The Fool's Errand - Cliff Johnson - 1987 - First time Playing?: Yes!

"Mini vMac? An emulator? Whatever happened to 'no emulation' MSX? You lying hack, you casual scum!"

Yeah ahaha, so while several old monochrome Mac games from the 80s do work perfectly fine on Mac OS 9, technical issues are pretty common. Many crash on start up, others don't work unless the operating system is running in a 1 bit colour depth just like the game itself, which OS 9 is incapable of, while others work perfectly fine with the single caveat of having no sound. Lode Runner, Uninvited and Shufflepuck Cafe to name a few all suffer from this. Other games run too fast, while the game we're looking at today, The Fool’s Errand has both the no sound issue and also some corrupted graphics when running on OS 9. I decided it would likely be best to set up an emulator for maximum compatibility with such games, so that I don't leave out some of the most iconic formative classics of the Mac library, but with the rule in place that I wasn't going to emulate on my modern Windows 10 desktop, but instead run an emulator on Mac OS 9 instead so it's still technically being played on a vintage Mac. So, I present to you Macintosh System 6 running inside of Mac OS 9. I call it "Mac OS 69". Goodnight everybody.

Was The Fool’s Errand worth the setup hassle? Yes. Very much so, yes. Really, really yes, I think I'm in love with this game. What may at a cursory glance look like little more than a collection of newspaper puzzles manages to use the interactive medium to design an intricate, interconnected non-linear metapuzzle and narrative that's unbelievably satisfying.

So, what is a metapuzzle? In short, it's a large puzzle that can only be solved by using clues obtained from the solutions of smaller puzzles. You can find examples of this in puzzles outside of games. For instance, let me give you a series of riddles as an example. I made these up myself, so my apologies in advance for them not being the most amazingly well thought out.

Now, what was the ____ of this exercise? Click here for solution.

Each of these riddles have a solution that spells out the answer to the final question. The Fool's Errand is essentially this on a much larger scale. The entire game is one big metapuzzle where every individual puzzle you complete is interconnected and gives you hints to piece together the bigger picture with, both in terms of gameplay and narrative.

Set in a fantasy world inhabited by representations of tarot cards, The High Priestess has harnessed the power of Thoth himself, the Egyptian god of wisdom that the Book of Thoth is named after. With his power she has thrown the land into disarray, manipulated the kingdoms into distrusting one another and has the world on the verge of war. In the midst of this, The Fool meanwhile, introduced by very nearly absentmindedly strolling right off of a cliff, is interrupted by The Sun calling out his foolhardiness. The Sun, fascinated by The Fool, decides to give him an incomplete treasure map, along with the goal of finding the fourteen treasures hidden across the world. And so, The Fool sets out to complete the map and find his fortune, in the midst of political tension.

On its own, The Fool's Errand’s story is a delightfully whimsical fairytale with a lot of character and subtle dry humour. Owing to the subject matter that it's based on however, there's a genuinely impressive amount of symbolism here. You might be wondering why The Fool is the choice of protagonist here, given that the name implies he wouldn't be the best at puzzles. As my girlfriend pointed out however, he's a perfect fit for this style of game. The tarot card of The Fool essentially represents a starting point. It's the zero of the deck, absolutely nothing on its own. However, it also represents growth, curiosity, development and potential. He's a brilliant choice of protagonist for a metapuzzle game. At the start of the game, characters will frequently speak in cryptic riddles and say complete nonsense that's impossible to understand, giving the sense that you're stumbling into something beyond your understanding, but by the end you'll have learnt more about the world and start piecing those early offbeat interactions together and understand how they fit into the bigger picture. The player and The Fool alike go through a growth over the course of the game.

As mentioned, your objective is to complete the map and find the fourteen treasures. Upon starting the game you'll be looking at this parchment that the story of the game is written on, of which only a few pages will be accessible. Every time you solve a puzzle however, another page is unlocked that is relevant to the solution of the puzzle you just solved. The pages are unlocked in a non-linear fashion, so there's a lot of jumping around the timeline early on until you start filling in the blanks with more and more pages. Each time you unlock another page of the story, you also obtain another piece of The Sun's map, so it's directly tied to both narrative and gameplay progression.

The puzzles in question are mainly word puzzles. You have a selection of anagrams, crosswords, word searches, ciphers and riddles to figure out, alongside some jigsaw puzzles and mazes and memory games and such. Generally, the solution will be tied to the page that is unlocked next, such as containing a keyword or phrase that shows up in the corresponding page. The puzzles on their own are standard and all well and good, but there’s a few major stand out highlights. Early on, one puzzle involves playing a card game with an old man, using the deck of Thoth. The rules of this game are not explained to you at all, but after clicking around a bit you’ll discover that certain pairs of cards are worth different amounts of points. You take a few notes and then you start to recognise patterns until this initially incoherent game makes more and more sense and you can confidently beat the old man.

