This is the last of the Charles Cecil games made with Richard Turner for Artic Computing. (Previously: Inca Curse, Ship of Doom.) Ship of Doom had the kerfuffle calling it a “digital nasty” due to a particular scene; after publishing Ship of Doom, Turner had his talk with a Whsmith manager about how his art was “rubbish” (as Charles Cecil notes, “…we weren’t worried about logos and marketing. We wanted to make games.”)
Espionage Island is the adventure that came after that talk, so the cover isn’t just plain text anymore.
From Mobygames.
The text adventure engine (based off a 1980 Practical Computing article) still hasn’t changed; plenty of I CANT messages for “I understood that verb but I’m not going to do it for whatever reason” and I DONT UNDERSTAND for when the verb is out of range. (The remaining games, E through H, do change things up, but we’ll save discussing that for when we reach 1983.)
We are, straightforwardly, on a reconnaissance mission to an island, looking for a “secret”. I think realistically we might get a camera or something (at the very least there’s a “disguise” not mentioned in inventory) but we otherwise just start sitting in a plane that was “hit by enemy fire”.
You can GET PARACHUTE, WEAR PARACHUTE, and PULL LEVER to be on your way. This leads to MID-AIR whereupon PULL RING will open the parachute, and you land in a DARK BUNDLE, and then get stuck by the parser.
This is one of those things that looks simple from the author’s end that’s still easy to get stuck by: you’re just supposed to DROP PARACHUTE, and now things open up.
Well, we start in a jungle rather than a beach, that’s different.
To the south there’s a “match” in a jungle thicket, and to the west is the crashed fuselage of our plane. There is a branch you can just grab, and a “dark corner”; if you light a match to look more closely, you die.
I’d say something about “ah, this is one of those games” but this is the only unexpected death I’ve come across so far. For example, a bit farther south there’s a guard, and going south farther kills you, but the game certainly gives sufficient forewarning.
Back at the plane, you can TOUCH CORNER or FEEL CORNER and feel a string; pulling the string reveals some BEADS. The beads can go over to another part of the island where there is a NATIVE WOMAN.
The player can SCREAM at the woman and get killed, but it took me major effort to find any other way to interact.
With the knife, you can eliminate the guard.
Past the guard is a “hut” with graffiti on a table that reads “RICK WAS ‘ERE 27/09”. After some testing I found 2709 is recognized as a word so I’m guessing it goes to a keycode combination later.
South farther is a river with a boat. You can head downstream with the boat, but not too far!
I suppose this death didn’t have much warning, but I still thought I was about to go off a waterfall.
If you (properly) take the boat only for a short trip, you can find a rope, then slide down back a “rocky ground” near a “rock face”. I am still suspicious that the rock face hides something but I haven’t had any luck.
A sneak preview ahead in time: there’s a plastic explosive later, but I wasn’t able to get it to blow open a hole here.
So that leaves the player with the knife, a gun swiped from the dead guard, a penlight swiped from the same, some rope, the match that blew things up earlier, and the branch by the crashed ship. To the southeast there’s an ERODED BANK with a gap and dropping the branch will allow crossing:
This leads to a swampy area which serves as a maze.
I actually ran into this area before going through the beads-knife-rope sequence, so I didn’t have much at hand to do mapping, so I started by trying EAST, SOUTH, WEST, NORTH, just in case this was a grid rather than a more randomly-connected area.
This leads to the next area! So I had the solution to the maze right away, although I still spent the time mapping partly just to be sure I didn’t miss something, but mainly so I can share the many arrows with you, the readers. This is proof that just because a map is messy to diagram, it doesn’t mean it is difficult to travel through.
Past the swamp is “marsh land” and then a mining site.
The ROPE seemed the most pertinent item, and I realized after some noodling the game allows you to TIE ROPE, followed by the prompt WHAT TO? You can specify to the rock hiding a shaft, then to the vehicle. Then you can hop on the vehicle and drive it forward in order to pull the rock.
Genuinely satisfying, and I didn’t struggle with the parser here! It helps that everything is just TIE or PUSH.
This opens a tunnel with a PLASTIC EXPLOSIVE (which you saw a preview of already, and I have yet to use). There’s warning sign about danger below and if you ignore the sign you get trapped in a ROCK CELL.
