Missed Classic: Nord and Bert - Won! (With Final Rating & Cut Scenes)

Written by Joe Pranevich

It always feels good to make it to the end of one of these games. Sometimes, it feels like a great accomplishment, a challenge defeated! Sometimes, it feels like a great relief, like we can finally move on with our lives. Often, it is a mixture of the two. This is something like my 65th review on “The Adventurer’s Guild” and I can confidently say that I have completed far (far!) worse games than Nord and Bert but this is the first one (except for Batman Returns?) where I have felt this frustrated by what could have been. This could have been a fantastic game and I am told that it inspired some games that are among the best in interactive fiction, but it wasn’t and I am glad that this is the last post. 

Where we left off last time, I had completed the seven main chapters of the game ranging from acting in a 1950s-style sitcom to saving a farm from the horrors of farming idioms. I battled Mr. Clean in his night job as the giant from Jack and the Beanstalk. I even sipped a pleasant cup of tea in the most charming cafe I ever saw, one I wish (truly wish!) existed in real life. All that is left for me is the finale where we “Meet the Mayor” and can finally put to right the pernicious problems that plague the people of Punster. Will the ending soar or belly-flop? There is only one way to find out.

Read on for more.

The mayor seems nice enough...

Meet the Mayor

Last time out, I had planned to head back into “Shake a Tower” to get the final missing point. I found what it was in a walkthrough, but would have had to play the scenario again from scratch to get it. As much as I would like to have full points for the game– and as much as my completionist urge is fighting me– I’m going to go straight into “Meet the Mayor”. I hope that you forgive me and that I forgive myself, but I don’t want to play through it again. 

Since we’re on our last chapter, we also have only one remaining hint image: “The Mayor Meets the Public Defender”. In retrospect, this one seems obvious, but the implication is that we’ll be dealing with homophones again or words with multiple meanings. In this case, a “Public Defender” is someone that aids a defendant in a legal trial if they are unable to afford their own lawyer, but the image has him be a much more literal “defender” of the public from the seemingly innocuous mayor. Will that hint be relevant in the final chapter? We have only one way to find out.

> meet the mayor

[...]

Okay, you have proved to the Committee wide knowledge of the nature of our problems in Punster. You have now within your grasp the decree that would legislate against, ban from the town, outlaw forever, all of the wordplayful shenanigans that have so tortured us. May our Mayor, the honorable Jimmy “Fat Baby” Kazooli, act in the best interest of his citizenry. You are sent…

Public Square

You’re in the public square. Facing one edge of the square stands an impressive looking neo-colonial townhouse, which is decoratively fronted by a row of laurel bushes. 

In the middle of the public square stands a thick, ten feet tall stump of a tree. Attached to that stump is a sheet of paper and next to the paper hangs the horn of the town crier. 

We’re off! I check my inventory and discover a decree that, when signed, will banish all of the wordplay from town. I have so many questions about this! Am I supposed to believe that the mayor (named here as Jimmy “Fat Baby” Kazooli) was the one that caused all of the wordplay-problems? Or is it just a function of the literalness of the magic that signing a decree will make it go away? Perhaps I should not be thinking about this as much as I am, but this is the first real sign that we have an overarching plot and a “big bad” to the game. And Mr. Kazooli sure sounds like a villain: his name seems to be a play on Italian mafia names. (In 1987, Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno, a real-life mobster, was in the news thanks to publishing an autobiography while in the witness protection program, but this name could also be based on “Fat Tony” Salerno, “Baby Face” Nelson, or any number of other mobsters.) 

Roman leaders loved their laurels.

Looking around the square, we see immediate signs of government-based idioms. I can grab a laurel from a nearby laurel bush, but the game doesn’t want me to wear it. Wearing a wreath of laurels was a sign of authority in the Roman Empire (at least, I’ve seen statues wearing them), but I could be approaching it in the wrong way. The giant stump brings to mind “stump speech” (a common speech given during a political campaign) and “to stump for a candidate” (to campaign on behalf of someone else), but neither of them appear to be recognized. I’m not sure what type of wordplay we’re supposed to be doing here, but all of the political references must mean something. 

