Enclosure [v1.01]

Enclosure is a fan-made adventure from 2004, presented here in its polished 1.01 release. It looks like a lost Sierra title from the late eighties, but no studio was involved: a small team going by Femo Duo built it in NAGI, a free re-implementation of the AGI interpreter that powered Sierra's early adventures. Sixteen colours, chunky resolution, beeps instead of music and commands typed at a parser, every detail of the pastiche is in place.

The story is unusually dark for the form. You play Mike Goodman, a small-time con artist who stages fake seances with his girlfriend Sarah. When a man named William Mayfield offers him money to investigate an abandoned drilling station in Greenland, deserted by his father's crew after mysterious events and sightings, it looks like easy cash. Then the helicopter crashes, the expedition is stranded in the ice, and things begin happening around the station that no staged seance could prepare anyone for.

It plays exactly like old Sierra: you steer Mike with the arrow keys or mouse and type everything else, from opening doors to using objects. The atmosphere of polar isolation, clearly indebted to Carpenter's The Thing, is built with surprising care, and the austere graphics oddly make it denser rather than weaker. Expect the genre's old vices too: hunting for the exact wording of a command, and a period-authentic lack of mercy towards the curious.

Taken whole, Enclosure is one of the best tributes to the AGI era, honest in its craft and equally honest in copying the bad habits of its models. It is not long, and its horror core rewards patient players; the authors later revisited the material in a 3D remaster, which says something about the original's standing.

You can play Enclosure directly in your browser on oldgame.cz, no installation required.