The Lurking Horror
| The Lurking Horror | |
|---|---|
| Studio | Infocom |
| Publisher | Infocom |
| Senior Developer | Dave Lebling |
| Erstveröffent- lichung |
1987 |
| platform | Atari-8-Bit , Atari ST , C 64 , DOS , Amstrad , Amiga , Mac OS , Apple II |
| Game engine | Z-machine |
| genre | Text adventure |
| Game mode | Single player |
| control | keyboard |
| language | English |
| copy protection | Enclosure referencing |
The Lurking Horror is a computer game by the US company Infocom from 1987. It belongs to the genre of text adventures ( interactive fiction ) and is based on literary motifs by the writer HP Lovecraft .
action
The plot in the style of a fantasy and horror story takes place during a snow storm on the campus of the fictional George Underwood Edwards Institute of Technology (GUE Tech). The player in the role of a student of GUE Tech. works on his seminar paper on a PC in the data center . Inexplicably, however, his file is overwritten by a text from the mysterious Department of Alchemy . The player must try to save his term paper. Eerie, supernatural events occur on his explorations through the university's vaulted cellars. He meets various fantastic creatures, comes across clues to a previous suicide on campus and has to solve numerous puzzles.
Gameplay
The Lurking Horror is a text adventure, which means that the environment and events are displayed as screen text and the visualization is largely up to the player's imagination. The character is controlled via commands that the player enters using the keyboard and that are processed by a parser . The commands are in natural language and allow the game character to interact with his environment. The player can move through the game world, find objects, apply them to the environment or other objects and communicate with NPCs . As the story progresses, more locations in the game world will be unlocked. There are short sound effects on some platforms to add tension.
Development and production details
The game was developed on the basis of the Z-machine ; the implementation took place u. a. for Atari-8-Bit , C 64 , DOS , Atari ST , Amstrad , Amiga , Mac OS and Apple II . The developer was Dave Lebling . The package insert for the adventure contains documents for new students at the GUE, for example a campus map and information about the university.
reception
In German game reviews of the 1980s, among other things, the exciting plot and the excellent text parser typical of Infocom were recognized. The adventure was rated 88 out of 100 rating points in a test report. In retrospect, The Lurking Horror was included in a list of the "Top 10 Scariest Games" by a US computer magazine in the 2000s. The excellent adventure ("a great example of the lost art of the text adventure") draws the player into a brilliant, imaginary world, similar to reading a captivating novel.
A study on computer game history and theory from 2006 differentiated: On the one hand, "The Lurking Horror" is a well-playable adventure game that presents the player with fair tasks. On the other hand, more was possible ("... it still feels like a bit of a missed opportunity"). The content-related focus on fantastic and horror elements based on motifs from HPLovecraft would only partially fit the game developer's further intention to create a kind of image of the famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the fictional "George Underwood Edwards Institute of Technology" (on the game developer Lebling had studied himself).
Web links
- The Lurking Horror at MobyGames (English)
- The Lurking Horror in the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Overview of development and production under The Lurking Horror at MobyGames (English).
- ↑ See Heinrich Lenhardt : The Lurking Horror . In: Happy Computer , games special issue 21 (1987); Heinrich Lenhardt : The Lurking Horror . In: Happy Computer with special games part 8/1987, p. 150f.
- ↑ See Allen Rausch: Top 10 Scariest Games, Gamespy (from October 28, 2004)
- ↑ See Jimmy Maher: Let's Tell a Story Together. A History of Interactive Fiction . Senior Honor's Thesis, University of Texas, Dallas 2006 (Chapter 5 The Infocom Canon - Late Experiments in Genre: The Lurking Horror and Plundered Hearts ) .