Zork: The Great Underground Empire (1980) is considered a classic, at least in the adventure genre. Even those who haven't played the game, know the phrase "You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door." or "You are likely to be eaten by a grue". Like many early text adventure games, Zork was at heart a treasure hunt game, where you explored the abandoned underground empire for loot. All the exploring and interaction were done via text. This was a stable for Infocom games, as while the other developers, like Sierra, were pushing out adventure games with graphics, they preferred the text form.
Come to the 1990s, text adventures were a passé. Even PC machines could now produce higher fidelity graphics with more than 16 colors and they had gained proper sound capabilities thanks to sound cards. Activision, who had bought Infocom in the late 1980s, wanted to publish a new Zork title, but it would have to be something entirely different. And that something different was a CD-Rom game with pre-rendered backgrounds and FMV cutscenes with real actors. The name of the game was aptly Return to Zork. For the fans of the series, it was a return to Zork that showed them the former text game in an entirely different form. The previous Zork title, Zork Zero (1989) some had had some graphics, but was still a text adventure. Return to Zork is a full-fledged point-and-click game.
The story of Return to Zork begins at the front of the now-famous white house. You open a mailbox and receive a message that you've won a trip to a beautiful Valley of the Sparrows, but as soon as you learn of the news, something goes wrong. As you enter the valley, via magical means, the first thing you notice is, that it's not habited by sparrows but vultures.
As you venture forth, it becomes increasingly evident, that there's something wrong in the lands of Zork. Buildings and people have vanished and a great sense of dread and unease has grabbed the population. Formerly safe lands have turned into death traps and everyone is waiting for an impending doom to come by.
After some more rummaging and puzzle-solving behind you, the picture begins to turn clearer. Or as clear as it's possible in a world like Zork. Apparently, there's this evil being called Morpheus, who has been gaining more power from his prison behind the veil of illusion, that was cast to imprison him. Now, he is looking for revenge and is just about to achieve it and it is up to you to tackle him for good.
Return to Zork is a 1st person point and click adventure. I hesitate to call it Myst-like, despite it having a similar presentation, as the puzzles in Zork are quite different and the puzzle design is overall closer to a traditional adventure game, down to the possibility to end in a walking dead situation. There are also quite a bit of different verbs on the context-sensitive action icon men. This makes the gameplay pretty interesting, as depending on what you are and where or what you are clicking on the screen, you get different interactions.
When you speak to people, you are also presented with a couple of different ways of speaking with them. You can alter your tone to be indifferent, friendly, questions or antagonistic, and depending on whom you talk with, this can lead to different kinds of responses. The many inhabitants can also be questioned about different items, photos, or even clips of dialogue that are constantly recorded by the ingame tape recorder. All of these can be puzzles as well.
At first, the progression is quite linear. You move from one area to another, solving puzzles on the way. But in the last half, a teleportation option opens up that allows you to move between previously isolated locations, making sure you should not able to hit any dead ends. At least I do believe, there are no dead ends in the game, despite it might seem like it has. You can die though, so if you make a really serious mistake, you'll know about it. Saving often is recommended.
Return to Zork belongs to the small group of those early FMV games that utilized the technology actually well. It's not filled with unskippable, pointless FMVs just for the sake of having them, it's using them to tell the story. The game itself remembers to be a game instead of a vehicle for dozens of unneeded video clips.
Despite being one of the earliest FMV games, Return to Zork is technically a well-made game with some solid puzzles and even the story is interesting and fun enough in a style Zork plots tend to be. While it has seriousness in it, Zork still is more of a humorous and bizarre fantasy world, where anything is possible.
Return to Zork was quite a drastic departure, in terms of gameplay and presentation, from games that had come before it, initially some fans of the originals didn't quite warm up to it, despite largely it was seen as a good game in its own right. It did even win some adventure game of the year awards, despite having to compete with classics like Day of the Tentacle and Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers.
After Return to Zork, Activision published two other FMV Zork titles, Nemesis and my personal favorite Grand Inquisitor. It wasn't all bad run in an FMV era for the old series that began as a tex adventure so many years earlier. And now, after Ken and Roberta Williams released their remake of Colossal Cave, it does make me wonder if it would be a good time for Zork to make a return as well. It would be nice to see more of a story-heavy text adventure brought back in a similar fashion.
Return to Zork is quite readily available at a very reasonable price. You can get it for around 5 bucks from either GOG or Steam. It's also in sales often enough, so with some patience, you can get it cheaper.
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