The paper on the stump lists nine strange laws, with a tenth torn off at the bottom. Will I need to systematically break the laws? Will I need to find the tenth law? Or replace the tenth law with one that benefits me? There are lots of ways this puzzle can go. Looking at the list in front of us, many seem like things we could do in a text adventure, but others do not:

• No Running
• No Painting Loons
• No Skipping
• Reptilian volleyball is O-u-t
• Honor Thy Fodder
• No Chewing Gum
• Defend your Landmother
• No Pepper
• Rip What You Sew

Attempting to “run” or “skip” into the building doesn’t trigger an alert for breaking the law (and the second isn’t recognized at all). I have no idea what a “Landmother” is, nor how we’d play “Reptilian volleyball”. I will keep my eyes peeled for signs of these laws so that I can break them, but I suspect that I’m not approaching them in the correct way. 

The final object in the room is the town cryer’s horn, also attached to the stump. If I attempt to take it, it blasts a loud noise to prevent me as I am not its rightful owner. Who is? Or will I need to become the owner? Will I “become” the mayor to end the game? That could be a fun twist! I give up and decide to explore inside. 

Not as cool as this.

The centerpiece of the town hall lobby is a large Constitution-like document that dominates one wall, with (strangely) a six-pack of beer sitting nearby. I consider all of my beer idioms, but I come up short. (The only one I can think of is to “cry into one’s beer”, to have self-pity. That doesn't help.) We are told explicitly that the beer is the type that might be drunk in the type of smoke-filled back rooms where political deals are cut. Looking more carefully, I see that the brand is called “Deep Six” and that brings to mind the expression: “to deep six something” is to destroy it permanently. This was based on the idea that if you dropped something in more than six fathoms deep of water (36 feet or roughly 11 meters), it would be irretrievable. I doubt that is still true today.

The “Pretenses” in the document are just as incomprehensible as the laws outside:

• The World, verily, is proved to be flat!
• The Rule of the Great Kazooli shall spread to the corners of the world!
• And beloved shall be Our Mayor in the eyes of the world!
• Forsooth, His Rule shall endure a thousand years!

It sounds like Mayor Kazooli has gone off the deep end. I’m still not sure if he’s the cause of all this mess or also a victim of it, but the evidence is pretty damning. Did he wish on a genie or something? My best guess is that he wishes for absolute power and managed to muck it up by making everything too literal, although that would not explain the spoonerisms or other wordplay. Am I working too hard to work out the plot?

Ultimately, I have to leave the room after accomplishing nothing. We’re not able to pick up the beer because we do not own it (a similar situation to the horn outside) and so the only way out is to head upstairs. 

“Punch and Judy” shows are disgustingly lowbrow, especially when authentic.

To my surprise, the stairs do not lead to an office or a hallway but rather to a bathroom that has no other exits. Does this section have only three rooms? Or will there be a way to open up more of the town hall complex? The room is dominated by a large bathtub containing a very angry duck. A comb sits discarded on the floor next to a pile of dirty laundry. The only strange thing is a very tall jar sitting in the corner. I grab the comb and search the Mayor’s dirty laundry to discover… a Punch costume! 

If you are unfamiliar, “Punch and Judy” shows were an entertainment staple in the early modern United Kingdom starting in the 17th century. They traditionally start with child abuse (Mr. Punch usually kills his baby), before multiple scenes where Mr. Punch beats his wife and policemen that come to her rescue, all before hilariously being punished at the end… or perhaps escaping after beating the devil or the hangman to death. It’s all very grisly, all very stupid, and the very thought of “Punch and Judy” shows are enough to send me into fits of rage. The idea that generations of British adults and children could ever have found this disgusting mess “funny” (and usually root for Punch to win at the end!) is enough to make me physically ill. That the mayor wears such a costume while going outside does him no favors in my book and just paints him as a potential psychopath, although I doubt that was Jeff O’Neill’s intention. 

Oh dear, I’ve just pissed off all of our British readers. I’d better get back to playing the game.

Exploring the room more thoroughly, I find my first pun: the duck in the bathtub has an injured foot. It is a “lame duck” (a politician still in office before his replacement is sworn in). As in the other adventures, we name it to change it and the “lame duck” becomes the Mayor! That also scores me my first point of this scenario! He’s enjoying his bath and ignoring me, but that’s a start. I try to get him to sign the decree, but he refuses. The jar turns out to just be “a jar” which of course becomes a closet door that is “ajar”. (This is an uncommon English word. I still remember my grandparents had a minivan in the 1980s that would say “door is ajar” in this terrible computer voice if you left a door open. It took me years to realize that the door wasn’t literally “a jar”.) Looking in the door, we see only darkness. We cannot enter as it is not a walk-in closet, but there must be something we can do with it. 

