Stephen King The Mist

Stephen King’s The Mist is an adventure game based on the Stephen King novella of the same title. It was developed by Angelsoft and released by Mindscape in the middle eighties and is arguably one of Angelsoft’s best offerings. It is an interactive fiction adventure with a horror theme. It is primarily text driven.
The premise of the story sees the user as a resident of the small town of Bridgton, Maine near Long Lake. In the middle of the summer, while David Drayton (the user/main character) and his young son, Billy are on the way to the supermarket for a routine shopping trip, a sinister mist rolls into town.

The mist comes on the heels of a violent and eerie thunderstorm, which destroyed many things, including the neighbor’s car. Once inside the supermarket, Drayton and the other shoppers become trapped by this unnatural mist. Visibility is reduced to nothing, and the mist is able to harbor some violently aggressive creatures that attack the people of the town. While no one is entirely certain from where the mist and the creatures it harbors have come, it is suggested that an interdimensional rift at the nearby military facility opened during the storm, allowing “things” to come across.
The majority of the plot for both the book and the game takes place within the Federal market where the town folk are trapped. Each time someone leaves the story either for a specific task or because they do not believe in the powers of the mist he is killed by the creatures hidden by the mist. As people are killed and the townspeople remain trapped, insanity and depression set in. A religious zealot convinces the folk that the mist fulfills a biblical prophecy and a human sacrifice is necessary to vanquish the mist.
In the game, Drayton runs out into the mist after finding a gun in the store. The user then has to figure out how to get out of the mist and save the people in the store. The gun is the most used piece of inventory, and it has a hit percentage, which means it is possible to miss what you are aiming at, even at point blank range when all of the other factors are positive. This is the most frustrating part of the interface.
In short, Stephen King’s The Mist is not a bad text based IF game. It does a reasonably good job of following the plot of the novella, which will be a sure positive for King’s readers. It also features straightforward puzzles that don’t require a lot of random thought processes. They are pretty logical. For the age of the game, it shows great potential, and it is well worth a look.