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Review by aschultz
June 12, 2009

Infocom's text adventures were usually better at being funny than serious. For example, Zork I and II were better games than Zork III. But Trinity, based on your efforts to prevent the first atom bomb from exploding, works, and staggeringly well. It places you, as a tourist, in Kensington Gardens, with the first missile of World War III about to land. You find a deformed lady, take an interesting transport to the shore, and enter a white door you'll see again later, to wind up in a place called the Wabe.

This surreal between-world connects to six other locations, depending on which white mushroom-door the world's sun reveals, the final one being Los Alamos in the forties. Animals seem to want something, a mysterious voice (you never do find its identity) encourages you vaguely, you have a Klein Bottle that disrupts the landscape, and you have other predators to dismantle. But here is the biggest puzzle: how do you get to the side locations and get back out, before an atomic bomb explodes there? Each one has a critical item and has even greater urgency than in Kensington Gardens. The first time in, you'll probably get stuck in these places. Then you'll solve one, or you'll think you'll solve one, and the door back to the Wabe will be blocked.

And that is a theme throughout the game of Trinity, that you just don't have enough to change things as you need them, even after you solve them. It's not the parser's fault, or yours, or society's. The items seem so hopelessly nonviolent, but often you have to use them against each other, or themselves, or animals in the Wabe. You often need to communicate with animals nonverbally or even force them to do certain things, and the descriptions readily lend themselves to whatever irregular verbs you need. It's just that there will be places you know you are helpless, where you know a puzzle is based on a popular myth or common knowledge, or even that you have limited turns to do B once you've done A, but you can't quite figure how to get through it. For example, in the Wabe, your game score from solving puzzles may initially rank you as a tourist. Then you solve a few puzzles, and you're an Explorer. Maybe you missed something in the seemingly-easy England scene?

As Trinity goes on, you meet characters and animals who will die after you jump back in the white doors, and later you face difficult problems in possibly having to kill some animals to reach the time-portal to Los Alamos, where you must sneak around the guards to attempt to disable the bomb. Even dying provides a clue to how to get there, and once you are, it becomes a race against time. This part is probably harder than the Wabe, and here, your death provides you with clues as to the ending. It's hard not to be consumed by the blast, and shortly you realize that you can only hope to contain the damage here, just as you did at the other bomb sites.

If you can only play a few Infocom games, Trinity must be at the top, because it is almost as distinctive as the very best game, Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Both start in England with the Earth's destruction imminent. They offer time travel, quirky puzzles, and well-imagined terrains. It relies on literature, in this case classic and not contemporary, but little else is similar. In Trinity, you generally avoid finger-pointing at the powerful and stupid, and you learn about death instead of clever slapstick trivia. While both games end with a mixture of hope and futility, they couldn't be more different in how they get there. Trinity manages to be understated, to add the additional sense of helplessness of solving puzzles to what is already a difficult story--of the creation of the atom bomb, of how it seemed inevitable, and how much of it you can stop, with both time-travel technology and magic on your side. As it manages to steer clear of cold-war rhetoric or reactions to it, focusing on the ethereal Wabe and a hide-and-seek game against soldiers doing their duty, it is still relevant today.

Rating: 9/10

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Staff Score (Avg): N/A User Score (Avg): 9.0 Press Score (Avg): N/A
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Title: Trinity
Genre: Unknown
Developer: Unknown
Platforms: PC, AST, Apple II

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