Hunter, in Darkness review More than one work of IF has revolved around an in-joke of sorts, a premise with significance to IF veterans or historians but inscrutable to anyone else, and Andrew Plotkin's Hunter, in Darkness is one of them, on one level. It sends up the early-'70s BASIC computer game Hunt the Wumpus, a pre-Colossal Cave relic that offers the player, with almost no description, the following possibilities: killing a Wumpus, getting eaten by the Wumpus, getting attacked by bats, or falling into a pit. A player familiar with the original can therefore begin Hunter... and note in short order that there is a Wumpus, a pit, and some bats involved, and consign the thing to the in-joke category.

Hunter... isn't just an in-joke, though; the real joke that it plays on the source material is that it turns one of the most tersely described caves possible ("You are in Room 1. Passages lead to Room 2 and Room 3") into one of the best-described settings imaginable. Not only is the cave vividly rendered, but the PC's experience of it is thoroughly, and harrowingly, done; no "cave crawl" in IF has ever taken such a toll on the PC over the course of the game. As in the source material, you're hunting a Wumpus, but here the player suffers at least as much as the Wumpus over the course of the game, and the cave is just as much an enemy as the Wumpus itself; finding a safe way down a pit and surviving a tight crawl are some of the problems at hand. It's worth noting that the caves of the classic cave crawls were largely innocuous; the danger in Colossal Cave, Zork, and others came largely from sentient enemies scattered around the landscape, not from the geography itself. Here, surviving the cave is most of the challenge. As with Plotkin's previous works, the writing is skillful; most of the five senses are at work throughout the game, and the descriptions often reflect a multisensory experience. The beginning of the game sets the tone: 

Nearly -- nearly. The animal stink is rank and close. You raise your
crossbow, try to peer beyond dark, wet stone.

smell
The stink of your prey is all around.

Something shifts in the darkness ahead, a great silent bulk. Your prey.

As the cave is very nearly a character in its own right, it is appropriate that the level of geological detail is high. ("Needles of yellow calcite spray from the rocks nearby.") Moreover, the layout of the cave as a whole makes sense in ways that most IF caves do not; you find standing water when you descend, for instance, and there is running water at the base of a canyon. Small details like this help make Hunter... such a well-realized setting that it puts most other cave crawls to shame; few cave games since Colossal Cave have given geology even token acknowledgment, after all.

As a game, Hunter... works quite well. The plot branches and rejoins at certain key points, so there is some replay potential, though the paths don't, fundamentally, differ all that much (at least, not the ones I discovered; I may be wrong). One element of the final confrontation feels somewhat contrived, but not inappropriately so, and the solution to it is nicely subversive--you pit the elements of the cave against one another, in a sense, rather than conquering them yourself. Moreover, the course of the story calls into question the hunt itself, since you find along the way that you are chasing something with considerable intelligence, making the showdown more a battle of wits than an act of violence. The puzzles are well-designed and not too hard; they draw on understanding and being aware of the cave environment, moreover, rather than applying items to problems, which helps them feel part of the story rather than artificial barriers.

The technical aspect of the game is admirable, as one might expect from Zarf; particularly good is a maze with randomly generated descriptions that can be infinitely large. Some will object to the inclusion of the maze at all, of course, but this is one of the more creative mazes in IFdom and as such gets a pass from me--no mapping is required, for one thing, and the random generation brings to mind real caves, which aren't limited to a defined number of rooms. Likewise, the disabling of compass directions strikes a blow for verisimilitude, since cave navigation is typically too complicated for anyone to preserve a clear sense of direction; instead, the game provides "forward," "left," "right," and such, and I found I didn't miss my compass at all.

But the best thing about Hunter... is the setting. It is worth remembering exactly how many IF games have been set in caves or some equivalent--the answer is "many"--in order to appreciate the way this game brings the cave- crawl genre alive. The nature of a complex underground cave poses many obstacles, only some of which Hunter explores--darkness, water filling a passage, steep climbs--along with predators, of course. A little imagination helps the setting come to life in a way that makes puzzles for their own sake unnecessary, and Hunter... illustrates how much a little creativity can do. By making the cave itself the subject of the game rather than the excuse for a grab bag of artificial puzzles, Zarf reminds the player that a cave is more than an excuse for lazy fantasy storytelling; here, after all, the cave not only is the enemy, it wins most of the battles.

Hunter... is therefore less an update on Hunt the Wumpus than an rebuke to the IF that has followed Wumpus but failed in certain significant respects to improve on it by giving the setting its due. It's one of the most vividly written pieces of IF in recent memory, and I gave it a 9, the highest score I gave any entry in this year's competition.