Wishbringer

Year 1985, evening, me and green text on a black monitor. No graphics, no sound — just a cursor, keyboard, and a sentence: "You are a postal worker in the town of Festeron." And yet I didn't go anywhere.

Wishbringer is a text adventure from Infocom, the studio that practically defined the genre in the eighties. The setting is fairy-tale-like — a small seaside town called Festeron, a mysterious package to deliver, an evil Witch, and a stone called Wishbringer that can grant wishes. On paper it sounds like a children's tale. In practice, it's exactly that — but meant as a compliment. The game targets less experienced players and is honest about it from the first screen.

You control the story with classic text commands: GO NORTH, TAKE ENVELOPE, EXAMINE STONE. Infocom always had the best parser in the business, and Wishbringer is no exception — it understands more natural phrasing better than most of the competition back then. The puzzles are designed so frustration doesn't overshadow the fun. The Wishbringer stone gives you a limited number of wishes that can solve some puzzles an alternative way. It's an elegant idea — a safety net for beginners, an unnecessary crutch for experienced players who proudly ignore it.

What Wishbringer brought was a deliberate opening of the genre. Infocom back then could write Zork and Hitchhiker — games where the parser was happy to kill you for a poorly chosen phrase. Here they went a different route on purpose. The atmosphere is dense, at times genuinely unsettling — the nighttime transformation of Festeron into something darker still works today. The prose is brief but precise. And the physical package in the box, a plastic Wishbringer stone, was more than a marketing trick in 1985 — it was a physical artifact that pulled you into the world before you even started playing.

Today the game has aged gracefully. The text parser requires some patience from anyone who came to adventures through point-and-click. The shorter length — by today's standards you can finish it in one afternoon — is more of an advantage. Wishbringer fits comfortably for anyone who wants to sample Infocom's golden age without spending hours staring at a dead end. Fire it up in your browser via online Inform/Z-machine interpreters in two minutes. No installation, no DOSBox. Just you and green text.