Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz

Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz continues the exploration of the Great Underground Empire that players first visited in the original game, this time from a different entry point and with new, more intricate locations. The central new feature is the eccentric Wizard of Frobozz, a wandering sorcerer who casts random spells on the player with unpredictable, often comical consequences — he might turn the player into an animal, teleport them elsewhere, or otherwise complicate their path. The game is controlled purely through a text parser: the player types commands in natural language and the game responds with descriptions of the world, which was typical of Infocom across all platforms. The game also includes a number of separate minigames and puzzle rooms that differ from the main maze in both pace and rules, so the player never quite knows what awaits behind the next door.

On the Atari 8-bit, Zork II takes the same form as on other computers — no graphics, just text, which was due both to Infocom's technology (the Z-machine) and the company's philosophy of relying on the power of the written word and the player's imagination. The puzzles are well thought out and require systematic exploration of the surroundings, combining items, and experimenting with commands, sometimes to the point of player frustration, which was characteristic of the whole Zork series. The parser was considered one of the most advanced on the market at the time of release, able to handle more complex sentences with conjunctions and pronouns, and the game could be saved to disk at any point and returned to later.

The second entry in the trilogy today feels like a solid, well-crafted follow-up that doesn't surpass the originality of the first Zork but deepens its world, humor, and sense of absurdity. For players interested in the origins of interactive fiction, Zork II remains an example of how far the genre could be pushed using text alone, without a single image, a single note of music, or a single animation.

Why play it: For those interested in the origins of interactive fiction, Zork II offers a deepened world and the humor of the first game, even though it doesn't surpass its predecessor's originality.