Interactive fiction
Setting: Slice of life, Time travel
Year: 9. May 1993
Studio: ---
Publisher: ---
Designer: Graham Nelson
Engine: Inform 5
Platforms: (cross-plattform)
Rating: 70 %
Story: 7 ..
Writing: 7 ..
Puzzles: 7 ..
Implementation: 7 ..
Fun: 7 ..
Curses is a monster. In a positive sense. I'll elaborate on that in a minute, but first please allow me to state that Curses has a special place in my heart. It is the game that brought me to writing interactive fiction years after my Commodore 64 coding attempts had ceased. I was still running a Commodore Amiga when I discovered Curses, and Inform with it. I had played countless text adventures before, on the C64 and the Amiga, and the Infocom games had looked like the peak of the now dead genre to me. Commercial text adventures were a thing of the past (apart from the few Legend Entertainment moments of glory), the homebrew scene on the Amiga looked dull (think Michael Zerbo, in case you ever came across that name), and then I stumbled across Graham Nelson's Curses. I was in love, my life was whole again. But let's look at the whole thing calmly.
The Story
Storywise, Curses throws you pretty much into cold water, but there is a sketch of a story at the beginning. You're a resident of Meldrew Hall, which seems to be a larger estate, probably in Britain. You're allegedly going on a touristic trip to Paris, the rest of the family is packing, and you're supposed to find a map of Paris in the old attic, which seems to be rather large. That's the story. Well, at the beginning at least. It will unfold though, and without giving away too much: What you'll be dealing with is hinted at in the title of the game.
The Writing
Brief, precise, setting the mood.
The game contains quotes. Plenty. From classical to contemporary literature. They pop up unexpectedly and will provide a welcome sense of meaningness and insinuation to some. Others may find them gabby, or suspect they serve the vanity of the author. Up to you. I like them. I don't know if you've ever played The Longest Journey before - there you have the action separated into chapters, and each chapter gets a small intro with some sort of headline. That gets me all excited about the upcoming stuff, and that's how the quotes in Curses work for me. If you find them boring that's fine tho.
Curses is not a comedy adventure. Also, Graham Nelson is not a comedy writer. The game is not dead serious though, in fact it has a certain... lightheartedness about it. Like, when you stumble across your aunt Jemima at the beginning, she's not introduced through a simple "Aunt Jemima is here.", but instead through "Aunt Jemima, who has for years collected varieties of daisy, is engaged in her regular annual pastime of deciding which species make the best chains.". I'd say this short description is rather typical of Nelson's prose. Never made me laugh, but it ain't no textbook either. Cheerful, sort of. Sometimes at least.
The Puzzles
Curses is all about puzzles. The story is... negligible, sort of. It's not like there is none or that it's childish or awkward or lame, it's just that the focus is on the puzzles. And the puzzles are good.
TODO: Screenshot
Games by Graham Nelson
1993: Curses
In case you've never dealt with the history of interactive fiction here's some general trivia: The most popular IF developing tool is Inform, and it was published by one Graham Nelson in 1993. The most popular IF game of that time is Curses, and it was published in 1993 by one Graham Nelson. Coincidence? No, that's actually the same person, and while it explains why Nelson has a godlike status in the IF scene it also makes you wonder if the development of the developing tool and the game are somehow connected. They are.
1993: Curses
Having played Infocom games (not a matter of course in Britain where smaller computers with tape drives were more common) Nelson was aware of the schemings of the InfoTaskForce, a group of programmers that had reverse-engineered Infocom's Z-machine format and released tools to disassemble, compile and run Infocom's code.
WTF is "the Usenet"?
Text
At an unknown time Nelson started to work on his own compiler for Z-machine games. By then he was working on an Archimedes home computer, using the programming language C. In parallel he developed a game that sort of organically grew together with the compiler: Curses. According to him he wrote it "in an Infocomesque spirit", aiming at replicating the crisp wit the company was famous for. A first version was uploaded to the Usenet on May 9, 1993, but Nelson continued to work on the game with the help of some dedicated testers. The development process was a dynamic one (nowadays we'd probably label it "agile") - the game testers provided ideas besides their feedback, Nelson picked up those ideas, and over the course of two years the game grew by about 100 %. Among the testers was Gareth Rees, of Christminster fame. TODO: Montfort S. 203 letzter Absatz
Text
Curses received favourable reviews. Well, not from the mainstream media. The New York Times calls it "acclaimed" in an 1998 article about text adventures and interactive fiction, but that's pretty much all I found. But there's people who deal with text adventures on a deeper level, and they of course recognized Curses.
The only picture of Graham Nelson I could find...
In 2003, Nick Montfort, professor for digital media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, called it "likely the most well known IF work since the demise of Infocom". He pointed out interesting details, like how the starting scene recalls the Zork Trilogy logo with its open trapdoor, but with Curses starting in an attic while Zork starts in a cellar. Montfort also mentions a "literary texture" of the game, visible through all the little epigraphs throughout the game and a good load of T.S. Eliot references.
