Game #66: Ghost Town

Saddle up for another rip roaring Scott Adams adventure set in the old west. Put on your hat and spurs and be ready to explore a frontier ghost town. This one has snakes, ghosts, an old abandoned mine and explosions. Scott Adams published six games in his Adventure Series in 1979 and here in 1980 Ghost Town is the first of two games he published. The only other game with a western theme that we have previously played was 1979’s Lost Dutchman’s Gold.

Ghost Town is the ninth game in Scott Adam’s Adventure Series and I played it until completion. I have now played the first nine games in the series in order so I feel qualified to make the following statement: This game is hard! There may be some readers who will disagree with me but if we’re ranking the first nine games based on difficulty level I would have to place Ghost Town at the top of the list. I had, up to this moment, thought that his previous game Strange Odyssey was the most difficult but now Mr. Adams has outdone himself.

I have read reviews where players have written that they felt a bit more detached from this game compared to others in the series. I have a theory as to why a few may feel this way. Ghost Town has a degree of difficulty that most games of interactive fiction don’t possess. What you need to do next in the game is not hinted at in witty exposition nor is it initially obvious. You have to metaphorically tease the threads and then pull on them again and again to get the game to give up its secrets to you.

Ghost Town is not a figurative description but a literal one as well. You WILL be dealing with ghosts in this game. The ghostly puzzles in the saloon are diabolical and not easy to solve. The ghostly voice whispering Vain… to me throughout the game had me going to the mirror more than once. WRONG! The contrapositive hint when you step into the jail for the very first time is one of the hardest puzzles in interactive fiction I’ve encountered up to this point.

Good luck dealing with ol’ paint in the stables. This horse will soon be making YOU feel like a jackass who needs his own stall. There are multiple puzzles to solve before you can even ride this animal so believe me when I say that Mr. Adams was not horsing around here.

Ghost Town does not make things easy for the player. There are locations that will only reveal themselves ONLY AFTER specific actions have been taken. The best advice I can give you is to read everything carefully and take nothing for granted. Every word in the game might have a deeper context. For example finding a light source, which is a necessity, is not easily done. Nothing is easily obtained or freely given in the game. Every item obtained is usually a hard fought victory or a puzzle that had to be solved. There is no hand holding here which might explain feelings of detachment by players or a lack of investment by those same players. I may be interpreting this the wrong way but I feel that Mr. Adams was trying to step things up a notch here. I am speculating that the thought process here is that this is the ninth game in a series and that dedicated fans of the series should be ready to graduate to greater challenges. You could see the degree of difficulty jump when introduced to Strange Odyssey and you see that difficulty level ratcheting up another notch here in Ghost Town. The feedback from others is that Savage Island Part One (which would be published later this same year) was his magnum opus or hardest challenge of them all which seems to lend some credence to my theory.

I played the TRS-80 version of Ghost Town on an emulator with no save option. So each time I died I had to start the game over from the beginning. I died often. I struggled finding a light source at first. Once I worked my way through that particular puzzle I died from pneumonia a couple of times as I struggled once again with figurative and literal puzzles. I spent two days this past week with the puzzles in the saloon. Purely diabolical. Blowing the safe was exceedingly difficult. There is an early action that many players may take in the Telegraph Office which can “soft-lock” the game so that you can’t win (yes I had to start over once again). The horse, as I mentioned previously, will cost you some time and mental anguish. Once you solve that puzzle, there will be another one that awaits you but I’m not going to tell you how to solve that one either. The hint in the jail cell leads to what is an extremely hard puzzle to solve and may be THE hardest puzzle encountered in an interactive fiction game so far.

One of the things that I admired the most about Scott Adams in 1979 is that you could see his growth from one game to the next and you could appreciate how he was experimenting with the medium. He moved from typical interactive fiction tropes of the period (the treasure hunt with the obligatory maze) to plots and puzzles which needed to be solved with the items you found. We moved from treasure hunt score awards to story awards. There are those who have said that Mr. Adams seemed to be resting on his laurels with the publication of Ghost Town because he reverts back to the treasure hunt trope. I would disagree with this assessment and argue that, like any artist, he was again taking a canvas or trope that many were familiar with and stepping things up a notch. The player is forced to interact even more with the environment and WORK for the items. This is not a simple game of hide and seek but a puzzle box masquerading as a treasure hunt.

I enjoyed this game and the experience because I felt like Mr. Adams was saying “Ok you want a treasure hunt? HERE is a treasure hunt!” I felt that all of the puzzles were fair (the GO Board and $200 might be borderline lol) and I liked the literal and figurative meaning behind the title of the game. I spent more time with this game than I did with Strange Odyssey and I feel it is one of the more difficult, if not THE most difficult text adventures I have played to date. If you have enjoyed the previous eight installments in this series don’t stop now. Put your big boy pants on, or assless chaps, whichever you prefer, and saddle up for a western themed, pull your hair out puzzle-a-looza.