Curses is an interactive fiction computer game created by Graham Nelson in 1993. It is the first major interactive fiction work written in the Inform programming language (which was also developed by Nelson). It is distributed without charge as a Z-Code executable. The Inform source code is not publicly available. Appearing in the beginning of the non-commercial era of interactive fiction, it is considered one of the milestones of the genre. The player takes the part of a young English aristocrat, who in the course of searching the attic for an old tourist map of Paris steps into a surreal adventure to uncover a curse that has been placed on the family.

Innovations

Curses contains some innovations that contribute to its appeal.

• Managing the player's inventory by automatically placing items in a container to make room for an object needed in hand (such as placing an item in the rucksack when reading an entry in a book), eliminating the tedium of having to manually drop one item before picking up another.

• Commands places and objects, displaying all the locations visited and all the objects seen during the game.

In addition, the game contains some amusing meta-jokes:

• Temporarily giving the player bonus points for a "good try" while solving a puzzle, and then taking the points away several turns later because "the score only gets in a muddle this way".

• Responding "You've played this game before." when the player uses knowledge obtainable only from a previous session.

• In-game hints provided by a demon who gives consistently misleading answers ("No, Hell itself is a marvellous place, and it has an excellent health club too.").

External links

• Baf's Guide to Interactive Fiction entry has some coverage and provides links to the original release (version 7) and the most recent release (version 16).

1993 computer and video games | Interactive fiction

Curses (videogioco)