Zork Grand Inquisitor

I'm somewhat ashamed to admit this, but Grand Inquisitor is the very first Zork game I ever played. Fortunately, it's never too late to pick up a new habit so I can assure you, it definitely won't be the last.

Story

These are very sad times in the realm of Zork. The Magic Inquisition has woven its dark web tightly around the villages and the people living in them and has all but succeeded in driving magic out of the kingdom altogether. Everybody who's found to be practising, talking or even remotely thinking about magic is immediately apprehended and totemized, which is frankly a very bad thing. (And I don't mean the "apprehended" part.) The only remnants of magic and magical creatures are constantly being seeked out and captured so the only safe place left is the highly magical Underground which, so far, has not been tempered with.

We play the role of AFGNCAAP (Ageless Faceless Gender-Neutral Culturally-Ambiguous Adventurer Person) and naturally, our task is to bring magic back to the kingdom by collecting and uniting the three most important magical artefacts, which represent the power of the three different kinds of magic. Our only help - and a feeble one at that - is the former Dungeon Master: Dalboz, playing the role of the smartass sidekick in the form of a lamp. (But a very cute one... With a red handle.)

Opinion

Well, well, well. Just what exactly have I been missing here? According to my hastily conducted research, Grand Inquisitor is the 13^th game in the Zork series, although the first 10 were all text adventures. Nevertheless, it looks like I have quite a bit of catching up to do.

To be perfectly honest, I never really liked first-person adventure games (or at least, not even half as much as I do third-person ones) and Grand Inquisitor is one such game. However, this one caught me by surprise. I was only about halfway through the install process but I was already laughing my pants off. This is in no way typical for an installer program.

The point I'm trying to make - maybe a bit clumsily - is that Zork GI had me won even before I started up the game itself. The fact that it was first-person didn't make a whole lot of difference after that.

It did and does make a big difference in the graphics, though. Zork GI introduced a graphical engine called Z-Vision, which allows the player to pan through his or her surroundings in a complete 360 degree circle, in effect, letting the player turn around while standing still in one place. This technique is quite well-known today (and often referred to as bubble-view) but this was one of the first games to use it effectively enough for it to become popular.

As you can see on the screenshots, the graphics are quite beautiful. The pictures may seem a little distorted at the edges but that is the price we have to pay for Z-Vision. The graphics in the centre of the screen always appear crispier than at the edges. (Except for still screens, of course, where no panning is possible.)

I should also mention that in addition to Z-Vision, Zork GI also uses FMV (Full Motion Video) clips. These movie sequences are not extremely well rendered, they are easily surpassed by even the earlier Tex Murphy games (like Under a Killing Moon for example). Nevertheless, the acting is enjoyable and the rendered animations are usually nicely done so these little movie clips blend in well with the quirky atmosphere of the game.

Another important factor that contributes largely to the aforementioned atmosphere is the wonderful music and the brilliant sound effects. Zork GI uses another piece of advanced technology in that department: QSound Virtual Audio, or 3D sound for short. What this does, basically, is it creates the illusion of you being surrounded by the environment projected before you by the game, so when you hear somebody shouting at you from the left, you'll hear his voice coming from the left speaker. And if you move away from the scene, his shouting becomes fainter and fainter. (This technique has also gotten fairly common since the release of this game.)

But despite the great graphics, music and sound effects, no game could ever be entertaining (and successful) without a good story and decent puzzles. And this is where Zork GI shines best. The story itself is very simple - very classic, when it comes to adventure gaming - but the whole universe built around it is just fantastic. The world is full of goofy characters: monsters, talking trees, whistling skeletons and I could go on and on. There's no end to the hilarious gags and jokes that are thrown at the player virtually every second of the game. (My personal favorite was Dalboz and his little warnings: "Your sword is blowing glue. Wait... let me try that again. Your sword is glowing blue." Imagine that in the middle of a 'crisis'.)

The only thing I could come up with, that my little third-person adventurer heart missed in this game, is the conversation. People - come to think of it, they were mostly animals and occasionally objects - talk to you all the time, but you can't answer back. There are no different replies to choose from, in fact, there's no reply whatsoever. Whenever one is needed, people simply pretend that you answered and leave it at that. At first I found this a little hard to get used to but after a couple of hours of playing it just ceased to bother me any more. Maybe it was Dalboz's constant nagging and narrating or maybe just less and less characters expected a reply, but the lack of dialogues didn't slight the game at all.

So to sum it all up, Zork Grand Inquisitor is a fantastic game with a great atmosphere, hilarious characters and story, very clever but not at all impossible puzzles wrapped in a nice blanket of technology, which provides you with a bit of visual candy while you laugh. No true adventurer can afford to miss it.