Game 1X: Fallthru

So it has been ages since I’ve whacked at Acheton (with various excuses, some more feeble than others) but it happens that The CRPG Addict is reaching a text-adventure-CRPG called Fallthru from 1990. I figured simulblogging would get the juices flowing again. It’s far off from my chronology, but I always planned to start intermixing some out-of-order games just to keep things interesting.

Fallthru is not just a text adventure CRPG, but a multiplayer text adventure CRPG. You pick between 1 and 3 players, and each character gets a set of turns to do in sequence before control switches to the next player.

(“Cinder” is player two. After a set number of turns — I got 24 on one try, but I don’t know if some actions vary — play will switch to Cinder.)

Given there are allegedly 80+ hours of gameplay (according to this review of the novelization of the game, anyway) I believe I’ll be stuck with single player only.

There are also allegedly thousands of rooms, but they seem to be of the no-description style:

You are in a slightly rolling region of well kept farms.
You are on an east-west road.

>west

You are in a slightly rolling region of well kept farms.
You are on an east-west road.

>west

You are in a slightly rolling region of well kept farms.
You are on an east-west road.

>west

You are in a slightly rolling region of well kept farms.
You are on an east-west road.

>west

You are in a slightly rolling region of well kept farms.
You are on an east-west road.

This isn’t as bad as it looks simply because it doesn’t present itself as scrollback; the window gives the room description and it will change when necessary. I am having to get used to a related psychological shift: the map should be done on graph paper with one-room-per-square where most of the rooms are unremarkable.

Despite minimal room description, there’s large chunks of texts you can get through the “info” command which works like an encyclopedia for the world universe.

I’m going to try mapping things out a bit and I’ll report back in with my next post.

(Note to any visitors from CRPG Addict: I fairly quickly decided this wasn’t an adventure game and moved on. I did later do the entirety of Quarterstaff which is a true RPG/Adventure hybrid.)