Without anything else to do, I spend some time going back through the three rooms over and over again to experiment. I won’t bore you with the details, but I learn three things:

• Taking the mayor’s laundry outside, I can “air dirty laundry” (revealing unflattering or unkind facts about someone). 
• If I “search the closet with a fine-tooth comb”, I discover that the mayor keeps a skeleton in his closet. A “skeleton in the closet” is something damaging in one’s past that they don’t want to have revealed. If I show the skeleton to the mayor, he wants to “put such liabilities behind him”, but putting it behind him (or the bathtub) doesn’t do the trick.
• The game recognizes “sit on my laurels” as an action, but won’t let us do it yet as we have done nothing to be particularly proud of. 

At this point, I get stuck and take a break for a few days. Fortunately, the break gave me a few new ideas.

A political cartoon from 1912 showing that the United States had some skeletons in our closet.

A few days later, I have the eureka that clauses in the Constitution-like document in the lobby are labeled “Pretenses”. Thinking through idioms related to that word, I think of “false pretenses” and then to “take beer under false pretenses”. That works! That’s a way to claim something by lying that you own it, which is exactly what we needed to do. With the “Deep Six”-branded beer in my inventory, that opened up other things to try.

I run around and try to “deep six” a lot of things (the mayor, the bathtub, etc.) but while the game knows the term, it will only let us do that on an item in our inventory. Eventually, I “deep six the skeletons” to save the mayor from his past indiscretions. Why am I helping this jerk? I have no idea, but I’m up to 6 of 14 points. 

Outside, I beat my head against law-based idioms. I try “above the law” and “the wrong side of the law” and to “take the law into my own hands”. All of them are great expressions, but none of them seem to be what I need to do with the laws pinned on the stump. My next eureka moment comes when I remember that there are only nine of the ten laws written there. While I initially expected that I would have to find or replace the missing one, the answer is trickier: what we have are “nine tenths of the law” and, as you probably know, “possession is nine tenths of the law”. If I “take possession”, that gives me the horn! I was expecting to get the laws and not the horn, but I cannot complain about the outcome even if it’s a terrible leap in judgment. 

I try to “toot my own horn” but the game hints that no one is around to hear us. If I do so in front of the mayor, he appreciates my directness and I win another point. I’m quickly stuck again with nothing new to do. I thought of looking for a “blessing in disguise”, but while the game recognizes the phrase, there is no blessing there.

At this point, I take another overnight break. Somehow, my brain solves these puzzles better when getting ready to sleep.

I struggled to find a good photo of a politician wearing a bathrobe. This one will have to do.

Alas, literally “sleeping on it” did not help much. I’m still stuck and there isn’t much problem-space left. This finale is only three rooms and seems to consist mostly of political idioms. I keep looking for spoonerisms or sitcom slapstick to do, but have found none so far. I can’t say that I’m disappointed exactly, but it has at least let me narrate more of my thought process. 

To make a long story short, I eventually take a hint to discover that my fixation on political idioms made me miss an obvious one: I can “beat around the bush” (to talk about something while avoiding the point) outside the town hall to find a ticket stub in the bushes. The stub is good for “one blessing” from the local Church of the Heavenly Ferris Wheel. Strangely, we cannot take the blessing into the building. (Obviously, this game believes in the separation of church and state!) But, if I “put blessing in disguise”, I am able to bring it inside and give the blessing to the Mayor. Seriously, why am I helping this guy? He’s quite happy about it, but I seriously question what valuable life lessons I should be taking from a game where I am helping a power-mad politician launder his reputation.

A short time later and I am stuck again. I didn’t have any immediate naps planned so I gave up and took a second hint. This one I would never have gotten on my own: You might remember that the Mayor’s name is Jimmy “Fat Baby” Kazooli because you just saw it a few paragraphs ago. But for me, that was a few days and while the game has referred to him as “the mayor” and even the “Great Kazooli”, I haven’t seen his full name in a while. I hope I can be forgiven then for not thinking about the expression “throw the baby out with the bathwater” (to toss something valuable away while discarding waste). 

