Quondam - Review

Robb Sherwin once observed quite sagely about Zork that the game actively hates its player. That may well be so; in which case Quondam wishes to eviscerate the player, gouge his / her eyes out and wrap one's entrails around one's neck while forcing said player to watch the Father Dowling Mysteries box set plus extras.

This was the third of the fifteen games written on the Phoenix mainframe in 1980 by the author Rod Underwood. It appears to have been his only foray into the world of text adventure creation but he indelibly left his mark with this one. The original mainframe version is sadly lost (like Andrew Lipson's Xerb and Alex Shipp and Steve Tinney's Hezarin) and it only survives thanks to a Peter Killworth port to the BBC. We have no way of knowing how much the original version differed from the BBC Acornsoft version but you can be sure it was ball-breakingly hard as well.

I played this game after finally nailing Acheton, Hezarin and Castle of Riddles from the same Cambridge stable and was fairly convinced that no game could be tougher than that holy trinity of mind exploders. I was wrong.

The game itself is the traditional treasure hunt (up to a maximum of 250 points) with an interesting time travel theme, hence the title which is Latin for former. You need to collect all of the treasures available and deposit them somewhere, but finding out where is like attempting to untie the Gordian Knot. Suffice to say that some puzzles should be attended to in the present day and some in the past. And at least one in the past and also in the present. Exactly.

All the tropes of early games are here, including soft locks, instant deaths, massive turn critical mazes and outrageous puns. It's just that in this game, like the giant spiders on the web maze, they come at you in swarms filling just about every location. As if these obstacles didn't make your task difficult enough, the game uses some objects in totally unexpected ways. I found myself desperately trying all kinds of obscure verbs to boldly go where no parser has gone before and some of them actually worked. I guarantee you have never used a mirror or a harp in the ways necessary in this game. When stuck try anything and it may just work. The knight, the fanged customs official, the Spanish Inquisition (I wasn't expecting that) a man-eating vegetable being and the dragon are all puzzles that require endless experimentation to overcome and the solutions to each are unique in the text adventure canon as far as I know.

Aside from the incredible toughness of the game and the necessity to perform actions in an exact order you can even die typing save or examining an object. In fact I have so far discovered seventeen different ways to join the Choir Invisible and at least as many ways to lock myself out of victory. The desert affords you all of two moves before you die of thirst. There is also an unmappable area of trackless forest in which you must thrash about until finally emerging into familiar territory.

Playing via the BeebEm emulator at least allows you to save without it costing you a move as it did in the original. As I have spent a lot of time racing around a spider's web with the residents only one move behind me this at least has made things slightly easier than it was for those masochistic souls playing on their BBC micros back in the day.

It has the standard T/SAL two word parser and no examine command plus an inventory limit of eight objects. I have come across two items that have multiple uses thus far so discard nothing that you find.

I am currently contemplating a barber's shop pole and a boarded-up cave. I have a nasty feeling that I may be here for some time.

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Parser/Vocabulary (Rating: 6/10)

The parser is the standard T/SAL two word parser. that is no examine or back or take all. Descriptions are not long in most places but fairly evocative. Read very carefully.

Atmosphere (Rating: 7/10)

A slightly creepy leitmotif underpins this with occasional flashes of black humour.

Cruelty (Rating: Cruel)

It really couldn't be nastier. You can screw up two moves from the start and there are boundless methods of dying and locking yourself from potential victory. Some are not at all obvious.

Puzzles (Rating: 8/10)

Some are very clever and some are downright unfair. I have used three verbs that I have never used in any of the hundreds of text adventure games that I have played. Assume nothing and take nothing at face value.

Overall (Rating: 8/10)

Eight if you love old fashioned and tough, Six if you like your hand being held.