Blessed are the amnesiacs, for they’ll never cease to be amazed. Blessed too, are all god's creatures (great and small, every nasty hornet, every snake that bites etc), and especially the western human children, that have been extra-blessed with access to the internet (and apparently an abundance of food and water). They might be carrying the burden of feeling bad after too much staring at screens, will never lay their greedy hands on the 100$ (well, 130$ actually) laptop, but they also get to play ‘Thy Dungeonman 3: Behold thy Graphics!!’. For free and in their nice browser's window. Preferably by following this link.
Dungeonman 3, just like its predecessor, the appropriately named Dungeonman 2, is an adventure game. A text adventure game, or to be more precise a piece of interactive fiction. Some would even go as far as calling it a post-meta-text-adventure, others might add it was developed by Videlectrix. Point is, you get to type commands, and get mostly sarcastic responses from your PC. You also get to look at retro-themed graphics and experience something like PC-beeper sounds, and an Apple II’s disk drive humm between screens. So far so good.
What's really special about this game though, is the brilliant writing. Playing DM3 will help you live some of those rare and rumored instances, when you actually laugh in front of your monitor to the sheer astonishment of your lovely companion or your hated boss. Well, at least I did. Of course. I also tend to find white walls extremely amusing. Oh, and the cliched fantasy, Dungeons and Dragons parody setting. The parser isn’t that bad either. It is a bit limited though.
Anyway. It's a great game. Really. If you ever enjoyed Zork, then play Dungeonman 3, if you really believe that text-adventures live and die on their writing, then play Dungeonman 3, if you have never played a piece of interactive fiction, then play Dungeonman 3, if your connection isn’t fast enough, then play Dungeonman 3, if you’ve got broadband, then play Dungeonman 3, if you can’t read/write English, then don’t. It’s in English.
Conquering the ever-elusive “yon flask” (the main objective of DM3) might last something less than a couple of hours (it’s not so difficult, and we’ve even got a nice walkthrough for you), but it will be the laugh of your digital life.
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