Do you like gory movies? You know, the kind with the army of gooey monsters, human sacrifice, people strung up on meat hooks and other fugitives from your worst nightmares? If so, The Mist is just the game for you.
Based on a short story by Stephen King, this text adventure bears his unique stamp. From the descriptions of the stricken township's population to the explicit narratives in which various monsters suck out their victims' lungs, King's black humor and keen sense of the macabre is what makes this story palatable—even enjoyable.
As you'd expect from a Stephen King novel, the adventure begins quite benignly. Our hero is impatiently standing in line at a supermarket checkout counter when the inevitable nightmare begins. The town suddenly becomes enveloped In a thick white mist, from which issues a stream of misshapen, horrible monsters like the Bug, a gigantic, oozing insect, and the Bird, a huge mutant that can snap a person’s head off with a single swipe of its beak.
The immediate object is, of course, to survive the trip home, search out your son, and try to figure out what caused the horror and what, if anything, you can do to stop it. Personally, I'd just as soon take the next bus out of town, but of course the road is blocked by an army of various monsters. Each creature can be killed with a different object, but first you'll have to find it, then figure out what to do with it.
This game is hard. First, players have to read each description very carefully, and occasionally remember to LOOK CLOSELY at an object they may have merely LOOKed at before. Second, timing is essential. The sequence of events proceeds according to the program's own inner clock, so while it might not be safe to leave the supermarket on the first move, it might be possible to do it on the third.
The game's sentence parser (the program used to create a vocabulary of words the computer understands) is quirky. Try to use a word that the Mac can’t understand, and rather than tell you what's wrong with your phrasing (other text games might say "I don't understand the word 'Fleece'), this sentence parser just funnels back nonsense. Only very experienced adventure game players will have the patience and attention to detail that's required to win this game. And remember, you’re on your own. Mindscape has no plans to publish a hint book for The Mist.
Despite its sentence parser, the fact that players must go through a limited reboot to return to a previously saved game (up to 9 positions can be saved to a separate disk) and the fact that the program can’t recognize an external disk drive, there's something about The Mist that makes you want to solve it. Chalk up another notch to Stephen King's ability to get readers absorbed in his stories.
Forman Hines, Tracie. (June 1986). The Mist. MacUser. (pg. 37).
Angelsoft, Inc.
Games
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2014-04-14 / 
71279425e2c1f1ca9077d6520940e6e364ab43a0 / 
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themist.zip
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Mini vMac
