Eye on iOS: Volume 2
iColossal Cave Adventure and ADVENT
You may not be familiar with the name Colossal Cave, but you’ve been enjoying its legacy in virtually every adventure game you’ve ever played. That’s because Colossal Cave Adventure, created in 1976, was the very first “adventure game” from which the genre was subsequently named. If you haven’t played it (and let’s be honest, how many of us have?), now’s your chance thanks to iColossal Cave Adventure and ADVENT, two apps that bring this classic text adventure to the iPhone / iPod Touch.
Originated by spelunking enthusiast Will Crowther, the game injects fantasy elements like hidden treasure, magic words, and evil dwarfs into the real-life geography of the Mammoth Caves in Kentucky. The goal of the game is to explore the cave system and rack up points while avoiding death and dead-end situations. Like an old oral legend passed down from storyteller to storyteller, Colossal Cave has had many iterations in the 35 years since its inception, with versions differentiated by the total number of points that can be scored.
iColossal Cave is a 430-point version, ported to iPhone / iPod Touch by Conexion Games. It currently sells for $1.99 and includes both the original English and a Spanish translation. This app tells the story via white text on a black background, with a command line and keyboard at the bottom of the screen. The text is fairly small and you can’t zoom in, which may be a problem for some players. To play, you type in two-word commands such as “take lamp” or “climb tree.” The device’s built-in spell check helps you avoid typos, and the parser only pays attention to a word’s first five characters, which allows for some cutting of corners. As you would expect, though, feeding the parser two-word commands can be cumbersome and frustrating, especially when the game leads you in circles. (“Kill dwarf.” With what? “Axe.” What do you want to do with the axe?) Navigation can be simplified by typing just the first letter of a cardinal direction, but the app doesn’t recognize certain shorthand such as “take all” to pick up all loose items in a room.
If the game senses that you’re floundering with an interaction, it will offer a hint in exchange for points. Of course, there are plenty of walkthroughs online, so instead you could switch back and forth between the app and your browser without quitting the game. It’s possible to save your game, but this also comes at the expense of points; upon restarting, you can type “resume” to load it. But there’s only one save slot and plenty of dead-end situations, so you can never be sure if you’re saving over a good game with a bad one.
Ported by Pi-Soft Consulting, ADVENT is a 1000-point version that’s free in the App Store. The interface is easier on the eyes, with larger text that’s dark on a light background, but since spell check is not enabled and ADVENT requires you to type full words, I had more trouble with typos in this version. The app does provide a convenient list of directions and common verbs that you can select from, however. It also recognizes longer commands, so you can type something like, “take apple and eat it” and the game will follow both steps.
Although ADVENT’s text is more descriptive and there are more treasures to collect and puzzles to solve, in many situations the required commands are more obtuse. For example, in iColossal Cave, upon encountering a locked grate blocking the cave opening, you can “unlock grate” and, on your next turn, enter the cave. In ADVENT, after unlocking the grate all further attempts to enter (“go hole,” “enter cave,” “down,” etc.) return generic “You can’t do that” messages. It took me several minutes to realize the game required the extra step of opening the grate after unlocking it. Likewise, commands that work in the other game, such as “go downstream” to reach a riverbed that has been described in the text as being downstream, don’t work in ADVENT. I don’t know whether these issues are related to the different game versions or to choices made during the porting process, but they make ADVENT the more frustrating of the two. Like in iColossal Cave, the game sometimes offers up hints, but annoyingly the “save” and “save game” commands don’t work. In some situations the game saves automatically, with a “resume” button option available upon the next launch, but I couldn’t figure out why it sometimes saved and sometimes didn’t.
Both apps have pros and cons, so the decision to spend two bucks on iColossal Cave comes down to what you’re looking for. If you just want to sample the nostalgia and history of the world’s first text adventure, ADVENT will probably give you what you’re looking for. If you actually want to play and complete the game without feeling compelled to smash your iPhone against the wall, iColossal Cave might provide a more forgiving experience. (Maybe. It is a 35-year-old text adventure, after all!) Either way, you’ll finally know the meaning of the word “xyzzy.”
The Secret of Grisly Manor
Developer Fire Maple Games boasts that over 70,000 copies of The Secret of Grisly Manor have been sold. That’s a pretty big number for the App Store, let alone for an adventure game. So what is it about Grisly Manor that appeals to so many? It’s certainly an addictive little puzzle game, one you won’t want to put down. Unfortunately you won’t be addicted for long, as it’s also extremely short.
In this first-person game, you assume the role of an eccentric inventor’s grandchild. Grandpa has recently gone missing, and in a letter he invites you to visit his house, where he has left clues revealing his whereabouts. It sounds like a scary set-up, but don’t let the title fool you; there’s nothing grisly about Grisly Manor. On the contrary, the house is modern and impeccably neat, depicted with sleek, nicely rendered graphics. The looping background music that accompanies your discoveries is more kooky than spooky—a soundtrack you’d expect during an animated Addams Family episode as opposed to a horror movie.
Most interactions are done with a simple tap, with one or two puzzles requiring you to drag items. The interface consists of an inventory bag in the lower left corner and a Menu button in the lower right. Using inventory items is as easy as tapping the bag to open the inventory, tapping the item you want, and tapping the area where you want to use it. The menu’s only options are volume controls, as the game saves automatically when you quit. The playable character’s occasional observations appear as text at the top of the screen, but there is no character interaction or conversation, only solitary puzzle solving.
Grisly Manor has been likened to Myst in reviews, but the games have little in common. In Grisly Manor, you explore the empty house and mess around with Grandpa’s silly gadgets to work your way through a chain of events that ultimately leads to his hiding place. The puzzles, while unique, are extremely basic and (unlike in Myst) usually have single step solutions. For example, in one room you acquire a peculiar-shaped object that fits into a hole elsewhere in the house. Once you’ve placed this in the hole, a secret compartment opens to reveal a knob. This can be used on a drawer in another room, and opening the drawer reveals a key, and the key can be used to unlock a door… and so on. Grisly Manor does have a couple of touch-specific puzzles (i.e. rotate tiles to complete a design; rotate knobs to the marked positions) and a few others that require a tiny bit more thought, but the vast majority of its gameplay is “use A on B to reveal C which can be used on D.”
The house has about ten rooms, each with two or three small puzzles to solve, and the game will be completed in less than an hour for most players. An entertaining hour, sure, but it feels more like a prologue or demo than a full game, especially in light of the non sequitur ending that implies it’s just getting started (and the developer has confirmed plans to work on a sequel). At the moment The Secret of Grisly Manor costs $0.99, and for that price it is worth checking out.
And that’s a wrap on our (mostly) oldies-but-goodies edition of Eye on iPhone! Join us next time for… well… more oldies-but-goodies, as well as some of the games we said we’d be covering next time, last time.
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