#014: Hurkle - The Solitary Relative of the Mugwump

Release Date: February 1972

Platform: Mainframe

Genre: Puzzle

Developer(s): Bob Albrecht

Publisher(s): People's Computer Company

Nobody knows what a Mugwump is - much less a Hurkle. According to BASIC Computer Games, a Hurkle is an alien creature created by author Theodore Sturgeon for a story his book, A Way Home.

Why are we seeking the Hurkle? How did we even get to the planet it lives on?

In seriousness, this is going to be a pretty short article that functions almost as a companion to the Mugwump article.

For instance, both share the exact same historical data. All of the authorship and dating details relating to Hurkle are as covered in the Mugwump article. As such, I won't be going into detail here, but I'll summarise in case you haven't read Mugwump's article. Hurkle was created by Bob Albrecht, and published in the February 1972 edition of the People's Computer Company newsletter alongside Mugwump. Both games are derived from an earlier, educational game called Hide and Seek, written by school teacher Martin "Bud" Valenti and his students as part of Project SOLO, an educational program created by the University of Pittsburgh designed to explore the use of computers in education.

So, obviously Hurkle is going to be directly compared to Mugwump throughout. Which one is superior? Or do both have their own merits?

While Mugwump is almost identical to the source material, Hurkle differs more significantly. There are multiple gameplay differences, which I've summarised in this handy-dandy table:

I've just discovered that I can paste in tables I make in LibreOffice, and I love it. You can be sure I'll be making plenty good use of this in the future.

I think most of these differences are self-explanatory. For the guesses, instead of providing the distance of the Mugwumps from a guess in units, Hurkle just gives you the direction the Hurkle is in. It literally just tells you "GO NORTH" or "GO EAST."

I got into a spot of bother with this on my first attempt at the game. I carried over my winning strategy from Mugwump, thinking it would work just as well - or at least it would be a solid base to start from. Starting from 0,0, I was told to "GO NORTHEAST." Here, I realised that the directional clues are laid out backwards compared to the co-ordinate system. North - the y-axis - is first, whereas the first co-ordinate number is the x-axis. My mind tricked me into assuming that the first co-ordinate was the y-axis, and so I ended going in the complete opposite direction to the clues.

Yeah, they meant your other northwest, mate.

I figured out what I was doing wrong on my second attempt, which was more of a "feeling things out" type of round. However, this issue persisted throughout my entire time playing the game for this article. I just could not wrap my head around it - it was like playing a platformer with the controls reversed - disorienting and making me feel very, very silly.

Slowly figuring it out.

On my third attempt, I managed to score a win on a relatively easy round. I started at 0,0, and the game kept telling me to go north-east, which I did until I found the Hurkle at 6,6 on my fourth guess.

There we go. Found the mongrel.

I wasn't particularly satisfied with this win, so I kept playing. I fell agonisingly short of the target in my fourth attempt, before earning a more satisfying win with my final guess in my fifth game.

This thing isn't easy to find.

When I came back the following day to get a good round for the final recording, I became increasingly more frustrated with the game. As I said before, this disconnect between the clues and input kept scrambling my mind, and I wasn't having a good time.

One strategic change I made in the end was to go back to my original Mugwump strategy of starting at 5,5. The thinking was that it would actually be better to have all directions available, but less distance in those directions. The guessing strategy from there was one similar to playing a number-guessing game. If the game said to go south-west, I'd go as far as was possible in that direction, while still leaving one space in case I needed to keep going. For example, if starting at 5,5, the game said to go south-west, I'd want to move to 1,1. It's likely that the game would tell me to go back north-east, and so I'd go back to 3,3, and so on and so forth until the game gave me a different clue or I found the Hurkle. That was the theory, in practice I had a hard time with it.

I asked the question at the beginning of the article of which of the two - Mugwump or Hurkle - would end up the superior game. I think that the answer's fairly obvious to you all by now, but let's see anyway.

Time Played: 20 minutes (approx.)

Difficulty: 5/10 (Low-Moderate)

I rate Hurkle a point higher than Mugwump on difficulty because of the clues-versus-input disorientation.

Gameplay: 5/20

-3 compared to Mugwump. It's amazing how small changes make a huge difference in how a game plays. Most notably is the change in the clues, which I won't keep talking about. There's far less strategy and room for taking informed risks in Hurkle due to the changes, and the game suffers greatly as a result. It's far less interesting and engaging than its counterpart.

Controls: 5/10

Exactly the same as Mugwump; and thus just as appropriate.

Visual: 5/10

Functionally the same as Mugwump, too. I prefer Mugwump, but there's not enough difference between the two for Hurkle to lose a point.

Functionality: 5/5

No problems.

Accessibility: 2/5

I think Hurkle is likely a harder game to process for most, as cardinal directions don't always come easy. The lack of any visual aid provided by the game accentuates the issue, and certainly the potential disconnect between clues and input factors into it as well. 

Fun Factor: 2/20

The more I played, the more I hated the game in all honesty. I constantly struggled with the clues, and it made me feel like an idiot. Could just be a me thing in this instance, but remember these scores are based on my own personal experience with the game.

So how does Hurkle compare to Mugwump in the final analysis? Mugwump ended with a score of 36. Hurkle... well, it only got 24. Two little gameplay changes result in a swing of minus twelve. Ouch. That puts Hurkle a full tier lower than Mugwump, sitting near the top of the E-tier, just behind Dartmouth Championship Football in the 13th overall position as it stands now.

We're done with the mythical-animal-hunting games for a bit now. But we're not done with People's Computer Company games.

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