851st played so far
Genre: Interactive Fiction
Platform: Various
Year of Release: 1985
Developer: Infocom
Publisher: Infocom
After we started the previous fifty with one Infocom adventure,ย A Mind Forever Voyaging, which I loved, I got to play another one from the list. It left me with Trinity, which is more focused on puzzles, though with a stronger story than, say, Zork. Just the description sounds odd, so let’s see how it goes.
Our Thoughts
Trinity‘s story starts off simple, walking through London’s Hyde Park (sort of…) and helping out people as some weird events start happening around you and, it turns out, an atom bomb is about to fall on the city. You escape in a rather Carroll-esque way into a wondrous land that gives access to a number of locations at a moment just before a nuclear explosion. It follows the development of the technology and the areas where it happens.
The conceit is interesting – it doesn’t draw you in as immediately as A Mind Forever Voyaging does, as the puzzles are a bit more obscure. The fairy tale world feels fairly disjointed, which makes the puzzles more difficult to track, while the other areas are fairly small. It also feels easier to fail, which isn’t great in places – death is still an option, and I believe there are situations where you can get into a dead man walking situation.
Final Thoughts
Trinity takes you into a weird, off beat world that draws inspirations from some big events in recent human history – its specific focus is quite interesting, as are the things it builds off it. It’s a theme that would have been that big in the eighties – nuclear disasters may not have loomed quite as big (and Chernobyl had not yet happened), so it seems like it would have closer to people’s minds than it might be now. As an adventure game it may not fit my current tastes as much though – I was glad I could at least go to a guide.