Persistence of Memory

• Platform: IBM PC Compatible
• Release Date: 1998
• Genre: Adventure
• Style: Text-Based Adventure
• Similar Games: Zork I (Commodore 64/128)

Game Description

You're a soldier in the middle of an unfamiliar foreign battlefield. You're carrying your standard issue rifle, compass and two-way radio. As you take a step, you hear a faint but familiar click. You've just stepped on a land mine buried in mud and don't know how to disarm it. Stepping away will trigger the mine and result in your death. But, this is a war zone and you can't just stand there.

What do you do?

This is the premise behind Persistence of Memory, a text-based adventure game by Jason Dyer set in a war environment. As you stand on the mine with no way to disarm it, you wait for help to arrive. Before you can be rescued, though, you must overcome a series of problems, all without moving your foot.

You'll have to deal with hostile enemy soldiers, the climate and local peasants speaking a language you don't understand. In keeping with the war motif, Persistence of Memory doesn't track your score. The only way to gauge your performance is by survival or death.

Persistence of Memory has a detailed hint system for all of its puzzles. The hints begin with very vague suggestions and become progressively detailed until you receive the actual solution to the puzzle. The game, freeware, is written in the Hugo hex file format (one of a relatively few text adventure games to use it) and requires a specific runtime interpreter (several are available at various websites).

Roots & Influences

Persistence of Memory is a text-based adventure game in the Zork tradition.

Review: Overall

Jason Dyer's Persistence of Memory is an odd game. It's one of the few text-based adventures set in a war environment and it's also a one-room game that makes you wait for the puzzles to come to you rather than letting you go find them. Although an interesting experience, the game for a variety of reasons fails in its role as entertainment.

Starting you out with your foot planted firmly on a live land mine is a clever way of limiting the game environment to one room as opposed to artificially constraining you in some other way. But, it also makes the game a little tedious, as you have to wait for the puzzles to come your way one at a time. If you don't know that you have to type in the "wait" command, you'll actually be very frustrated since nothing ever seems to happen.

When the puzzles do come, they are beset by time constraints. For example, someone or something will come your way that poses a threat and you must decide, within a certain number of turns, how to react before the threat kills you. If you successfully evade it, you then have to wait some time until the next crisis arrives.

Most of the puzzle solutions are quite obvious and none have any alternative solutions. Because of that aspect, playing Persistence of Memory can feel like reading a short story without the ability to change anything, except that you have to type command inputs or words to get the story to continue.

The totally linear nature of the game leads you to suspect that it's trying to deliver a message instead of just a gaming experience -- but the point of the message isn't entirely clear. Your experience of the war is too limited for Persistence of Memory to be a critique of war in general.

In fact, nothing much really happens at all during the course of the game that could be interpreted as war-like, aside from one isolated puzzle. It's also not possible to say with any certainty that the game is meant as a commentary on the human condition during war. You don't see any suffering except for your own and it's not directly related to the war.

The game's writing is fairly eloquent. Some of the passages describing your suffering while standing on the land mine are actually quite moving. On the other hand, the prose sometimes takes this too far and gets tedious with its melodrama.

The message you get out of Persistence of Memory, if you get one at all, is entirely dependent on your views about life, suffering and war prior to going into the game. Regardless of what that message might be, Persistence of Memory fails as a gaming experience. The puzzles are much too easy and the completely linear nature of the plot means you're more of a spectator than a participant.

If you're interested in searching for a message from Persistence of Memory, give it a try. But, if you're expecting some sort of gameplay, you won't find much here.

Review: Enjoyment

The game has an interesting setup with generally good prose but is ultimately a failure as a game.

Review: Graphics

Text adventure with no graphics.

Review: Sound

No sounds used in the game.

Review: Replay Value

There is zero replay value due to the completely linear nature and no alternate puzzle solutions.

Review: Documentation

Detailed hint system contains hints that progress from vague to exact.

Production Credits