![]() ![]() That’s because there’s an entirely different escape route. (No doubt attempting to invoke the randomness of the board game.) If the action fails, you lose, with no indication it was random chance that did you in.Īnd yes, I did say second-to-worst. Here we come up to the second-to-worst part: there is only a 50% chance the action above will work. Once I had my uniform disguise, I was able to stride back through with the pass card and make a beeline for the front gate. ![]() In the earliest type-in version, that game had a supply room where you had to guess at what the room contained and just try to GET stuff (like a BLASTER) and hope you were lucky. Combined with the COMPASS and MEAL I was lacking before, I just needed a MAP and UNIFORM.įor the map, I needed to win another epic struggle of getting the computer to understand me.įor the missing uniform, the game here invokes another nearly unique bad trope, one I’ve only seen in the original Dog Star Adventure. Once I made it by the guard I found a KEY and some DOCUMENTS. I finally broke down and looked up hints, to find that the prompt was being a continuation of the parser, and rather than the prompt being for what the player would say in response to the guard’s question, it was asking for another parser command, one that had to be typed in exactly.īravo, game: you found a brand new way to be awful. I knew I likely needed to go north of the APPELīut I was stuck trying “password” phrases, including various permutations of DER BEUTELMAUS. I had found a PASS CARD, a COMPASS, a MEAL, and a TAG that read “DER BEUTELMAUS” fairly early but I was otherwise stuck. I had entered the westmost room, and then tested the exits by typing GO EAST, GO SOUTH, and GO WEST, which of course looped me back to where I started without realizing I was changing rooms! This meant I missed the eastmost room (with a ladder) altogether. I only found this out very late in my playthrough. We’ve seen this before in Arnstein’s Haunted House, which compounded the problem by putting two identical rooms next to each other (so you couldn’t tell you had changed rooms!) Escape from Colditz repeats the same trick. The only way to find out an exit works is to try it out, and even then you may not know, because the game simply reprints the room description if going a direction fails instead of stating outright a particular move is impossible. Notice: no room exits, and more or less no description. For the purpose of this game, documents, maps, and money have been combined together, providing a total of four components to be collected.”) (Compare with the rules for the board game: “The Escape Kit consists of Civilian Disguises, Magnetic Compass, Food, false documents, maps, and money (Reichmarks). Īnd that before an escape attempt can begin, you need to collect an “escape kit” consisting of a compass, document, map, uniform, and meal. TO BE FOUND ,POINTS TO BE SCORED OR WHAT EVER. THIS IS A VERY SIMPLE ADVENTURE, THERE ARE NO TREASURES Unfortunately - and I regret to inform you, given I wrote two posts worth of buildup - in most other respects, the game is very, very, bad.Īt least the title screen is a good rendition of the castle. ![]() So for what qualities the game has, it automatically gets some via the same grounding in reality as Colossal Cave. The TRS-80 game Escape from Colditz by Stuart Wilkinson is based on a board game, and the board game was made with consultation of someone (Pat Reid) who lived the experience. The strength of coding and reasonable puzzles didn’t hurt, either, but my general point is that a certain grounding in reality can elevate what otherwise would be a mundane room location. It’s awful easy to link rooms called “cave” together just out of one’s imagination, but harder to match the character of the WINDOW ON PIT, or Y2, or the HALL OF MISTS, all real locations. It has all the sloppy edges of an innovator, but there’s a tactile atmosphere lacking in most of the imitations that follow, and I theorize that this is due to the original being based on the actual Colossal Cave in Kentucky, closely enough that it is possible to match the map of the game to the cave. The original Crowther and Woods adventure hits above its weight class. ![]()
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