Where Evil Dwells -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Author(s): Steve Owens and Paul T. Johnson Genre: Lovecraftian/Humor Language: en First Publication Date: 1998 License: Freeware Rating: 2.5 (based on 4 ratings) ABOUT THE STORY A few short hours ago you were in your private investigator's office sleeping- er, concentrating hard on your work when a frightened young girl named Elizabeth came to you with a sinister tale. [--blurb from The Z-Files Catalogue] EXTERNAL LINKS evil.z5 Requires a Z-Code interpreter[1] evil.txt Walkthrough EDITORIAL REVIEWS >INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction > Where Evil Dwells is subtitled "A Creative Differences Production", and the > billing is apt. This is a story that doesn't know what it wants to be. It > starts out in Gritty Detective mode: you're a grizzled private eye, brought > to a creepy house by the tale of distressed young girl. However, once you > get into the house and roll up one of the rugs, you are confronted by dust > bunnies who "glare accusingly at you." Say what? This is not a metaphor. The > dust bunnies are implemented as actual, animate creatures. Oh, OK, so this > will be a supernatural twist on detective adventures. But wait. In another > room, you find a series of collector's plates depicting "scenes from Samuel > Beckett's lesser known children's play 'Waiting for Godot to Finish Up in > the Bathroom So I Can Go.'" Well, that's just plain silly. When this picture > is combined with the article you find on "getting ectoplasmic residue stains > out of linen", Evil starts to look like a Ghostbusters-style comedy with, > uh, detective influence and, er, maybe a strong inclination towards > silliness. But perhaps not, because once you get into the forest, you might > find yourself in a "broken and bloodied heap" facing an "impossibly large > behemoth", shivering while "true horror sets in as it leands [sic] its > malefic head through the gap, its eyes fixed intently on you." Wow, horror. > You don't expect broken and bloodied heaps in Ghostbusters-style comedies. > That's what the whole game is like. Its tone staggers drunkenly from one > room to the next, sometimes from one response to the next. Some rare works > can actually pull this off, bringing all the disparity together into a > harmonious whole. Where Evil Dwells is not one of those works. Instead, the > differences undermine each other, and every time a solid tone gets > established for the story it is promptly squashed by whatever comes next. SynTax > This is not a huge game, but it was quite fun to play, and there were one or > two quite tricky puzzles. [...] There were one or two glaring bugs, none of > which stopped the game being finished, but did spoil the effect somewhat. REFERENCES [1]