Jailbreak is the third game I’ve played from Roger M. Wilcox’s collection of games that he wrote from 1980 to 1983. You begin the game in a jail cell with your only exit a locked door with a guard standing outside. You have nothing on you for inventory nor is there anything in the room to aid you in any way.
I had no difficulty at all with the puzzles in Wilcox’s previous two games: Misadventure and Star Cruiser. However with Jailbreak I was absolutely stymied from the get go. I tried to interact with the guard and I tried various ways to even kill the guard; all to no affect. I finally had to head to the internet hoping to find a hint or a solution as to how to exit the jail cell.
I am glad that I did decide to look for a hint. I may never have left the opening screen and this blog could have ground to a halt for weeks on end. The solution was to type in Throw Voice (yes I’m not kidding) . If you type in Throw Voice the guard reacts by running down the hall and dropping his set of keys in the process. So we went from two games where the puzzles were fairly straight forward to a game where the opening sequence was almost impossible to solve.
The rest of the puzzles in the game posed no problem and I found the game to be shorter than the previous two games in the collection. You have to deal with a second security guard and you do so by shooting him with a loaded pistol that you find in a secret room off of an office.
You’ll also find a means by which you can sneak by the warden and leave the prison. Once you’re outside the prison you’ll buy a shovel and then dig up evidence in a nearby field which was extremely convenient. The courthouse is right next door to the prison so once you have the uncovered evidence you present it to a judge who then overturns your sentence and finds you innocent.
Never mind the fact that you shot a guard in cold blood and killed him while escaping from prison. I’m not clear how the evidence you needed to exonerate yourself was conveniently buried in a field next to the prison either. This was the weakest of the three games I’ve experienced from Mr. Wilcox. When you’re exploring a dungeon or an alien vessel that’s landed in your hometown there is an automatic suspension of disbelief because you’re dealing with the fantastical. With a game like Jailbreak you’re looking for the plot to make some practical sort of sense and unfortunately in this game it just doesn’t.
The second problem I had was the locked room puzzle in the opening sequence. I view it almost as a parser issue because I never would have thought to type in Throw Voice on my own. This was a problem with some of the text adventures in the early 80’s. The authors, in an attempt to ratchet up the difficulty level in a game, would include a puzzle that was almost impossible to solve. I spent probably a good 45 minutes trying just about everything I could think of to escape the jail cell before having to resort to looking for a solution. I did like the originality of how the game begins and I also liked how you had to figure out how to get past the warden.
Despite some problems with this particular offering I am looking forward to the next game in Roger M. Wilcox’s collection. I am going to take a break from the text adventures in 1980 and move forward again in time to 1982 and play the next three CRPG’s on my list from that year.