Lost Ship Adventure is the second game we’ve played developed by Charles Forsythe. We had just finished his other game also published in 1980; Dragon Quest Adventure.
Lost Ship Adventure was Charles’ first commercial effort. He published Lost Ship at the age of fifteen and at the time was considered one of the foremost junior programmers in the country. He now joins the ranks of Great Hassett and Joel Mick who also published a string of interactive text adventures at a very young age.
I really liked the start of Lost Ship. It’s different from Scott Adam’s Pirate Adventure in that you begin the game floating in the water in a dive suit. You’re next to an old, abandoned ship. The black flag fluttering above the ship depicts a skull and crossbones which suggests a pirate ship.
Once you climb aboard the ship you’ll soon find out there are not many initial locations to explore. From the main deck you can explore the Captain’s Study which leads to a Crow’s Nest and that’s about it. There is a dog guarding a southern door which you cannot get by so I’m assuming we’ll find an inventory item which will remove that particular obstacle. There is a steak on the deck of the ship but this is a bit of misdirection as the steak is rotten. You’ll find a feather and and a jeweled dagger in the Crow’s Nest both of which become useful later. There are also seagull eggs in the Crow’s Nest but if you disturb them a seagull will swoop down and knock you into the water as well as scatter any possessions you’re carrying.
We have played and reviewed many interactive adventures to this point and one of the things which stood out to me in Charles’ Dragon Quest Adventure was the originality of the locations and puzzles. I thought the use of a rowboat to move to different locations in the game clever as well. Lost Ship is no different in that initially the game shows great promise. The beginning is atmospheric and the brief descriptions of the ship are original.
The book that you find in the Captain’s Study containing the above passage is a great example of atmosphere and originality. The book is giving you a clue there concerning an important inventory item you’ll need to uncover.
Like the rowboat in Dragon Quest Adventure, the dive suit provides another spark of originality and atmosphere. I thought it was extremely cool that you could move around underwater from location to location using the dive suit. The underwater environment is one of two mazes that you’ll need to map out. The second maze is the jungle on the mysterious island you’ll eventually sail to. An important location to discover while underwater is the coral reef.
If you chip away at the coral using the jeweled dagger you’ll uncover some old, coral encrusted bones. You can then take the bones back to the ship and use them to get by the dog guarding the south door on the deck. The southern door gives way to a map room with an X marks the spot. When you EXAMINE the feather you found in the crow’s nest, you’ll find that it is actually a pen. You can use the pen to plot a course to an island you spotted up in the crow’s nest. You then will want to SET SAIL and your next destination will be the island.
This is where the game went off the rails for me a little bit. Up to this point, I’m really into it. But I became absolutely stuck here. I spent nearly 45 minutes with the game up to this point, then spent the next 90 MINUTES ! moving from location to location trying to figure out what I missed. I found a programming book by Bob Liddell which contained all of the code for Lost Ship which shows a secondary deck location on the ship. I could find no way to reach that location. I deduced too that it was a hidden location and a parser issue, much like entering the river in Dragon Quest Adventure, but I could not find this section of the ship. Once the ship arrives upon the island, a fat manatee is there to greet you and it has something in it’s mouth. Is this the same irritating manatee from Dragon Quest Adventure? It is obvious I need to feed or give the manatee something from my inventory but I have not found it yet. There are fish as an object off of the island and I suspect I can catch the fish somehow, but again, I am missing items from my inventory. There is a path on the island which leads to a jungle maze and ultimately a cave containing a dead pirate and a locked chest.
I finally had to reach out and ask for a “nudge” or a push from the esteemed Jason Dyer who informed me it was the same issue that I had with Joel Mick’s Journey Through Time. Argh! I went back to the map room and tried to break the windows in the room; to no avail. Then I merely typed in GO WINDOW which immediately took me to the mysterious secondary deck location. Which really irked me from a pragmatic standpoint because it seemed silly that the only way to reach the secondary deck was by climbing through a window. The crew must have gotten very tired of this. You know what I mean?
Once I discovered the secondary deck I then made my way down to the cargo hold and found a net and a bag of gold. The game went by relatively quickly from there. I used the net to capture some fish. I then gave the fish to the fat manatee who promptly dislodged a gold key from it’s mouth in order to eat the fish. I then took the gold key and returned to the pirate’s cave and used the key to unlock the chest; which was filled with rubies.
I had now reached another point in the game where there didn’t seem to be anything else to do. Earlier off of the coral reef that I explored there had been another sandy beach with a sign that read store your treasures here. When I had tried to store the dagger there it didn’t recognize the action but I thought I would go back and try again.
I SET SAILS once again and arrived back at my previous destination and then, with my diving suit still on and my air supply good, I went back past the coral reef to the beach area. It took some experimentation but I found that if you typed STORE then each of your four treasures individually that it recognized what you were doing.
I really thought that Lost Ship Adventure started out very strong in atmosphere and in originality. I found myself less enchanted with the game when I found I had to climb through a window in the map room to reach another area of the ship. It really must have been a bitch for the crew to have to climb through the window each time to store items in the cargo hold. Know what I mean? I also felt that the game sported a bit of an abrupt ending and I was surprised that I was done after only four treasures. So the game began with a lot of promise but transitioned into a bit of a letdown after that strong start.
I am looking forward to Charles Forsythe’s 3rd and last game which we’ll get to in the 1981 batch. There was a lot of originality to like from both Dragon Quest Adventure and Lost Ship Adventure to keep me genuinely interested to try his third programming effort. If you haven’t experienced any of the Charles Forsythe adventures yet you really should.