Item - Conquest at Quendor

Conquest at Quendor starts with a thunderstorm at a junior baseball game. It's different from the usual "oh my goodness the Ring of Zork turned a weird color" summons. But it's sort of nice to have the variety in how Bill and June are summoned to be Bivotar and Juranda. Unfortunately, the book itself is uneven. There's magic aplenty, but it does feel forced, and the antagonist is confusing. Also, there are a few misdirected "go to page X" references.

Biv and Juran wake up in a dungeon which turns out to be in Grawl's castle. Grawl is a powerful warlock that killed them in bad endings previously. They meet a weird cat with no limbs, Jeearr, that taunts them and gives them clues at the same time. It sics scorpions on them and tells where the antidote is. They (and you) keep getting into scrapes and then getting clues. In short order, Fred and Max rescue you, and Syovar fights Grawl. He wins but is gravely injured. This puts Syovar's huge peace conference at the city of Quendor in jeopardy, and it's part of Jeearr's plan. Logrumethar suggests a plan: find the Helm of Zork, which lets someone impersonate anyone else without a chance of magical detection. (Personality is another thing.) There's a spell to get Biv and Juran close, but it only works once.

This is an interesting twist on "kill the big bad guy," but with Jeearr giving cryptic hints along the way, and a few choices being "use the magic bead to return or keep going," it doesn't feel like a full gamebook. Especially since the page progression was linear and the bead kept sending you backwards to page 53. Also, Fred and Max, present early on, don't get to join you. Boo.

The end feels disjointed ... you find the Helm of Zork, and it seems like Jeearr has one final trap planned. Yet the "so close" ending feels anticlimactic. I'd expect a gloating poem from Jeearr e.g. "It must hurt more. So close to peace / Discussions cease / No fate but war." Not top-notch poetry, but I felt left hanging. Which is a big pity, because over the years since reading CoQ, anyone who reminds me of Jeearr generally does turn out to be a bit of a troll, e.g. they eventually give a bit of help, then laugh at you for a mistake. So even though the book itself feels like the weakest in the series, having Jeearr as an idea or warning has been valuable.

Yet I still remember CoQ well, because it explicitly helped with some Zork puzzles, perhaps more than the other books combined: how to get one palantir, how to get the balloon, and even a caution against several in-game deaths, such as the wrong way to use dynamite. I think I got to 145 on Zork 2 just from CoQ's help alone. So I was eagerly awaiting book number five, and it never came. Looking back I realize there were some oblique hints, too, like how to get by Cerberus near the end. This is no big deal with Internet walkthroughs being common, but I'm glad it was there at the time, and it would've been interesting to have more books like that for other Infocom games. I'd have devoured them.

The ending is rather amusing, too. Bill and June are called cowards for hiding from the thunderstorm for five minutes. It's a bit odd, given Bill was the pitcher, how people weren't more confused or worried by all this. Still having a baseball game compared to saving a kingdom is a neat twist on the whole Narnian "come back just after you left" convention.

More reviews by andrewschultz

This book isn't quite as good as the previous two, though it's certainly not bad. It simply suffers from some fairly lame riddles and a rather illogical and underused opponent. The book has the requisite trap for cheaters, but it doesn't work right, probably because of a copy editing error; it should keep returning to page 68 forever, but it instead leads on to page 70.

More reviews by Demian

I would say this dungeon-crawl is on about the same level of quality as the other three adventures in the series. Both the riddles and the demon that confronts the reader are indeed quite lame; however, what I really found off-putting is that the book does not really break any new ground and feels very redundant if you have read other Zork gamebooks previously. You will not miss anything if you just give it a pass.

More reviews by Guillermo