Anchorhead Reviews

Great text adventure with excellent writing. The puzzles are demanding but never illogical or frustrating, at least if you take notes during the first third of the game, or so. The game is known to be unforgiving in that you can run into dead ends without being warned immediately. However, if you keep this in mind and are a bit careful, it is not too hard to avoid. It mostly means not destroying items without need or leaving them behind in places you cannot return to. Also, saving often and under different file names is a good idea. I'd highly recommend this to anyone with even a remote interest in text-based games and the setting, even without much prior text adventure experience. In the latter case, however, I'd suggest keeping a clue list at hand. There is a great one available on the interactive fiction forum: https://intfiction.org/t/anchorhead-2018-invisiclues-hints/49044

Anchorhead is a great example of the IF genre, and is truly Lovecraftian to its core. Interacting with the world and exploring is interesting and I found the pace of the story developments to be just right. The atmosphere is excellent and when played together with some minimalist dark ambient it really comes alive for me. I recommend this game for anyone into dark and interesting storytelling. Also do save a lot while playing the game.

A very well-written text adventure with plenteous references to Lovecraft (numerous story elements and tropes combined from several stories). The puzzles are sometimes hard and sometimes easy; with even a minor hint they can usually be solved, though some require thinking outside the box a little (not just using the obvious items in the obvious ways). The story is quite good, as is the writing and the sense of building excitement as the game progresses. Being a big weird fiction/cosmic horror fan, I can say this is one of the most faithful (maybe THE most faithful) game out there which draws on that literature. It's definitely worth the price on Steam.

If you never really got into text adventures because you were too young back then to understand them. AND you jumped right into graphics adventures and dug those but find them a bit too easy theses days, then you should probably give this one a try! It works exceptionally well as a first text adventure experience when you have all the background knowledge of how a graphics adventure works and that a text adventure just gives you more options to interact with the environment. Give it a few hours and it will suck you in for days and days to come where you unravel a dark tale around sensitive topics like incest and child abuse with a long history all nested in a town in New England named Anchorhead. It is so well written and illustrated that it really triggers your imagination much more than any modern game with graphics and sounds and all the other bells and whistles does. One tip: Draw a simple map from the beginning with all the rooms and places and how they connect! Makes navigating through the game a piece of cake.

Very well writtened horror text adventure game. Don't feel bad about using a guide, however - its one of *those* games where its not always clear what you're doing may softlock or straight up kill you due to misdirection. Take notes, make a map, and get lost in this creepy and wet ass town.

Very enjoyable old school text based adventure with illustrations. Save a LOT, because this game has timed elements where you need to execute multiple moves in sequence in some areas, and it will let you break the game if you lose items or fail to pick them up when you need to. Great writing and atmosphere.

This game becomes functionally impossible if you don't take your husband's university ID on the morning of Day 2. If you have any interest in playing this game blind, take that bit of knowledge onboard right now. Remember it, and DO NOT let yourself progress past the morning of Day 2 unless you have that ID. Do not read further. If you're still here, I'll assume you're willing to risk spoilers. So - as I said, Anchorhead becomes impossible to complete if you don't get that ID on the morning of Day 2. Now, that's not automatically a problem, you might say. This is a game - it's got fail states, it's got things you have to do before you can proceed. No problem. Thing is, you will not discover this or realize this until you get stuck halfway through Day 3, and resort to google searching where you got stuck. Is the game well-written? Without a doubt. I loved it from the beginning, and I loved it even more as it ramped up to higher levels of intensity from Day 3 on. And everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, fell apart for me when I realized that this goddamn game REQUIRES you to get that ID on Day 2, take it to the university, and read about Croseus Verlac. Because if you don't, you will never know who the fuck that even is, and you will not have the knowledge required to solve a crucial puzzle in the game. You think maybe you can just check the university on Day 3 instead? Nope, fuck you, it's blocked by rioters. And the game waited until I was engaged, well engaged and well committed into Day 3, to let me realize this. So, honest to God, fuck this game. Sure, it didn't cost a lot of money. I still wish I could get a refund. I've already spoiled what the solution is to the puzzle because I couldn't figure it the fuck out, and hey, surprise, it's because THERE IS NO WAY TO FIGURE IT OUT. It relies on knowledge that you are in no way, shape, or form required to get in order to end Day 2, and there is NO WAY other than resorting to Google to find out that that's even the issue. Spend your money elsewhere.

Anchorhead is my favorite interactive fiction game, my favorite Lovecraftian game, and one of my favorite video games, period. The atmosphere and setting of Anchorhead are unparalleled in their immersive strangeness, and this is thanks to the wonderfully evocative prose and both the limits and opportunities of parser-based interaction. Text-based storytelling works especially well for this genre -- graphics can never do justice in representing Cosmic Horror. I'm very happy to see Anchorhead now on Steam with what look to be apt illustrations (they hint more than spell out with too much-ness) and apparently genuinely *remade* from the cobbles up (Michael Gentry's preface to the game was fascinating in its own right on such questions, and well worth reading). On the technical side, I'm especially pleased that the game allows for multiple settings for changing fonts, margins, zoom-in level, and colors. I always play text games, when possible, with black background and lighter lettering -- so I'm grateful I can do that here! For Anchorhead, it's also emblematic of the feeble attempts at generating light over and against overwhelming darkness.... Very highly recommended.

After many years of IF abstinence, I've discovered the re-release of Anchorhead. It was my first time with the game so I can't compare it to the free version. I've managed to play to the very end with two hints from a kind community member and here are my thoughts. Pros: + exceptionally well written game + captivating plot and strong feeling of a real place + huge attention to detail and variance (environments, events, etc. etc.) + lively characters + the plot doesn't parasite on existing Lovecraft tales, but it draws the inspiration from lovecraftian universe + I enjoyed the illustrations + most of the time, enough clues were given + undo command Cons: - very, very unforgiving! Many dead ends requiring partial replays so save often! (think Dark Souls :) ) - the game doesn't communicate you are in an unwinnable state, forcing you to roam around aimlessly - sometimes the descriptions are too vague given how critical the outcome is. [spoiler]entrance to the old foundation workshop[/spoiler] - areas are getting locked so if you forget critical item, you are once again lost, sometimes you need to carry around very counterintuitive item - sewer area can be accessed from the very beginning through a pipe. If you do so, you are endlessly stuck. I believe this is more of a game bug than a design feature. I recommend this game to IF enthusiast in case they are not afraid of replaying portions of the game. Save often and take breaks because some of the solutions are ingenious yet totally out of the box. As time is a factor in the game, not everytime you can do everything on your first scene entry. If you decide to give the game a go, save often under different names so you don't have to replay the whole game when you reach one of the many dead ends. Still my overall impression stays. I had a blast with Anchorhead and hope to play more such a games from Michael Gentry.

Usually I'm not a big fan of parser IFs (it's too much like managing *nix server. Btw, I managed to close game by pressing Ctrl+W when trying to delete a word, good thing it has autosave), but this is pure classic. Also it's Lovecraftian and has nice illustrations (which remind me Sunless Sea for some reason).