Spellbreaker
1985 Infocom
Designed by Dave Lebling
Relevance:
*) the octagonal rooms are unexplained, and so feel Rubiky
*) the plain (with living rocks) don't fit into the game world
*) the fake cubes puzzle is strained; the detect-three-spells alarm is very
contrived
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Reasonability:
*) resurrection: you don't know that you will be "frozen" in the end game, nor
for how long, so you have to go through it once to know what you should be
doing, and exactly when
*) dead end: you can girgol the rock avalanche and go up, but if you don't yet
have caskly you can't finish
*) going down to mid-air from the Packed Earth cube is silly, certain death
*) dead end: the grouper will swallow something, but you don't even know it
will be there, let alone that it will quickly swallow the bottle or cube
*) dead end: going south from the water room ruins your spellbook, even though
you had no problems going north
*) dead end: cutting the weed, which you can see before you even know what you
want it for; you also don't know why it wouldn't be effective simply cut
*) dead end: if the merchant closes for any reason, you can never get a rug
-- it's straightforward enough to get right
*) resurrection: knowing where to leave the light source in the grue caves seems
unreasonable
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Difficulty:
*) operating the gold cube box -- a tough deduction
*) understanding what has to be done off the Sand Room cube -- good challenge
*) going up from the oubliette -- a good challenge
*) octagonal rooms, figuring out how to use the compass -- could be tough or
obvious, a good a-ha kind of puzzle
*) picking the real cube from the fakes
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Comments:
Lots of substantial puzzles.