There are six Zork games for PC worth knowing. Three of them are text adventures, followed by three more standard adventure games for PC. The text adventures are hilarious though all but impossible to get very far into. They are ridiculously difficult, mostly due to quirky inventories and how they are used. First released in 1977, Zork 1 became the father figure for most adventure games that followed. Return to Zork, the game under discussion here, was released by Activision in 1993, in the same month that Myst was released. Two more different games could not be imagined. Though I love both of them, at least Myst was playable without having an IQ of 160 and a completely warped sense of what to do next in a game. When I originally played RTZ (March 2000) I found the game impossible to get very far without hints and a newly available walk through guide, and never managed to finish it. People would congregate on forums trading ideas as to how to progress. Hardly anyone ever finished the game back then, and I daresay no one ever did without the solutions in front of them.
So this review is really of a 2026 walk through, which took us about 5 hours. Without a walk through in hand frustration will quickly erase any humourous moments the game provides. And it provides plenty of humour. The game follows the lead of the text adventures in its absurdity and unabashed use of very confusing mazes. Yes, there are several mazes and none of them are the least bit fun. While the humour helps support the game (in walk through mode), the graphics are a complete let down. After playing Myst and trying this game, I was hugely disappointed back in the day to see what had been done with Zork. I might have preferred the text games at the time.
The game opens at the boarded up white house as the man that lives there goes out to check for mail. Soon he, and we, are sucked into the land of Zork, and our adventure begins on a hilltop overlooking a wide valley with a road leading down towards adventure land. It all seems so exciting and fun.
Things I really like about the game are the different characters one encounters, including a cow that eats carrots and will only give milk if your hands are warm enough. We meet a wood fairy, a bowman, a mayor, a blacksmith, a guy with a boat to take us across to the witch, a schoolteacher, some dwarves, a drunkard who wants to share his rye, a lighthouse keeper, a comedy club manager and a waif. Now we come to a few of the puzzles. How about trying to figure out that one must capture several rats to power an outboard motor on a boat? Or lighting hay on fire in a barn, after feeding carrots to a cow, so you can warm your hands and milk her using a thermos? How about burning a bra in an incinerator to retrieve a wire in which to pick a lock? These are all very funny, but damned near impossible to figure out.
Be prepared to die often, get robbed, and even get turned into a bog rat a few times by a witch who needs to be appeased. You can be killed by grues at the hotel and booed out of the comedy club (that hurts). And don't get me started on the bat guano, or the duck Canuk, or the joke book method. Turning to the game's music for a moment, much of it is midi fun time. I especially liked the Fools Monument theme. However, if stuck on a puzzle, the music anywhere can be extremely annoying.
Don't expect to go through this game alone. Come prepared with a very good hint system, which will get you places, though not all places, and a walk through guide. Even with both it still took us five hours to get through the game. Expect to spent eternity in there without help. The game ran fine on Steam though the graphics are very pixelated. Funny and enjoyable with help. Frustrating and maddening without.
