
	Platform PC Genre Adventure Developer Infocom Publisher Activision Released 1993
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Return to Zork

I remember Return to Zork (RTZ) as the first CD-ROM game I ever played. I was dazzled by its cutscenes, graphics, and full motion video (FMV). At the time, I could barely believe what I was seeing. Overall, the game wasn’t very notable as I was to find out after hunting down the preceding Zork games.

RTZ begins with this classic line of text and quickly switches to a graphical world:

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.

Utter this single line of text at comic conventions or anywhere old-time gamers congregate and you’ll be immediately swarmed by people who remember the days when Text Ruled the Earth! (At least in gaming circles.) RTZ took the Zork franchise into a fully graphical and parser-less world – everything was point and click for adventure games.

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The game starts with an urgent plea to come to the Great Underground Empire of Zork (right after the classic line of text). Upon arrival you find that time has not been kind to the area. (The Valley of Sparrows is now the Valley of the Vultures.) Obviously it’s up to you to set things right and find out who (or what) is behind all the desolation.

Along the way you’ll piece together an interesting history of Zork, revisit old locales such as Control

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Dam #3, interact with a variety of characters, discover the origins of illuminyte, encounter more than a few grues, and solve some of the most difficult puzzles in an adventure game. Depending on your past experience with Zork (dating back to 1980) you may feel a little left out – like there’s a joke being told, you missed the setup, and the punchline is in front of you. Which is not to say there aren’t some funny moments in RTZ.

Zork, as a series, has never taken itself too seriously, even when there are some dark undertones. This is no more apparent that the FMV acting that, for the most part, is over the top – way over the top. Jason Hervey’s (The Wonder Years) turn as the Troll Leader (and the rest of the trolls) is still right up there in the pantheon of really bad acting in a PC game.

The FMV was of high quality for 1994, but by today’s standards it’s grainy and flat.

RTZ interface showed an attempt to innovate. The basic point and click was there, but you could also get emotionally involved. When speaking to characters, a sidebar of facial expressions – ranging from Boredom to Apologetic – appeared at the side and by randomly clicking on the faces you could elicit different responses from the speaker. It was a good idea, but its application was hit and miss – you never really knew if your choices were registered or had any impact. (Plus you were never given any cues as to when or if you should attempt a facial expression.)

There was no “Rubber Walls” feature in RTZ meaning a lot of instant death. Heading into any dark area nearly always resulted in the grues – those never-seen but obviously well fed shades – getting you. There was also a character that showed up if you killed anyone (or broke the rules in general), called the Guardian, that would strip you of all your possessions – leaving you to wander the landscape unable to finish the game. (The mantra, “Save now, save often” has been permanently burned into my brain.) You had to be equally careful about losing important items in your inventory or mishandling them.

Puzzles, so long the mainstay of classic adventures, are difficult for the most part. Take for example, reforging the Flying Disc of Frobozz, which tasks you with setting up a Rube Goldberg contraption. If you didn’t have the necessary inventory items – too damn bad -- you'll had to go back and find them. Basically, there were seven buff statues that needed to be equipped with specific items so when they performed their motions everything worked like clockwork and the disc was reforged. Then there was the Double Slider puzzle. This was one nasty puzzle! It was a basic tile puzzle, but on each tile were two words. The tiles had to be arranged to form two different sentences. Unfortunately, there were a few different sentences that could be arranged – it was damn tough to complete but it was crucial to learning the secret invisibility potion.

The CD-ROM version could play the music right off the CD and some of the tracks were/are particularly good. I still pop in the CD every once in a while just to relive the old days.

A couple more Zork games came out after Return to Zork (neither received the kind of attention usually awarded Zork games). Both were technologically better but the magic of Zork had started to fade somewhat. RTZ is still good for a romp, especially if you haven’t played it in years and have forgotten about meeting the poodle hellhound or how to get Ben Fyshin’s boat running. (However, you may want to hold out for a while. There have been rumblings about a redux of RTZ along the lines of Myst but I’ve been unable to confirm anything official – it could just be a rumor started by a fan.)

- Omni