Nuclear Sub is an interactive text adventure written by Bob Retelle who also wrote Trek Adventure. Nuclear Sub was published by Aardvark originally for the OSI/Compukit but was later ported to the C64/128, Timex Sinclair, TI-99/4a, TRS-80, TRS-80 CoCo, and the VIC20. I played the C64/128 version.
One of the very first puzzles which you have to solve is finding a circuit board and installing it so that you can get the computer operational. Once you have the computer up and running you realize the ship is in serious trouble.
The game seems reminiscent of Retelle’s previous Trek Adventure in that it seems you need to repair the ship. This was a false assumption on my part and in reality what you want to do is escape the ship. Once I discarded one paradigm for another the game began to make much more sense to me.
There are two different hatches in the game that will not open for you. The first hatch is jammed and will not open all the way. In order to open this hatch and reveal new locations you’re going to have to throw a heavy chair at it. The second hatch has a broken latch that will not open. The solution to open this hatch is a little bit trickier. You’ll need to find and don a pair of gloves and pick up a leaky battery. Pouring the leaking battery acid on the broken latch will get the hatch to open. Opening this hatch however leads to a flooded compartment and my untimely death due to drowning. I had to start the game over a few times, and I finally remembered to channel the spirit of Scott Adams and I typed in HOLD BREATH and this works long enough for you to dive down and open a locker where you’ll find a set of scuba gear and a lantern. Once you put the scuba gear on you won’t have to worry about losing oxygen again.
In another area of the ship you’ll find the reactor room and the smashed reactor control rods. You keep getting an intermittent warning throughout the game that the core temperature of the reactor is rising. If you do not do something about this the ship will explode before you can escape. In the reactor room there is a large puddle on the floor. If you look up you see leaking pipes. In the tool room if you picked up the sledgehammer you can use it here to BREAK PIPES which causes the Reactor Room to flood and thus the reactor to cool off.
Cooling off the reactor and allowing water to flood the compartment also somehow allowed a moray eel and an electric eel to enter the ship. If you’re wearing the rubber gloves that you picked up in the ship’s galley you can pick up the electric eel without harming yourself. If you then type in SHOCK EEL you’re somehow able to use the electric eel to deliver an electric jolt to the moray eel and it goes away.
All that remains now is heading to the torpedo room, climbing into the torpedo tube, and swimming through it to escape. There is a slight problem however. At some point in the game, before the ship loses power, you needed to clear the torpedo tube by typing in FIRE TORPEDO. A torpedo will indeed fire, clearing the torpedo tube so that late in the game you can escape through it. If you do not fire the torpedo in an earlier part of the game then your escape route will be blocked by the said torpedo.
There were a few difficult puzzles in the game but overall I was very impressed. I though the map locations made a lot of sense and I certainly appreciated how your actions in the game could change the game environment. I must say I have really enjoyed Aardvark’s offerings and we have one more game to play from them that they published in 1981 which happens to be the next game on my list. Aardvark’s last game offering in 1980 is Pyramid and I’m looking forward to it. Until next time…