Doing that causes the bathroom to flood and a mini-waterfall to drag the mayor downstairs. I find him standing in front of his “Pretenses” (thankfully) wearing a bathrobe. I hand him the decree to sign and he does! Punster can finally be free! Except… I have one point left and the scenario doesn’t end. Having done everything else, it finally is time to “rest on my laurels”: 

> rest on laurels

With dreamy slowness you begin to fall back upon your laurels for the long, soulful respite you have so well deserved. In the enclave of your dreams the clarion voice of a herald is given forum:

“We, the members of the Citizens’ Action Committee of Punster, do hereby honor your exploits in delivering our town of the nefarious crime of wordplay. Punster has once again returned to the life of trusting normalcy.

For the McCleary Farm, the cows have truly come home. Audiences once again revel in the gift of laughter. A pretty girl is rescued from the brink of tragedy. You have made our town safe for shopping. The Teapot Cafe is a homey hearth and nourishment for our supping folk. A house for guests gas gained back its repute. A neighboring town must no longer live down its name. 

In gratitude for your selfless dedication to our humble town, we present you with the Key to the City. May it unlock all the doors for you along life’s path.”

You fall still further into deep and luxurious sleep.

I am glad that I won, but after eight scenarios, this ending doesn’t feel much like a “finale”. None of my questions about what happened were answered and we have very conflicting information as to whether the mayor was a hero or a villain in this tale. Obviously, O’Neill wasn’t focusing on the “plot” of the game very much, instead just trying to craft great puzzles, but I wish now that there was a little more. We’ll see how I feel when I do the final rating.

Time played: 2 hr 45 min
Total time: 15 hr 30 min
Score: 22/22 (Bizarre), 11/11 (Jacks), 19/19 (Farm), 31/31 (Teapot), 10/10 (Theatrical), 7/7 (Manor), 25/26 (Tower), 14/14 (Mayor)

I won! A few too many hints, but I’m glad it is over.

Final Rating

Through the magic of reading the next sentence, it’s time for me to rate the game! The first question I should ask however is whether or not it is “fair” to rate this game as an adventure. While it has the trappings of interactive fiction, it deliberately stays away from providing more than the most basic meta-narrative. It doesn’t answer our questions of “why” we are solving wordplay puzzles. Why would we do a crossword? Or a sudoku? We don’t expect those to have plot, but we do expect a game like this to at least have a good framing device. I expect this game to score low in our scale, but that doesn’t take away that it may be quite a good wordplay game stuck on an adventure gaming website. 

I’ve already disappointed enough of you with my hatred of “Punch and Judy”, so let’s disappoint some more of you with this review:

Puzzles and Solvability - Of all the categories, this is the one that I labor over the most. Judging it for its wordplay puzzles, we have a few great chapters, but those do not contain (barring a few small exceptions) real adventuring puzzles. Players have to come to the game knowing the answers, rather than being able to tease out the solutions in-universe. We’ve seen Infocom do these puzzles before, all the way back to the “Odysseus” puzzle in the first Zork game, but never as comprehensively as this. The most adventure-like section, “The Manor of Speaking”, was almost brilliant in its use of puzzles but felt confusing and off when put next to the other chapters. I just don’t think I can give high marks to a game that you cannot solve using the tools in front of you. My score: 3. 

Interface and Inventory - Infocom always gets bonus points here for being best of breed, but more seams showed through this game than many of the others. An engine designed for parsing “intents” (to use more modern computer science terminology) isn’t designed for the linguistic hoops that must be jumped to handle idioms well. The help system was a good addition however. My score: 3. 

Story and Setting - The story leaves me frustrated and upset. I want there to have been a point, or a cause, or something that explains why what we did is what we needed to do… or even why we are there in the first place. The individual chapter stories range from okay to awful, up to and including the finale where we have to help an uncaring politician redeem himself. The game’s settings are better, but only the Teapot Cafe really strikes me as a real place rather than a minimally-constructed location for the completion of puzzles. There was a huge missed opportunity here. My score: 3. 

Sound and Graphics - At least this category won’t be a surprise. My score: 0.

Environment and Atmosphere - This category is about how the game makes us feel, but it’s so mixed that I struggle to pin a number on it. I would have scored seven points for the Teapot Cafe alone, a location that I loved and that made me feel the angry wordplay involved. Most other locations though did not feel consistent or even consistently whimsical. Remember that mermaid in the frozen pond? That’s how jarring the atmosphere feels to me. My score: 4. 

