a
professional artist to equal them. It's clear from the instructions that
Mirror of Khoronz is aimed at an audience that will find the text more
evocative than a few graphics.
The game does feature some graphics, because certain objects,
when examined, pop up a graphic over the main window to show what
they look like. This adds a certain amount of interest, whilst
not overwhelming the gameplay by being too frequent. The one
example that I encountered (a bit of decaying parchment) didn't
seem to display correctly in a 256 colour mode, but was fine
otherwise.
That's a look at the mechanics of the implementation and the few
minor niggles that I found. But what about the game
itself? It is extremely detailed and carefully created.
It's described as having around three hundred locations and around
one hundred objects, and very few of the locations that I visited
seemed repetitive or without some purpose.
There is a very distinctive atmosphere created by the locations, even
though the largely deserted landscape of caves, forests and hills does
seem reminiscent of other software from the same genre. An element
of mystery is added by little touches subtly inserted into this
partly familiar setting... the quiet landscape seems to have been
wandered by Oxford undergraduates, amongst others, and other hints
are given that there is a wider story behind and beyond the immediate
events.
The amount of work that has gone into the game, over several decades,
is apparent in the quality of the text, which of course is all
important in a game like this. In several thousand words of
descriptions and events, I didn't spot a single typing, spelling
or grammatical error, nor even any of the minor glitches between
singular and plural that affect objects in some other adventure
games. (I did spot a typo in the instructions!)
The parser is also noticeably more sophisticated than those
I've seen in earlier adventure games, even though it's still
occasionally difficult to get the computer to understand
what the player thinks should be an obvious and logical course
of action. But perhaps this happens in all text adventures...
One unusual feature of the game is that it supports a primitive
form of multiplayer mode. This is only a "hotseat" form of play,
because each different "player" has to log in at the same keyboard;
once each player is created, you can swap between them using the
function keys. There is no networking option for multiplayer play, but
there are interesting facilities like the ability for one player to
follow another, as well as hand over objects.
Although I've completed much less than a tenth of the game, I did
get an impression that some of the puzzles and challenges, like
some of the locations, were similar to other games. After all, there
are only so many problems you can encounter in this sort of setting.
But even those situations that seemed very familiar, did have a
welcome difference in approach and presentation.
The instructions mention that for some people, "text adventures
might be their idea of what a computer game should be". Sadly
I'm not one of those people, so Mirror of Khoronz is not the perfect
game for me. That's why this article really is only "first
impressions", not a proper review.
But given the depth of the game, its size, and the obvious care
that has gone into it, it may well be the perfect game for anyone
who does enjoy, or used to enjoy, text adventures... or perhaps
someone who hasn't tried one since the very early era. If you might
fit into one of those categories, download it, give it a try, and let us
know what you think!
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Many thanks to an anonomys reader for writing article on Mirror of Khoronz.
