Bored of the Rings - Review

As a 12-year old Lord of the Rings fan when this game was originally released, the schoolboy sense of humour combined with locations and characters that I recognised from the original books made this a very enjoyable game. Retrospectively, looking at the game aside from that, there's not a huge amount here in terms of interesting or innovative puzzles and not all of the humour has necessarily dated well.

Parser/Vocabulary (Rating: 5/10)

As a Quill game, it is necessarily limited in terms of the parser (verb-noun only). The vocabulary is reasonable for a game of this age, with a number of synonyms supported. Puzzles can be solved with use of standard vocabulary. There is one example of a magic word that relies on you having played an earlier part in order to know what it is, but most puzzles can be solved through use of typical vocabulary.

Atmosphere (Rating: 7/10)

This game does a reasonably good job of creating an atmosphere through the location descriptions, especially given the sense of humour relies on the slightly incongruous merging of a Tolkien-style fantasy environment with various things clearly of the present day. Pictures are few and far between but are of a style and add to the atmosphere of the game. Due to the limited memory of the machines on which this ran, there's not a great deal of descriptive text apart from the location descriptions. Nevertheless Part 1 feels open and pastoral, Part 2 starts in a cramped and limited cave environment, opening up to the elven kingdom of DeLorean later and the journey down the river later. Part 3 manages to create a sense of impending doom as Fordo and Spam head into the land of Dormor, with a deserted, abandoned shopping centre not feeling at all out of place.

Cruelty (Rating: Polite)

There are a few circumstances under which the protagonist can die, although the majority of these are sufficiently clued enough to be avoidable. There are a couple of instant death locations and at least one puzzle that requires a few playthroughs to get the timing of moves just right, but generally the game does not ever get you into an unwinnable state.

Puzzles (Rating: 3/10)

Generally this game is fairly light in respect of puzzles. Part 1 has a grand total of two 'puzzles' in the whole section, the rest of it being a case of visiting locations in the right order. The number of puzzles and difficulty ramps up slightly through Parts 2 and 3, but there is nothing particularly outstanding or interesting in terms of the puzzles present.

Overall (Rating: 5/10)

I enjoyed replaying this game 30 years later although it doesn't hit the heights of modern interactive fiction. Perhaps worth a look if you're into spoofs and don't expect anything too challenging in terms of puzzles.