Work's performance appraisals continue, so more distraction was needed, and I decided to go for an Infocom game, Enchanter. It's magic-based, and pretty fun. I got through it all on a single hint.
I particularly liked the in-game hint system. When you sleep, your dreams give you hints as to what you need to do. Which is helpful, since some of the things are rather unobvious - there's a bunch of solving problems you didn't even know you had.
I got particularly stuck when I found a thing that was clearly supposed to do something, but no idea what it was needed for. This was made trickier by the fact there were some red herrings.
What I forgot is that '80s games, especially text adventures, were sadistic. Despite the game not supporting several solutions that I thought were quite reasonable, that it didn't like, it also allowed me to solve one problem, apparently succesfully, in a way that left the game unfinishable. And once the puzzle was solved, the dream hints didn't cover that puzzle, leaving me without hints at the actual correct solution.
Once I'd read online hints and gone back to the start to replay it successfully, the in-game sleep hint was really obvious. Most frustrating.
Between that and the occasional "guess the verb" there was plenty of frustration, but a fair amount of fun and exploration too. A very '80s experience, not quite as good as Trinity or Bureaucracy. Followed by Sorcerer and Spellbreaker.
Posted 2018-10-06.