Dialog and Acting - I want to love the text in this game and much of it is good, but much of it is just serviceable and there are relatively few NPCs that are interesting enough to score “acting” points. I really could go a few directions with this score, especially given how much prose was required to render all of the areas that we explored. I think I could go higher, but my gut instinct says that this is the appropriate number. My score: 3. 

Let’s add that up: (3+3+3+0+4+3)/.6 = 27!

Before we finish, I need to bring up one other thing that has been bothering me for weeks: who are Nord and Bert? What does the title mean? Having played through the whole thing, I see no evidence that we have dual protagonists, nor a single puzzle that would have benefitted from having two. I keep thinking that the name itself must be wordplay, but the best I can come up with is a spoonerism on “Bored and Inert” and I doubt very much that Jeff O’Neill was aiming for that. Like so many other elements, this feels like it could have been amazing but it ended up being a distraction instead of an addition. Minus 1 discretionary point for the bait and switch title. Our final score will be… 26!

Oh dear. That places this as the lowest-rating Infocom game, behind even Bureaucracy with 27 points. Is that the full picture though? This game actually scored a few points higher than The Oregon Trail, a game that similarly straddles the line between what is and is not an adventure game. If you ask me, I’d be tremendously proud of producing a game that is better than a beloved classic like The Oregon Trail! Moreover, this game was memorable enough that I still had vague recollections of scenes that I played once twenty years ago. This is a low score, but that score represents only one way to come at a game like Nord and Bert. 

Our average score guess for this game was 33 points, suggesting that most of you enjoyed the game more than I did. Our winner this time is Adam Thornton whose guess of “28” landed the closest. Congratulations! You will receive your CAPs as soon as we complete the next mainline game. 

Before we close however, I want to take a few moments to look at what might have been: cut scenes and deleted content. I had intended this to be a separate post, but there is not quite enough information to justify taking a post slot away from another game. Please enjoy a week (or two) early!

Kevin Pope also made at least one promotion image (this one) for Nord and Bert.

Cutting Room Floor

It’s become my tradition, after winning a game, to try to dig at the development process and find what “cut content” that I can. This is especially easy with Infocom games as so much of their corporate history and development processes have been leaked in the past few years. Nord and Bert is not well-represented in these leaks, but we do find a complete set of source code to peruse. Alas, we have no early pitches or design notes available online. (More material has now been made available at the Strong Museum of Play, although it has not been digitized. While I might be able to con my way into their vaults, I am neither well-credentialed enough nor do I have funds enough to make a pilgrimage for each of these games. Perhaps someday if I write a book, I’ll make the trip. Regretfully, there are not nearly enough of you to justify writing a book…) 

Trawling through the Nord and Bert source code for lost ideas is also more difficult than with other games. For starters, more of it has been borrowed from other games such as A Mind Forever Voyaging and Bureaucracy, but the juicer bits are harder to identify. There is a full collection of body part related commands in there (such as “pick nose”) that never become applicable in this game. Weirder still is code in the files for “make love” and even (cover your eyes) code for a masturbation joke. Plundered Hearts has a different masturbation joke in the same part of the same file, but I’m not sure which came first or whether this originated in Leather Goddesses or elsewhere. There are also multiple references to a survival sequence that doesn’t fit with any of our chapters, including draft hint text. Thanks to commenter “zxcvb”, I now know this is coming up in Border Zone. (I’ll try to forget the hints by then.) This sort of borrowing wasn’t uncommon and new Infocom games were often started by copying the source directory of a previous game, but the high number of false clues like these make the digital archeology more difficult. 

Games Magazine was an influence on O’Neill as he developed Nord and Bert.

Reviewing the source, the game’s working title appears to have been “Wordplay” and many of the source files (dating back to 1986) use that name. In Steve Meretzky’s analysis of possible games that eventually led to Stationfall, he cited “Wordplay” as a great example of how Infocom could do “short stories” and intended to use a similar model for his religion game, if it were ever approved. I am unclear when the title was finalized or even why “Nord and Bert” was selected as the title at all. If anyone works it out, I could consider returning the discretion point that I took away. 

The source also does not feature any additional or incomplete episodes, but we have small clues in the episode names that could have referred to abandoned ideas. Each chapter was given a one-word source filename. Most of the names are easily understood and aligned: “Aisle” for “Shopping Bizarre”, “Comedy” for “Act the Part”, “Farm” for “Buy the Farm”, “Teapot” for “Eat Your Word”, and “North” for “Play Jacks”. All of the names refer to the setting where the wordplay would take place. 

