Trinity is an Infocom product and publication that was released for play on the MS-DOS bearing personal computer in the middle eighties. It also saw time on the Commodore 128, Macintosh, Amiga, and Apple II. It is a single player game that is a work of interactive fiction that relies on the keyboard for input.
Trinity is an award-winning title and was considered one of the best interactive fiction games of its time period. The title of the game refers to the Trinity test, the first nuclear explosion experiment that took place in July of 1945.
The storyline of the game is partially historically based, but it has many fantastic elements in it, as well. These blend together wonderfully in the form of a well done prose poem that guides the gamer through the plot.
The game begins on a bizarre, fanciful note with the gamer finishing up a London vacation. When he is preparing to return to the United States, a series of odd events begin to unfold and make his return to his homeland increasingly unlikely. He cannot get out of Kensington Gardens due to the fact that hordes of nannies are blocking all the exits. As if that were not weird enough, the grass itself seems to be rebelling
against reality and is blocking any attempts to simply walk on it. A distant light in the sky is the harbinger of a Soviet nuclear missile. As the missile gets closer, time begins to slow. You know that you are going to be at ground zero when the bomb hits and are preparing for death when a strange door opens in midair. Not knowing where it leads…and really not caring…your character leaps through it into the unknown.
What the user will find on the other side of the odd door is a strange land that specializes in the impossible. As the gamer begins to explore this odd place, he will find even more doors, akin to the one that brought him to this land. Each door leads to a chapter in the evolution of nuclear weaponry. The gamer’s character will visit several historic test sites, including Siberia, Nevada, Nagasaki, and the Eniwetok Atoll. The final door leads to the Trinity site in New Mexico, but the user will learn that all is not well here. Without the gamer’s intervention, the testing at Trinity will go horribly wrong and the nuclear era will be out of control. It is up to you to help save the world from imminent nuclear disaster.
Trinity gleaned so many awards for good reason. This is a nice textual game with great descriptive prose, well-placed puzzles and a load of intrigue.
