Spellbreaker completes the Enchanter trilogy and is by far the best-written, most interactive, and fun of the three to play. Instead of fighting against an evil wizard or a powerful overlord, this interactive fiction (text adventure) game is aimed at a combination of self-discovery and a discovery of the foundations of magic itself in the land of Zork.
The game starts off in the Council Chamber, where wizards and heads of the various trade guilds are complaining about how magic that they have come to rely upon over many years is no longer working as it should.
The player character, who has recently come to be the head of the wizards after the successes garnered in Enchanter and Sorcerer, is being looked to by all to solve this dilemma and get the world working as it has come to expect, with magic facilitating the production of goods and services to create a thriving economy.
Throughout the game, the player character discovers many "cubes", each one of which transports the player to different regions in the game. By amassing the cubes (which, incidentally, requires clever inventory management), the player character discovers the foundations of magic and why magic has stopped working reliably.
Several difficult puzzles exist in the game, including one of the most difficult in any Infocom game that resembles the famous 12-ball
problem where one has three weighings in which to guess the differently-weighted ball. In this case, there are 12 cubes and two piles, with three attempts at the 'jindak' spell allowed before the guards are alerted to your presence, enter, and kill you.
The magic system works in the way as it did in the other Enchanter series games, where spells have to be copied into the spell book (via the now-familiar 'gnusto' spell), and memorized before they can be cast. In this game however, due to the fact that magic is not reliable, one sometimes must memorize spells multiple times or rely on saving and restoring the game frequently in case the spell does not work on the first attempt.
The end-game is extremely complex, where events have to be completed in a precise order and frequently within a specified time limit in order to allow the player character successful passage to the next phase of the game. Just when the player is expected to win the game, a final twist can cause the universe to come to a horrific reckoning under a new world order, giving the player character a negative score. Successful completion of the whole game gives the player character the maximum point total and the rank of 'Scientist', which will make sense once you complete the game.
All in all, this is a very challenging game but well worth every moment of it. A must for any interactive fiction enthusiast!