Three however tell a different story:

• The “Manor of Speaking” is called “Dueling” in the source. Who was dueling? Were the rooms in competition with each other? Was there a different plot entirely? We can only surmise now.
• “Shake a Tower” is called “Hazing”. In American English, “hazing” means to force someone to do humiliating (and often dangerous) tasks, such as to join a fraternity. I see no connection between that and the story that we saw, and I especially cannot connect it with Jack and the Beanstalk. 
• And finally, “Meet the Mayor” was just called “Eight”. My guess is that O’Neill really had no idea what it would contain until after the other stories were developed.

A sword fighting duel. 

In the whole source repository, I only find reference to two cut puzzles. The first one is amazing, the second less so:

• In the “Manor of Speaking” section, there is a room (“Interior Decorated”) where everything is fancy and over-described. Originally, there appears to have been a puzzle here where you could only interact with objects if you also over-described them. You would use several adjectives to describe each piece you were trying to manipulate. Insufficient use of flowery language (as defined by an internal adjective counter) and the room would not let you proceed. I presume that this would have been required to pick up the pillow or the chair. 
• In “Shopping Bizarre”, an additional object would have been present making a homophone off of the word “choose”. In order to “choose”, you would have to pun on “chew” and the object is specifically described as “chewing tobacco”. Whether it would start as tobacco or you had to change it to tobacco isn’t clear. Even in 1987, selling tobacco to kids was probably frowned on.

That said, two bits of narrative text were cut that I feel would have helped the game. The first is that there may have been more intended connecting tissue between the episodes. A cut portion of the outdoor area in “Meet the Mayor” would have involved a dark forest starting to overtake the town square. This seems similar to the forest in “Play Jacks” and the beginning of “Shake a Tower”. Was there some idea that this forest would be in all of the episodes? I don’t know, but it adds to the urgency and the sense that something is swallowing up Punster if the wordplay isn’t dealt with. 

The second bit is two different drafts of the opening text. I like this idea better so I’ll just include them verbatim:

Sheriff stands here next to his cop cars with twirling silent blue lights arranged in a road block just outside of town, tumbleweeds. Tall, muscular square-jawed mirror-black glasses. Tilted. silent man with a toothpick angling out of his mouth. Tight-lipped. Leaning back against the care with his legs and arms crossed.

If you want to try and help, I can deputize you. You are given a short oath, and conclude it with I Do. (Now, we're just waiting for the national guard, we've sent a messenger on foot, since all

communications have been jammed by whoever's messed up this town.) You can't go beyond this point though. Three of my finest deputies have entered and never come back... Need to be cool as a cucumber...

And then an improved version of the same:

Hiking around in the country one day, you come upon a wind-blown newspaper, pick it up and begin reading it while slowly continuing to walk. From the unbelievable things you read, the paper seems to be some kind of foolish joke, but you keep reading while not being mindful of where you're going. When you finally decide the stories are just too far-fetched and you're about to let fly with the newspaper, your thoughts are abruptly interrupted as you bump into a road block an hear the words:

“Whoa there!"

A sheriff is leaning against a police car whose blue lights are silently rotating. He tilts his hat back and sizes you up for a moment. "Civic-minded," he says. "Well, so you've read about the troubles. It's good to see a new volunteer." The sheriff recites a short oath. Stunned, you respond "I do?"

"Good enough. Okay, Deputy, you can do one of the following:

"Go to the Shopping Bizarre, Play Jacks, Buy the Farm, Eat your Words, Act the Part, Visit the Manor of Speaking, Shake a Tower, or Meet the Mayor."

This must have been discarded late in the process as all of the scenarios are in there and named correctly. This version eliminates the Citizens Action Committee (which was impossible to visualize) and replaces it with a lone sheriff guarding the road into town. I get very much a WandaVision vibe from this description and love the idea that the town is trapped in a mystical wordplay bubble. That sounds fun to explore and fix! I would have given this higher points for “Story and Setting” and I wish more of these ideas had been included.

And that will be it for my coverage of Nord and Bert! More Dracula Unleashed will come next, but I have an important question for our readers: should I jump into Plundered Hearts immediately and alternate posts with Dracula? Or finish Dracula first? I’m excited to play a more typical adventure game, although I do not know if Plundered Hearts will provide that experience. (Should I do any research on romance novels first?)