Angelsoft Inc. | Through the Shattered Lens

For my final horrific adventure of the month, I returned to the Internet Archive and I played Stephen King’s The Mist (1985, Angelsoft, Inc.)

The Mist is a text adventure based on Stephen King’s novella. (The game came out before both the television series and Frank Darabont’s film version.) You are at the supermarket, just trying to buy your groceries and get home, when suddenly a thick mist envelopes the entire town. There are monsters in the mist and you soon discover that there are monsters in the store as well. Can you survive the mist and make your way back to your home where, hopefully, your son is still alive and waiting for you to rescue him?

The Mist does a good job of turning King’s story into a work of interactive fiction. Even if you have read the story or watched the movie, The Mist is still not an easy game. This is a game where it is very easy to get killed and there’s one puzzle where, due to randomization, you can do everything right and still end up dying. It is unfortunate that you cannot save games while playing them in the Internet Archive because The Mist is a game that can only be won through trial and error.

The best advice that I can give is don’t spend too much time in the supermarket, pick up everything that you can, and don’t shoot Mrs. Carmody, as much as you may want to.

Of course, you can just play the game with a walkthrough, like I did.

For my next adventure in the scary part of the Internet Archive, I played Voodoo Island (1985, Angelsoft, Inc.).

Voodoo Island is an early text adventure from Angelsoft, Inc. Angelsoft was Infocom’s only serious competitor when it came to creating challenging and rewarding text adventures. Typically, both an Angelsoft and an Infocom game would require the player to solve puzzles and search for clues. What made Angelsoft unique was that the results of solving the puzzles were frequently randomized. You could solve a puzzle and still die, just due to the luck of the draw. That may be why Infocom outlasted Angelsoft by several years.

In Voodoo Island, you are the sole survivor of a shipwreck. You wake up on the beach, confused but with the feeling that someone has been watching you. The game’s introduction establishes Voodoo Island‘s tone early:

Spend enough time exploring the island and eventually, you will find a hotel. Exploring the hotel leads to scenes like this:

The first time I tried to play the game, it took me a while to make it to the top floor of the hotel. That is where I discovered not only Doctor Beauvais but also Sharleen, who the game describes as being “buxom” and “blonde.” Considering the target audience of this game, I assumed that buxom and blonde was going to be a good thing. I turned out to be wrong:

Your goal is to get off the island and avoid joining the living dead. It is not easy but I have discovered a few things that might help: examine everything, grab everything that you can, and remember that just because you don’t see something the first time you look, that doesn’t mean you won’t see something the second time.

Good luck!