ENLIGHTENMENT - A text adventure by Taro Ogawa
                       On Disk 1310

                    Review by Bev Truter

This Inform entry in the 1999 competition run on the 'Net is yet
another one-location jobbie where you play the role of a typical
adventurer, right at the very end of a long and arduous
quest...Well, not *quite* the very end, more like the home
stretch.  You have amassed quite an assortment of bits and bobs,
including the fabled starjewel, you have a score of 240/250, and
now all you have to do is negotiate the last few obstacles out of
the cave system. The opening paragraph in ENLIGHTENMENT sums it up
succinctly.

"As the Great Gate slams behind you, automatically locking, you
breathe a sigh of relief. All you need to do now is cross a
bridge, then head out of these caves forever...but there's a troll
blocking your way over the bridge!?! Still, you've survived worse,
and there's no turning back now, since you left the key to the
Great Gate counterbalancing Yet Another Annoying Deathtrap. You'll
have to kill the troll (technically unkillable), and how hard
could that be?"

The game begins in the single location - At The Wrong Side Of The
Bridge - with the gate shut firmly behind you, and a troll facing
you across the chasm, chained near the other end of the bridge.
The gate behind you, with its notched and sloping slab underneath,
plays an important part in solving several of the puzzles in the
game. However, I found it quite difficult to visualize this gate
and accompanying slab, so examine it thoroughly for some ideas
before attempting anything else.

There's also an adventurers' magazine as a separate file, which
details many items of equipment on sale for adventurers. You, of
course, being a cheapskate, bought a poor quality backpack, which
is the main cause of your current predicament in Enlightenment. If
your backpack wasn't so threadbare, it wouldn't leak out light
from all those lit and glowing objects you're toting about with
you...

There are plenty of footnotes sprinkled throughout Enlightenment,
as well as a detailed hint system, and you can also read the nifty
magazine Spelunker Today! for some ideas about the kit you are
carrying. The title itself ('enlightenment') is a reference to
your main problem in the game, and how to solve this predicament
and overcome the troll provides several fairly difficult puzzles
with rather obscure solutions. I managed two of the puzzles on my
own, but had to check out the hints for some help with most of the
other puzzles, as some of them required unexpected leaps and
twists of logic to solve. None of the puzzles could be described
as "easy"!

The quality of writing in Enlightenment is very good, and you will
soon become absorbed in the richly detailed, amusing, "zorky" feel
of this single-location gameworld. References to the Zork empire
and other similar adventures abound, with comments on the Frobozz
Magic Company's various unlikely-sounding products, the behaviour
and habits of grues, and plenty of detail about the troll,
doggedly preventing you from crossing that bridge.  Like that
other one-location game Spodgeville Murphy, Enlightenment is so
small, geographically speaking, that the author has been able to
provide descriptions for absolutely everything in the game;
whether it's items you are carrying, actions you perform, or
scenery you interact with. In fact, I'm beginning to like some of
these ultra-short games a lot. They are often better written than
the larger, sprawling games which can ramble over 100 or more
locations; you don't need to set aside 3 or 4 months of your life
to play them, and everything in the game can be fiddled with,
without getting the standard reply of "You can't do that" that so
frequently pops up in longer, larger games.

So back to Enlightenment, after going off at a slight tangent
there for a while. I found it a witty and enchanting game to play,
until I reached the point where I had to dispose of the troll.
Gulp. Call me faint-hearted, or burdened with too many scruples,
but I found the sudden change from lighthearted problem-solving to
a frankly brutal dispatch of the troll horribly jarring. I know
monsters have to be killed and enemies overcome to win many games,
but getting rid of the troll in Enlightenment left me feeling mean
and nasty, not triumphant. Squeamishness aside though, this is a
very entertaining game to play. It's well written, there are no
problems in the spelling and grammar departments, and you are
immediately drawn into Enlightenment's atmospheric, zorky little
world. Pity about the troll, though. R.I.P.














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