I recently played the Tin Man Games conversion of Forest of Doom for computer.
The original Forest of Doom from 1983 was a gamebook in the standard style at the time, where a winning run takes many restarts. The first bit of the map has four choices:
If you choose wrong, you have lost, although you don’t find out until the very end of the book.
Maybe some emphasis would help: if you choose wrong on the first map choice, you lose at the very end of the book.
Sigh.
This got my thinking about restarts in general which are still a general style in both parser games (like Jon Ingold’s Make It Good) and modern gamebooks (like The Sinister Fairground from Cubus Games).
Acheton is a game that very much wants you to restart, on many levels:
* The near-comedic presence of death leads to short resets.
* The ningy, which I already wrote about, is nearly guaranteed to cause a total restart.
* Optimizing lamp life can require a restart deep in the game, 500 or so moves in, requiring the steps for finding treasures be carefully tracked.
* There’s occasionally a more moderate “explorer-restart”. A simple example would be when mapping a dungeon; it is understood that you map the dungeon thoroughly first, find a good route, and then restore to the point you started.
This is the sort of thing adventure gamers accept without thinking. Consider, though: it’s deeply weird. It’s almost like it is built in (to this and many other adventures) acceptance of the sort of time travel mechanic where a character makes a “fugue echo” of themselves to send out before resetting the timeline. This is true no matter what the genre.
In my most recent play session, I came across an ocean.
Fortunately I remembered this section when I played through Acheton 5 years ago, so I knew that mapping the entirety of the sea is not exactly useful; the first time around, I inspected each and every square I could because this game was evil enough I knew it would have no shame about hiding a secret.
Renga in Blue 
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