Leather Goddesses of Phobos

Year 1986, Infocom at the peak of their powers and someone in their offices said: what if we made a text adventure game packed with B-movie sexual humor inspired by pulpy sci-fi magazines from the fifties? Management nodded. Thus Leather Goddesses of Phobos was born.

The game is a pure-blooded text adventure — no graphics, no animations, just a parser and your imagination. The story throws you into a situation where you're abducted by the titular leather goddesses from Phobos, a moon of Mars, and you must thwart their plans for Earth. The setting is intentionally over-the-top, right in the spirit of those cheap sci-fi paperbacks where every alien woman looks like a model and every plan to conquer the universe is both absurd and indecent. You can play as a male or female character, which in 1986 was far from a given.

The controls are classic Infocom parser — you type commands in English, the game processes them. The engine is solid, handles relatively natural phrasing, and Infocom was simply the best in the world at this back then. The puzzles are brilliant in places, frustrating in others in a way we now consider a historical artifact rather than design. The game also offered three difficulty modes with varying levels of explicit content — from tasteful to "adults only" — which was quite a bold gesture for the time, though even the loosest setting's explicitness is more suggestive than explicit. A parser simply has no pixels.

What Leather Goddesses brought was unapologetic, confident humor. Infocom could write — Zork, Hitchhiker's Guide, Plundered Hearts — and here too it's clear that people behind the keyboard genuinely enjoyed writing nonsense with style. The game isn't ashamed of its B-movie nature; rather, it wears it like a badge of honor. Today it's aged somewhat unevenly: the humor still lands, the parser is true to period practice including its dead ends, and a few puzzles will give you grief in ways modern gamers used to autosave and hints might not appreciate.

Who will enjoy it today? Text adventure fans wanting something lighter than Zork and less gritty than Plundered Hearts. People who love pulp sci-fi and don't mind pointy, straightforward humor. You can play it in your browser without installation, without DOSBox, and if English doesn't bother you, you'll spend a pleasant few evenings with it — or one frustrated one, depending on your relationship with eighties text adventure logic.