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This acclaimed horror text adventure was inspired by the horror writings of
H.P. Lovecraft and wriiten by the co-writer of Zork. The game starts with the player
trying to finish a term paper at
G.U.E. Tech, a large MIT-like American University. The player has braved a snowstorm
to travel to the school's computer lab to work on the report. The document is now
mangled beyond repair, however; with the help of a hacker, the player finds that the
file has been partially overwritten by the School of Alchemy's files. Although the
game begins as a quest to try to salvage the term paper, alarming events soon unfold,
revealing a powerful evil within the school's depths. What began as a mere snowstorm has strengthened into a full-force blizzard. Much of the campus is deserted and covered in snowdrifts, rendering walkways impassable. The only accessible avenues are steam tunnels
and a small complex of buildings. In the course of unraveling the mystery, the player
encounters demons, zombies and sinister references to a recent campus suicide. Failing
to set things right in the hidden passages beneath the school will result in a literal
fate worse than death. The Lurking Horror was one of Infocom's first titles to feature
sound. Creepy sound effects would play at appropriate times in the game in an effort to
intensify the horror atmosphere. This marked one of the only major additions to the
Z-machine with the exception of graphics; traditionally, Infocom had scorned such
changes in favor of expanding the parser capacity and overall size of game files. |
