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All
eight stories take place in the mixed up town of Punster
where you are to solve puzzles involving spoonerisms,
homonyms and other general verbal trickery. For example,
in the Shopping Bizarre scenario the player comes
across a freezer containing the number 22 frozen onto
the number 7, one soon realises that this is of course
the formula for Pythagoras's theorem, and inputting
the word PIE transforms the numbers into a fruit pie!
The exact reason for doing this remains a mystery to
me and is one I shall probably not bother to solve.
The
kind of puzzles found in Nord are neither clever
nor very Infocom. Some are so simple that one wonders
if it was worth wasting the memory on them.
In
the Play Jacks scenario you find and take an
object called a Jack of all Traits, this, as the name
suggests, is a gizmo which can perform many functions.
One such function is to clear the stark whiteness of
a particular location simply by having the player type
in the name Jack Frost. There is very little
challenge here, there is no feeling of pride at having
cracked the problem and certainly no incentive instilled
to carry on to the next location or scenario and see
what mental challenges there are there. Most of the
puzzles are either very easy or incredibly obscure,
and all are silly. They left me with a feeling of 'why?'.
Mapping
is made obsolete by the presence at the top of the screen
of all the locations accessible from the current one;
you simply type in the name to get there. There is an
extensive help system available which may be accessed
at any time during play and contains clues on every
problem you will come across. Handy perhaps, but once
boredom crept (which didn't lake long), I found myself
using these clues all the time just to get through the
game as quickly and with as little effort as possible.
I
could quite happily winge on about Mousse, Box
Boy and Worst Brat, but there seems little
point. Suffice to say that the usual professional implementation,
the parser, the size of the game and the general user-friendliness
that Infocom include in their adventures are all present,
but where is the adventure? Nord is not funny,
not clever, not inspirational and very easy to switch
off. What are they playing at? Examine the Plundered
Hearts review amidst these pages to regain any faith
lost in Infocom.
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