Fellowship of the Ring, The - Part 2

When a computer tries to adapt Tolkien's epic into games, it doesn't always go smoothly. Fellowship of the Ring: Part 2 from 1986 proves it — it's a text adventure that awaited you in MS-DOS with only a paper manual and your own ingenuity. The game gives you a list of commands, a map of Middle-earth, and the rest you have to figure out yourself.

You find yourself in Moria — a dark chasm where a party of hobbits, dwarves, and Gandalf must fight their way through monsters. You alternate between text descriptions of rooms and typing commands like NORTH, TAKE, USE, or CAST. There's no graphics or sound, just words on a black background and your imagination. Required reading of the manual to tell you who's who and why you should care about anything.

The game is challenging on a trial-and-error basis. Some things you solve logically, others are hard to guess — characteristic of adventure games from that era. A magic word could be anything, a boulder falls on your head and you need to know exactly what happened three rooms back. There's not even a way to save mid-game and come back — just simple states. The pace is slow, testing takes time, frustrating moments alternate with the feeling of victory when you finally manage to get past the bench with Gandalf's staff.

Part 2 focuses on the middle of the story — the escape through Moria and the challenges that follow. The game respects the book, but in text form it means that a lot of the atmosphere and tension stays just in you. You have to provide it yourself. It's not a gripping novel, more like an instruction manual with broken logic.

Today you can play it through nostalgia or curiosity. Emulators and online archives offer it, the manual too. If you love old text adventures and want to uncover their secrets through trial and error, it's an interesting relic from a time when games didn't rely on graphics, just on your brain and patience.