What is 3 in Three?

To inveterate Mac game players, news or a new Cliff Johnson game brings a sense of both anticipation and dread — anticipation of what new wonders Cliffs warped mind has produced this time around and dread of the amount of time that they'll spend playing the game (instead of making a living).

The man who brought us The Fool's Errand and At the Carnival has delivered 3 in Three, and those feelings of anticipation and dread are well justified. The plot of this game is a bit Tron-esque: An innocent number 3 has been bumped off her (Cliffs anthropomorphism, not mine) rightful place in a cozy spreadsheet cell during a power surge and has fallen into the innards of the Mac. Even worse, the wayward 3 has fallen into The Land of the Letters, where the residents don’t even know what a 3 is. The object: to get our hapless 3 home safely. As usual, that's easier said than done.

Along the way, there are plenty of opportunities to make fun of just how stupid computers really are. Humor abounds, as do brainteasers. As with earlier Cliff Johnson concoctions, the primary task involves solving puzzles — in this case, 80 of them on five menus. This time, however, there are no dead ends that force you to start over, so losing is impossible. If you run into a problem with one puzzle, you can try another. That's fortunate, because the infuriation level of some of the puzzles reaches an all-time high. This is to be expected: It is a Cliff Johnson game, after all.

The game contains the now-familiar mix of anagrams, word squares, logic puzzles, mazes, games with no rules until you figure them out, and number progressions. New forms of puzzles defy verbal description. Suffice it to say that Cliff has achieved a new level of weirdness.

The most impressive aspects of 3 in Three are the sounds and the 256-color screens. The game has a five-minute, fully animated Prolog and a similar Finale, and connecting pieces between each puzzle contain dialogue and sound (look in the Finale for special thanks to Steven Sondheim, one of Cliffs most ardent late-night fans). The game has more than 60 minutes of animated screens all told, yet compressed, the two game files fit on one 800K disk! For those without color Macs, the game has special dithering routines that make the pictures look almost as good in black-and-white as in color. The game runs equally well on all Macs, and we found no compatibility problems. The only problem with 3 in Three is hair loss — try not to pull out too much hair as the game's puzzles wreak havoc with your brain.

Gruberman, Ken. (October 1991). 3 in Three. MacUser. (pg. 87).

Download 3 in Three for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

System Requirements

From Mac OS 6.0 up to Mac OS 9.2

Compatibility notes

Architecture: 68K

At least 1.6MB of free RAM

Mac OS 6.x - Mac OS 9.2.2

You need to set your monitor to 256 colors mode or lower (8-bits or lower)

 

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II