I made it to the end. It’s curious, there aren’t all that many puzzles really. There was another leap of logic required right at the end but on the whole it’s a lot more beatable than I might have expected. There is a massive information dump late on at which point the world starts to make a lot more sense. I expect goofy humour from Meretzky but the tone of the game was largely serious sci-fi, except for Floyd’s personality.
The limitations of the engine of the time are somewhat apparent but it’s easy to see why these games were so popular in the early days of PC’s. I’ve been playing this on the 5150 for authenticity and it runs great. Just text genuinely does create a better world than the graphics of the time. There’s a timeless quality as a result. The parser still impresses me now and according to the box, this only needed 48K of RAM to run. It seems to understand near enough everything I try and I was never fighting it.
I’ve only spent any real time with Zork 1-3 + a handful of the later Infocom games – the text got more verbose in those later games which is a good thing. It’s hard to have much actual narrative with the limited space in Planetfall and it’s more about world-building but Meretzky still manages to get some story and character in there. This was so much better than the Zork games as far as I’m concerned. I really need to play through the rest of the Infocom catalog one of these days.
As an aside, I’ve heard talk about Space Quest’s Roger Wilco being stolen from Planetfall over the years. This seems to be based on the cover more than the game given that you aren’t even a janitor so I’m not seeing it. Seems like more of an urban legend to me.