The unique puzzles tend to be the most memorable, for better or for worse. Most of them are satisfying and fun, but The Maze of Hedges is just rubbish. It’s a maze, as the name implies, but the walls are invisible until you bump into them. In addition to the hidden walls however, there’s also hidden gusts of wind that will teleport you to a random earlier spot in the maze if you step on them. It’s just a trial and error game, there’s no clever puzzle solving here. Just bumble around blindly until you’ve uncovered enough of the wind gusts and walls to see a clear path. Appropriate for The Fool, but a slog to actually play. Fortunately, this style of maze is a one-time thing. On the whole, the puzzles are enjoyable.

The real puzzle, as alluded to earlier however, is the metapuzzle, and this is what makes The Fool’s Errand so special. As you get more and more map pieces you’ll quickly discover that all the pieces are jumbled up and out of order. The map in itself is another jigsaw puzzle, but a much more complex one. You’ll wonder at first how all of the pieces fit together, but on closer inspection you’ll notice that each and every piece of the map is an abstract representation of a location The Fool visited on his travels. You go back to that page in the story, check the clues based on the description of the environment and now have an actual idea on where pieces of the puzzle should be going. Reading the story is part of the gameplay in The Fool’s Errand as nearly every line is directly tied to clues for solving puzzles, made all the more engaging by the fact that the writing is pretty damn good, especially for the time period the game was released in.

It’s difficult to discuss The Fool’s Errand without delving into spoilers unfortunately. Even mentioning what I have already feels like giving away part of the joy of discovery with this game, but completing The Sun’s map is an established goal from the very start, and the other puzzles I’ve described show up very early, so what I’ve described barely scratches the surface of The Fool’s Errand. Needless to say, the metapuzzle is much larger than the simple quest given to you by The Sun at the start. The more you progress the more you discover even more clues and keywords that don’t seem to fit into any puzzle. Are they just there to be surreal and whimsical? Are they red herrings? Then, as more and more objectives are revealed as you progress through the game, you’ll start to understand the meaning of them more.

What I wasn’t expecting was the fact that The Fool’s Errand had me taking notes, as in with actual physical graph paper and a pencil. I was jotting down every clue, keyword and jumbled phrase I ran across, giving them a checkmark once I figured out what they meant, copying puzzles onto paper, drawing diagrams, the list goes on. By the time I finished the game, I had nine pages of notes dedicated to cracking the puzzles of The Fool’s Errand, and I had an absolute blast doing so. This might sound intimidating if you’re not great at these kinds of puzzles, but for what it’s worth, I’m not the best at them either. I’m incapable of beating a LucasArts adventure game without checking a guide on occasion for instance. The Fool’s Errand however, while it took me a while, I was able to beat the game all on my own, no walkthrough necessary. It’s not an easy game, but it’s absolutely fair. It does a superb job of easing you into the logic of the game more and more with each puzzle solved, until by the end you can look at a jumbled mess of numbers and letters and instantly get exactly what they’re conveying thanks to having the relevant clues and having solved puzzles like this before.

I’ll also give credit to the amount of personality and charm the game is filled with. It’s common for puzzle games, especially of this style, to have a fairly dry and minimalist approach to their presentation, but The Fool’s Errand manages to pull off minimalism with style and a ton of character. Characters are primarily represented by shadowed silhouettes surrounded by a glow of light, a move that makes the characters easily pop out in any frame they’re present in. In spite of being a 1-bit game where black and white are the only colors available, the pixel art surrounding those characters is lavish and detailed, owing to the higher than average for the time resolution of the Macintosh.

The characters are great too, especially The High Priestess and The Fool. The High Priestess is delightfully hammy, cocky and arrogant, believing herself to be unstoppable and the most powerful being in the world, which makes her a great antagonist for The Fool, who in spite of his faults, is humble enough to acknowledge that he can improve and become smarter, a virtue which The High Priestess lacks. As The High Priestess believes she is already perfect and the most powerful, her falling is that she doesn’t believe she needs to improve herself, all the while The Fool is gradually catching up more and more to her intellect and eventually surpassing it. The Fool is also funny and charming, making me smile and chuckle on multiple occasions. He’s a fun character to follow and see how he bounces off of the characters he runs into across the journey, with his bizarre leaps of logic and misinterpretations of the words of those he meets.

All in all, The Fool’s Errand is just an immensely satisfying package all around. Between gameplay, story and those “aha!” moments of piecing it all together, it absolutely nails all that it sets out to do with style and class. This is a subgenre of puzzle games I had no idea I needed in my life so badly until I played it and now I am desperately craving even more. While there’s not any modern ports that I’m aware of, Cliff Johnson did release the game as freeware a few years back, so definitely give it a look if you’re willing to set up emulation.

- Page written by MSX_POCKY, 14th December 2024