Cutthroats

True Tales of Adventure

Review by Greg Maples

Designed by Michael Berlyn and Jerry Wolper
Infocom, Inc, 55 Wheeler St., Cambridge, MA 02138
Released, September, 1984
Catalog No. 1A3 -AP11
Price: $39.95
Complexity: Intermediate
Solitaire Suitability: Solitaire Only

Cutthroats is an interactive text computer game that allows the player to attempt to assemble a crew, ward off intrigue, and outfit a boat to recover sunken treasure lost off of Hardscrabble Island. At any point during play you can die or be unable to continue because of bad luck or the machinations of the sordid inhabitants of Hardscrabble Island. Should you manage to get the boat launched, a tough task in its own right, you then have to take a deep water dive to salvage the booty. You only become a master diver if you can return to the island with the treasure intact. As if this were not challenge enough, the designers have placed two wrecks in the game, giving you more than one scenario to play.

Cutthroats is a slick professional product from infocom. The game comes in a foldover box/magazine package with a photo cover. inside the twenty-four page glossy magazine, the buyer is treated to facetious tales like Danger at Fifty Fathoms! and ads to learn spearfishing in your own swimming pool. Only the back half of the magazine is the instruction manual for Cutthroats. Inside the box are more professional products, like the shipwrecks book of the Hardscrabble Harbor Historical Society, the tide-table/ price list from the outfitter's shop, the program disk, and an insert from Infocom asking you to buy more games.

In Cutthroats, you play a diver living on Hardscrabble Island. A good friend of yours, also a diver, was murdered the previous night, but just before he died he left you a copy of the Historical Society's book of wrecks. This particular copy of this readily available guide for tourists is unique because your deceased friend knew where the wrecks really were and marked in their actual locations.

As the game opens, you are the character on the day after the murder. It is up to you to get those treasures before the murderer returns for the book. To win Cutthroats, you must carefully assemble the companions you will need to crew the salvage mission. This requires several meetings in forboding swamps, dingy dives, and lonely promontories. Johnny Red, the least shady type on the island, sets up these meetings on a tight timetable that will have you running all over the island.

To meet the expenses of the trip, you will have to run to the bank and empty your account. You must also be careful to stay clear of the local thug who will ruin your plans if he thinks there is treasure involved or sees you acting suspiciously. Once the money and crew are ready, you must then rent a boat, outfit it, and meet the delivery boy to get the goods. But before you can do that, you might well discover the skullduggery taking place behind your back and be forced to rectify the situation.

You are now ready to set off, but by then one of your crewmen might have been blackmailed into ruining the mission. Should you manage to steer clear of all the dangers to be found on Hardscrabble island and get out to sea, your troubles are not over, for you stand to be eaten by sharks or run out of air at 250 feet attempting to get to the wreck. Once you get to the wreck, you must explore its hidden secrets and map its water (and air) filled passageways. Watch for floating mines. If you manage to find the treasure and get it back to the boat, you might discover it to have been ruined through your clumsv handling.

My reaction to Cutthroats is mixed. There is nothing new or exciting in Cutthroats aside from the genre. The timetable motions of the game characters is used in the Infocom mystery games, the multiple methods of solution system comes from Enchanter and Sorcerer, and the copy protection scheme was used in Sorcerer.

The parser allows the player to communicate with the game in near English. The non-player characters (NPCs) to move around even if the player doesn't interact with them. Cutthroats is fun and packaged with multiple scenarios. It has a higher than normal replay value for adventure games.

There is nothing innovative about Cutthroats, but the strategy and suspense factors are high. The application of adventure gaming to the underwater genre was done well, and the player gets the feeling of being in a 1940's pulp sea adventure story.

Cutthroats is for anyone with a popular home computer who wants to get absorbed in a game for untold hours. It is a must for Infocom fanatics and adventure game players.

The Infocom game mill has produced yet another solid professional game.

Greg Maples is a freelance computer programmer whose life and mind have been destroyed by role-playing and refined sugar.

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