Earthly Delights

Earthly Delights is a video game in the adventure genre developed by Datamost, Inc. and published by Datamost, Inc. originally released in 1984. It is currently playable on DOS, Apple II, Mac.

Earthly Delight turned out to be a pleasant surprise when I first discovered it in March 2000, mostly because it's surprising that such an innovative and well-written interactive fiction game for its time could almost completely fade into obscurity before most gamers even had a chance to see it on the shelves.

Earthly Delight begins with an intriguing premise: you wake up in the middle of the night to discover that a painting you recently inherited has been stolen. Already at this early stage, the game allows for a variety of actions you can take to finish the first episode: if you're quick enough, you can catch the thief in the act, and even fight him. If he's already gone by the time you reach the room, you can still discover clues that will lead you to the next episode. Each episode opens in the style of an animated book, with its own music (with PC speaker) and a well-written introduction.

Although the game is 'shallow' in the sense that the non-player characters are underdeveloped and two-dimensional, the intriguing plot and numerous optional puzzles and alternate solutions more than make up for this shortcoming. The game has a curious parser feature: you need to use the 'GO A' command a lot to get to certain locations, though you can only GO TO that location when you're close enough. Given the sprawling and confusing layout of Paris, finding a location can quickly become the most time-consuming action in the game, and it's really infuriating.

Despite this quirk, Earthly Delight is definitely an above-average game for its time (1983!), and while not an Infocom game, it's well worth playing. Highly recommended, but not for the easily frustrated.

It is possible that we have multiple downloads available when different versions exist.