Nelson himself points out that Curses was an unusual game for 1993, in so far as it was rooted in real life in (then) present day, with an elaborate player background and puzzles connected to real life problems.
Sources:
- Nick Montfort: Twisty Little Passages - An Approach to Interactive Fiction. The MIT Press, Cambridge 2003, ISBN 0-262-13436-5.
- Aaron Reed: 50 Years of Text Games. Changeful Tales Press, Oakland 2023, ISBN 979-8-9859661-3-8
External links: Wikipedia, IFDB.
Sparse is the info we receive at the beginning. Curses refrains from a lengthy introduction and drops us right into the action instead. That's a bit disappointing, but we'll get over it soon.
We're in the attic of our home. The home has a name, indicating it's not exactly a back-to-back house, which would mean the attic might be a bit bigger. We're supposed to find a tourist map of Paris. That's the story. We have an electric torch with us (which is pretty helpful given there's no electric light in the attic), a chocolate biscuit and a todo list, the latter seeming to be unimportant. Now, before we start to look into the details of our surroundings, let's map what we can access as of now.
Given that every room is cramped with stuff that's quite a lot to take in. The following items and NPCs simply lie respectively hang around:
- Starting inventory: Chocolate biscuit, electric torch (with a battery inside), crumpled piece of paper
- Starting room (Attic): Jewellery box (below the trapdoor)
- Servant's Room: Dictionary, scarf, bed
- Old winery: Attic key (disappears)
- Storage room: Wrench, chicken wishbone (in the dumbwaiter)
- Airing cupboard: Radio (under the sheets)
- Potting room: Aunt Jemima, rubber gloves (puzzle!)
Been there, seen that. At this stage I restarted, knowing my way through the early rooms and what to find where once I need it. So, we start in the room named "Attic" and have our starting inventory with us. So where's this map now? As a first step, close the trapdoor, which reveals "something shiny", which turns out to be a jewellery box with the initials "A.M." and a drawing of a rabbit's foot on it. Mysterious. A single step to the north brings up another problem: The attic key (that someone had carelessly positioned on top of a bottle) falls down onto the ground and into a crack. Great. Guess we'll have to take care of that one, too. For now, we'll start with the northwestern part of the attic. On your way, remember to collect all the stuff listed above.
Aunt Jemima in the pottery room is annoying in so far as she prematurely ends the game when she notices us, which she does when we try to pick up the rubber gloves hanging on the wall. How to distract her? Well, I found out quickly by try'n'error, but to my knowledge there's no real clue why you should do the following: Jemima easily gets distracted by music. In the airing cupboard two rooms away there's a pile of sheets, and the nosey adventurers we are we of course look under them, where we find a radio (or wireless, as the games calls it with a stiff upper lip). We can turn it on, but nothing obvious happens - until six moves later, when the old box finally jumps to life and splutters horrible tunes from the pleistocene of pop music. The radio is too heavy for us, but it's on casters, so we can push it around. One room is enough, for if it it's in Jemima's lair she can hear it from the potting room. Pushing it to the potting room doesn't do any harm tho. So, Jemima is distracted by the music, and we can snitch the gloves. First puzzle solved.
If you tried to open the glass demijohn in the Old Winery you're probably on the way back there already - you can't get a grip on the damn thing, and now you got gloves. Wear the gloves, try again - tadaa, we're now owners of... Well, in case you collected all the stuff you could find so far you're running into a classic old school problem now the latest: Inventory limitation. You can only carry a limited amount of items (6) around with you. Back in the 1990s this sort of patronising was still acceptable, and it was regarded as a puzzle in itself. Since as an adventurer it's in your genes to hoard as much stuff as possible, you'll have to make camp somewhere and store stuff there until you need it. We'll find a solution to this problem very soon though.
Anyway, at this very moment you don't need the content of the demijohn yet. In fact right now all you need is the gloves and the flashlight. Go south, south again and then southeast into the east wing, possibly meeting our cat, Austin. Austin freely roams the attic, so don't expect to meet him here later on. East once more, and you're in the east annexe.
You're still wearing the gloves, aren't you? If yes, examine the old insulation rolls, and you're rewarded with a shiny new battery. Pocket it. Any better item to use it on than the torch? Probably not. Examine the torch, then fiddle around with it and cuss the lackluster implementation. The correct phrasing to exchange the batteries is OPEN TORCH, EMPTY TORCH (the compartment has no description of its content...), PUT NEW BATTERY IN TORCH, CLOSE TORCH. A bit of guess-the-word, but hey, seven points plus a (hopefully) indefinitely lighting torch!
Up next: The inventory limit. Go south to a dead end - et voilà, a rucksack! How classic! Inventory limit problem solved (maybe)! One potential game aspect comes to mind at this stage: The rucksack once belonged to a certain Ebenezer Meldrew, renowned explorer. Now one thing we know about complex adventures is that knowledge about ancient family members is something one should take note of. So far we know that besides ourself there's at least two other Meldrews: Aunt Jemima, and this Ebenezer guy, who went on an expedition to the Zambezi river in 1882. I'll take notes of this and other Meldrews in a table at the bottom of this walkthrough. Now, on with the game.
