The Re:Retro Top 100 Games Of All Time, No. 72: Snowball & Hell

If you like text adventures, why not go and read The Adventuress, also available on the videogame channel? And if you don’t like text adventures, you might as well stop reading now, because we’re going to delve into Level 9’s classic Return To Eden.

This is the first example in the Top 100 of a kind of game that was prolific when I was young, but disappeared very quickly once graphics and memory capability advanced enough to have the player experience a virtual world through graphics rather than descriptive text. I’m talking, of course, about Text Adventures. those hoary dinosaurs where anything was possible and everything was extraordinarily difficult. Return To Eden was no exception to either rule, but it did hold my attention longer than any game of its type, possibly because you could get very far with mapmaking, and further still with some basic symbolic logic. In the first part of the game, you even got a rudimentary three lives to play with.

The game is the second part of a trilogy that included Snowball, with it’s famed 7000+ locations (mostly a colour-coded maze) and The Worm In Paradise, which was set in an Orwellian dystopia and involved new concepts such as puzzles only being soluble at set times of the day (to make them more difficult). Essentially, though, it works on its own – you’re a female space explorer accused by her shipmates of a crime she didn’t commit, and forced to traverse a jungle wilderness and negotiate a city of robots who are all incredibly angry at the ship you’ve just escaped from. Your goal is to stop the robots from blowing up the ship and to clear your name, but in the early stages I played, the aim of the game was simply to survive and, if possible, to progress. Surviving was basically just a matter of finding things before time ran out – finding a safe place to cower before the crew of Snowball turned their engines on the planet to try and incinerate you (this incurring the wrath of the robot inhabitants), then finding an anti-radiation pill before the aforementioned huge explosion gave you radiation sickness. Progression was a matter of actively solving puzzles to unlock further areas of the game, or simply not die.

What was interesting was that most of these puzzles relied on wordplay or symbolic logic. For example, you could lure a brick-coloured bird down to lay an egg (it gave a cry of ‘Ouija’ as it did). You then planted the brick egg and it grew into a house. What’s the reasoning behind that? House plant. Later, you could pick up some foxgloves, which you needed to wear to handle something too cold to touch. And don’t get lost in the maize, etc etc…

Here’s one example of a puzzle – the edge of a high cliff. You need to get down that cliff somehow. JUMP. You are dead and have scored 150 out of 1000. Play again Y/N?

Wandering into the jungle, you see some strange plants, including a shoot. GET SHOOT. N. W. You are at the cliff edge. JUMP. The para-shoot breaks your fall.

That’s the kind of puzzle that starts things off, and by coincidence, that was as far as I got. Later puzzles get more and more difficult until finally you’re negotiating your way around a robot-run tube system trying to become President of their civilisation. It really was a perfect learning curve, and I don’t think I ever got bored of playing Return To Eden despite the insane difficulty level of it (some of the puzzles really were almost completely impossible to figure out). It’s almost certainly the best text adventure I can think of, and probably the one I’d use to demonstrate the form.

In other news, I’m off to Berlin for a few days – I should get an opportunity to post while I’m there, but just in case I don’t, that’s why. Either that or I’ve died in a hideous plane crash, in which case I’m burning in Hell, where all atheists inevitably go for their hubris in denying the Lord Of All.