Gruesome is a parody of some of the earliest cave-crawling text games: the Zork series (especially Zork I), but there are also references to Adventure, Enchanter, and even Hunt the Wumpus. You play as a grue, that “sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth” – a monster invented by the creators of Zork to prevent players from wandering around in the dark. Rather than feasting on adventurers, though, your goal in Gruesome is much more benign: You must lead five lost cave-crawling adventurers to freedom.
Your task is made difficult precisely because you are a grue: You cannot see properly in light. The adventurers, though, can only see well in light. This means that when you find a way to light up a room for one of the adventurers, you blind yourself and can no longer interact with the room’s contents. In addition, the adventurers will both attack you and each other on sight. This all means that the gameplay involves a great deal of coordination and timing among you, the characters, and the various light sources. Overall, I enjoyed this inversion of the usual IF-style light puzzles.
One of my favorite aspects of Gruesome is its attention to parodic detail. To take just a few examples: The game’s opening text, “It is pitch dark. You can see perfectly,” riffs on Zork‘s classic response to a player entering an unlit area. There is another grue in Gruesome‘s attic, a nod to the rather incongruous fact that you could be eaten by a grue in the attic in Zork I. Even the text font used in Gruesome is an homage: It appears to be the same font used for the taglines on the 1980s-era Zork cover art. There are other examples as well, examples that players who fondly remember Zork, Adventure, and similar games will enjoy discovering for themselves.
Gruesome features an interesting choice that one might call “jigsaw puzzle design.” What makes jigsaw puzzles difficult is the huge number of combinations of ways to put pieces together: The vast majority of pieces you try to connect don’t fit. As you do fit pieces together, though, the solution space shrinks, the puzzle becomes easier, and by the time you’re near the end it’s not hard at all to put pieces together. Some interactive fiction games are like that as well: You have a huge number of objects and challenges facing you at the beginning, and this makes the game much more difficult. As you use objects to solve puzzles, though, you can often mentally discard those objects, and it becomes easier to see how to match objects to puzzles. Gruesome uses a design like this: Once past the opening puzzle, you have access to most of the game’s map, including a large number of objects and puzzles. Because of this, the game felt like quite a challenge at first. However, after I had solved a few puzzles and had mentally organized the remaining puzzles and objects, it became easier. So Gruesome felt a little on the hard side at the beginning and a little on the easy side at the end, with the result that on balance it was just about right. My memory is that this “jigsaw puzzle design” was fairly common for Zork-like games circa 1980: Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III all feature it to some degree. I think Adventure does as well, although my memory of that game is hazier. At any rate, I wonder if this puzzle design in Gruesome was an intentional part of its parody.
Overall, Gruesome hit a sweet spot for me of not-too-hard and not-too-easy puzzles plus a solid dose of nostalgia made fresh by the PC-as-grue inversion and some gentle parodic elements. Recommended, especially for fans of Zork and other cave-crawlers of its era.
An Exercise for the Reader 