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Hezarin - Review

Review by Canalboy

Ratings

Parser/Vocabulary
9
Atmosphere
9
Cruelty
Cruel
Puzzles
9
Overall
9
Written:
16-03-2022
Last edited:
Platform:
PC

At last. After 25 years on and off, 1,713 little blue tablets and umpteen visits to my psychiatrist I have beaten Hezarin.

This old mainframe game only survives as a port by Jon Thackray to the BBC under the auspices of Topologika and the beta testing of Peter Killworth back in 1990 but thank goodness it does as it must be the ultimate treasure gathering / picaresque odyssey of a text adventure game ever coded by mortal hand.

It was the fourth of the original 16 games written for the old IBM mainframe nicknamed "Phoenix" and is certainly one of the toughest from this stable, which really is saying something.

The game itself is based on the old Mesopotamian epic poem the Epic Of Gilgamesh, although no prior knowledge of the poem is needed to solve it. Just patience, a keen eye for detail and pen and paper to note down clues on the way (or stab yourself with maybe). Oh yes and about two and a half decades of spare time as this thing sprawls over 300+ rooms and (by my reckoning) 86 objects. There are 1100 points to be gained and 45 treasure as well.

Hezarin will take you on a quest through several regions, that is in an area of fields by a village, an underground cave complex with a central cavern, another area of caves with its own fountain cavern, shifting halls, a dragon maze, a wild wood, desolate moorland, an ivory temple, a castle....and so on and on, deep into the night if you are like me.

The game has the standard Phoenix two word parser but atypically the examine command is usable and you will need it on more than one occasion The inventory list is seven but there is a receptacle available somewhere to augment this number.

You don't so much play Hezarin as strap on an extraordinarily heavy suit of armour, oversharpen your lance, mount a trusty steed and physically assault the thing. Be prepared to die and restart a thousand and one times. There are several puzzles which I would consider unfair here; pretty much the norm for the Phoenix stable. Soft lockouts abound, and there is a really cruel trick in one smoke filled corridor where using the save command renders the exit unreachable but beyond a description of an earth tremor this is not at all made clear. Another puzzle revolves around noting down part of a room description that only appears the first time you enter it (the music room) and this then needs to be interpreted and applied much later in the game. Another requires you to invoke an old piece of speleological slang which I was not familiar with. Think Bedquilt in Colossal Cave. And then there's the inn sign.....you get the general idea.

There are many NPCs in the game, nearly all of whom want to do you in and several laugh out loud moments as well. If you are not English one of them may go over your head, but the centuries old mural depicting shaven-headed, peace loving monks doing over some Millwall supporters had me in stitches.

The final moments of the game involve a dangerous sequence of cat and mouse manoeuvering with the wizard Anjith and the final puzzle, fittingly, is extremely fiendish but certainly sums up the whole game.




Parser/Vocabulary (Rating: 9/10)

You can only examine items that you can take but I rarely struggled (with one notable exception) with the parser. There many synonyms that work for verbs and nouns.

Atmosphere (Rating: 9/10)

Wonderfully atmospheric but not too lurid. There are some long text dumps in here too. And some great humour too, from dry to slapstick.

Cruelty (Rating: Cruel)

As cruel as any piece of interactive fiction ever written I suspect.

Puzzles (Rating: 9/10)

Varied, clever and mostly extremely tough. Some can be solved with one command. Others are chained across multiple rooms.

Overall (Rating: 9/10)

Brilliant piece of old school IF.