The way forward is to move on, going back outdoors to where there is a LANDING CLEARING and a CONTROL UNIT containing a switch which is set to green.
Unfortunately, my moment of smooth parser interaction was followed by utter pain: no verb I tried was able to interact with the switch.
I tried making my verb list and then applying each and every verb on there, no joy.
Just trying to move on, there’s a tank patrolling. Unfortunately, a tank is rather larger than a guard and neither the knife nor the gun is of use. I might think the plastic explosive could do something but again, no joy with the parser.
I’m unclear if I’m stuck here because of the aforementioned parser issues or if there’s some “legitimate” puzzle I’m missing. But just to summarize, I have
a.) a rock wall that may or may not be hiding something
b.) a switch that doesn’t want to work
c.) a tank I have been unable to get by
d.) and just for completeness sake, going down from the mine leads to a “cell” but I suspect that’s just a trap.
Renga in Blue 
I played this years ago in my run through the Artic series, and I remember the switch thing being one of the dumber parser moments I’d thus far encountered:
Qbhoyr lbhe cyrnfher, qbhoyr lbhe sha!
There’s also a very silly hint hidden in there for getting out of the maze. Go back and read the room descriptions…
Artic games are notorious for their tortuous verb/ noun combinations like POINT SONIC and SWITCH SWITCH. Good two word parsers like T/SAL seldom leave you groping for acceptable commands.
I think Hezarin is the only one where I struggled
like the bit where you need to make a loud sound
or where you fix the box at the end (it requires MEND, which is the only game I’ve ever played where that verb occurs)
the mountaineering bit at the endgame is bad although it is a different category (the authors made an ill-advised attempt to get the player to do a very specific action, although it seems like that action would be implied by CLIMB)
That would be an interesting (at least to me!) list, namely Text Adventures where obscurely unique verbs are required for progression; that is not counting games where synonyms can be used as well. An example of the latter would be HYPERVENTILATE in Savage Island II as BREATHE OUT and EXHALE work if memory serves me correctly.
Castle Ralf, one of the best late era competition games requires COGITATE. Quondam unsurprisingly uses a few as well. One of the Level 9 games uses SMITE if I remember correctly.
Ah, I was going to suggest FLIP SWITCH.
“Rock face” suggests CLIMB to me? I’d also wonder if you’d be able to blast your way out of the rock cell but it seems dangerous. Anyway if it’s giving you the “try again” message it looks like a death.
The dark corner puzzle seems like a neat trick–it does seem fair that lighting a match in a crashed plane would lead to an explosion and the alternative sensory modality is cool. The other parser stuff seems not so cool.
Regarding games with unique verbs, the first example that springs to mind is one that I just happened to recently mention here in another thread, Beyond the Tesseract. El Diablero had a couple of unusual ones too, I recall. But both of those fall into the category of the purposefully unusual game world or concept, so most things there follow a certain logic that can be adjusted to, and can generally be considered as good game design. On the other hand, the more traditional examples mentioned above, like some of the Phoenix/Topologika games, Savage Island, etc. (and I’d include a handful of very obscure titles that I’ve just recently played through on this list) are more of the “For experts only!” school, where a certain amount of parser sado-masochism was an inherent part of the shtick, and you usually knew that going in.
The description of the maze is given as a “stiched [sic] swamp”. This gives the directions, because “stitched” means the same as “sewn”, and the way out of the swamp is to go S,E,W,N.
I wondered what the heck “Stiched” was supposed to mean. Here I was thinking it might have been a mistake for “Sticky” although that seemed kind of unlikely.
this is a case where the typo made me miss entirely the clue Exemptus is talking about
I thought it was some Brit-slang and/or a typo for some other thing
so never stopped to process if “stitched” would be a clue
it isn’t like solving the maze was hard anyway
Since you can’t light the match in the dark corner, can you use the penlight instead? Or is there nothing more to be gained in the dark corner?
alas no
the penlight gets used later
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Artic adventures seem so crude to me. I think it’s justified since they were written for the ZX81 (only black and white, no colors, all caps), but then again you could at least just put a prompt like “>” before what is written by the user.
Anyway, those adventures were ported to the ZX Spectrum, and only the presentation screen was changed with colors, the rest of the program was left as is. No caps. No colors. At least, the user prompt could’ve been colored. A Shame.