Adventure D: Espionage Island (1982)

Play: 7/10 The action! It's thrilling! Watch as I pull my parachute cord plummeting to an enemy island

Oh, 2-word parser adventures... trying to solve those on your own heh... Uff dah. But at least retains that classic text adventure feel from it. Tho compared to, say, the Adams or Hi-Res Adventures, my goodness are these Artic Adventures terse! And they sure like their Indigenous settings, not that it's done in a very legitimate or interesting way... As I was playing this, I couldn't help but think that there were text adventure games incorporating not just graphics, but also animations and action sequences a la the later God of War action sequences (what do they call those again, one of you modern gamers? heh. where you have to press X then O then Square etc during a cutscene-type-fight-thing in God of War) released at the same time as these very sparse, purely text adventures. I feel that having some of those time-based or "action" parts could have spiced up the game, e.g., at the beginning when pulling the parachute cord etc. Oh, and you're telling me that lowly branch I've been carrying somehow allows me to cross the crevice (spelled like crevvasse or something ha; these early text adventures had so many typos and misspellings and niche spellings)

Feel: 8/10 Definitely the hardest of the Artic Adventures so far imo. After 2 attempts with just map/clues, I caved and used a Solution for the parts I was stuck at (and it wasn't just actual puzzles like that confusing explosive/tank situation but also simply dealing with the parser/how to word things like switch switch haha. Still was fun giving it a few tries and then going through the full game. Not that the descriptions provide much to build off of or imagine heh... Oh, and thank goodness for the save function when I was trying it on my own at first (tho peculiarly you save by simply typing "Quit" ha). Even if its setting was quite tacky, I liked how most the puzzles in this one were more... well.. logical (tho again, I couldn't solve several on my own heh... meh). Despite its limitations as a Spectrum game, let alone a purely-text game, a lot of the descriptions--as concise as they were--struck me, kind of like when I was playing through Adventure C: Ship of Doom. Nothing special, but bleak and mysterious descriptions like this for some reason caught my eye/struck me: Oh, but gotta say, for how sparse the wording is, this one is particularly functional like Adventure C. Maybe these mid-to-later Artic Adventures fix up some of the issues of the earlier ones. And quite cool that you can get killed by your own people if you forget to remove the colonel jacket :-p thank goodness for the solution preventing me that frustration so late in the game without a recent save heh. The fact I pushed through the difficulty and got to 100%, while enjoying myself more than the first 2 Artic Adventures, means this one may stick out whenever I return to early text adventures in the future. Kind of a bland ending tho after one of the better, more epic of these Artic Adventures

Attachment: 6/10 Quite clear the first I had played (Adventure C: Ship of Doom) was the best one of these Artic Adventures, or maybe it's the "first one you try feels the best" conundrum. I really don't think that's the case tho cuz I loved feeling like a Blade Runner in that game. And the setting and puzzles were epic-feeling despite the terse verbiage. There are a few more in this series in '83 and '84, so we shall see in the future. For now, this is another good-quality text adventure game that I likely wont return to, but certainly is worth a playthrough if you enjoy early text adventures. If only there were action sequences, perfect Apple II graphics (hehe), or something else striking that would make it stand out more in the sea of innumerable early-80s text adventures.

Completion: 100% Cumulative Playtime: ~40 minutes