Nothing else to do in the dead end, so go back north to the east annexe. There's this intriguing cupboard door. Open it and enter the cupboard. Interesting! The skylight above you can be opened, offering a passage up to the roof, while behind the painting of "Mad" Isaac Meldrewe (another Meldrew - noted!) there's a fireplace which we can enter. For now though, just grab the painting and the gas mask and head back out of the cupboard. West, northwest, north and north again and you're back in the Old Winery where the red battery and the tourist map are waiting for you. East into the storage room. Grab the wrench, and get ready for some exploring.
Enter the dumbwaiter. There's a wishbone that doesn't look very much like it could be of use later, but we're not in lack of inventory space anymore, so take it. A dumbwaiter can move up and down, usually controlled from the outside, but we can pull on those ropes and... whoah! Okay, we made it down to the cellar in one piece. Now, that looks interesting. We have a new area to map, there's a robot mouse we probably need to misuse for some puzzle, and there's the question how we can get back up to the attic. Let's start with saving the game and then drawing a map.
Thoughts: The starting point has a closed window-vent that we can't open. Maybe from above? The wine cellar is a dead end as of now, but it has wine racks. They're of no use so far, but we've played enough adventure games to know that there must be something behind one of them. The south end has a hole, and there's a robot mouse. I sense a connection. The western cellar has a locked door, but we don't have a key (yet). We can actually go back up to the attic by pulling the ropes in the dumbwaiter (one question solved), and there's an intermediate stop at some dark passage. Inside the passage (which we reach by exiting the dumbwaiter and going north) are a recess and door, but the place is full of coal dust to which we are allergic. So, a face mask or some other way to prevent breathing in the dust would help here. Back down to the cellars and down the stairs in the western section - now that's a game changer. We are in hell, and a demon offers us help. Is that a help feature or some sort of puzzle? And will we stumble into more totally unrelated rooms? Let's find out.
Restore your saved game from the beginning of the cellar (or just walk back there, it's just a few more turns on the meter). First, take the mouse and check it out. It's not exactly small, more like a loaf of bread. There's no controls, but after some fruitless efforts I found out you can actually talk to it. Like, "mouse, hello", but the only thing it understands is movement commands. Which is not much of a surprise because those puzzles are... not uncommon. Think Suspended (Infocom, 1983). I bet we need to pick something up that is e.g. behind a barrier. But how will we pick an item up? Well, onwards to the hole. Drop the mouse and get it going: "mouse, west". Works! Er, wait a moment... It disappeared in the hole (good) and now we can't talk to it anymore (bad).
Many attempts later: The solution is to continue issuing simple commands, but this time to the hole! Like, "hole, west". I was a little proud of myself (although it was try'n'error, actually), but that quickly turned into consternation when I noticed what's behind that hole in the wall: A maze. Oh boy. I hate mazes. Well, that's a demerit for my review above, but let's grit our teeth and map through this shit:
And so, the solution to this puzzle is:
- drop mouse
Well, that's a short corridor. There's a recess in the eastern wall, but so far I haven't found a use for it. The way north is blocked by a locked door. This door will become important much later in the game, but to save us a lot of time we'll unlock and open it now, using the newly found brass key. Step through the door and you'll score five points for entering the gardens, but that's all we're doing here right now. Feel free to explore of course, but eventually go back south into the corridor and then back into the dumbwaiter.
SCORING
Points are awarded for solving puzzles. Here's a list of points to score, following the walkthrough above.
| No. | Room | Points | Score | Puzzle |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Airing Cupboard | 2 | 2 | Discover the wireless under a pile of sheets |
| 2 | Aunt Jemima's Lair | 4 | 6 | Get the gloves, distracting Jemima first. |
| 3 | Old Winery | 3 | 9 | Open the demijohn, wearing the gloves. |
| 4 | East Annexe | 3 | 12 | Examine the insulation rolls (wearing the gloves). |
| 5 | East Annexe | 7 | 19 | Exchange the old torch battery for a new one. |
| 6 | Storage Room | 3 | 22 | Pull on the ropes in the dumbwaiter. |
| 7 | Garden Stream | 5 | 27 | Enter the gardens |
THE MELDREWS
Here's a comprehensive list of the Meldrew family members and what we know about them.
| First Name | Profession/relation | Biographical data | Annotation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ebenezer | African explorer | Alive in 1882 | Went on an expedition to the Zambezi river |
| "Mad" Isaac | 18th century | On a painting in the attic | |
| Jemima | Aunt | Present day | |
Walkthrough 2 mit Hintergründen: https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/solutions/Curses.sol Walkthrough 3 mit Maps: http://plover.net/~davidw/sol/c/curse93.html Maps: http://www.highprogrammer.com/alan/games/video/ifmaps/curses.pdf Source code: https://github.com/allengarvin/curses/tree/main/release-16-recreation