It’s dark. You are in danger of being eaten by a grue.
Then you hear a scuffle.
Apparently, the grue has gotten into a fight with a Night Gaunt, an unseen creature from Sierra’s Quest for Glory series, which also has the nasty habit of killing you when it’s dark.
And, although you’re not quite sure, you seem to hear the heavy breathing of a Damned Thing (from the story of the same name by Ambrose Bierce) nearby.
Which fictional creature will win the battle and kill you before you ever glimpse it? Other suggestions are perfectly fine; but the restriction is that it has to be a fictional creature that kills and that no one ever sees. Personally, I go with the grue.
FYI, Night Gaunts are actually from the H.P. Lovecraft story, “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath,” as I recall. I drew a pretty decent picture of one after reading that story. Scary creatures.
Going with Lovecraft, how about Shoggoth?
Or how about the Creature from the Id from Forbidden Planet?
Lovecrafts Nightgaunts were seen and described in some detail. The Shoggoth were also seen, albeit briefly, so neither of those critters actually qualifies as a creature no one ever sees They’re just critter that no one ever sees for very long.
Lovecraft’s works are packed with creature that live primarily in darkness or are invisible and are rarely seen:the color out of space, the <I>other</I> Whately twin, gugs, ghasts, Curwen’s reanimated dead and even Cthulhu himself. The trouble is that they always seem to be glimpsed at some stage in the story and so don’t qualify.
You get to see a night gaunt after it kills you in QFG. They look like hats with cloaks I think. Now I’m curious. I’ll install my old copy and see what I’ll see…
Yup, they look like those halloween ghost things only black, with red eyes.
Lovecraft nightgaunts wouldn’t kill you, though. They either deliver you to whoever they are serving, or tickle you with their razor-sharp tail until you go insane.
Really? Dang. I only ever played the revised fancified version of the new one, and in the manual it says: “Night Gaunts: no one knows what Night Gaunts look like, because those who have seen Night Gaunts are dead. Take care when sleeping outside” or something like that (I know the first sentence is verbatim.)
Can we just pretend that a wizard sends the scary ghost thing?
Oh, and the Ur-Grue you can see normally in Beyond Zork but I think it’s safe to say that he doesn’t count.
Was it Spellbreaker or Beyond Zork that had the baby grues? I can’t remember and both would have them far enough in that I’m not about to jump into them to find out.
Oh nuts, I just remembered the Grue convention where you have to assemble a Grue costume in the mini-Zork game they released about the time of Zork Nemesis.
Yeah, or they just fly you up a few hundred feet and then drop you, like they did to the ghasts that atacked them - somehow, that strikes me as being more effective than mere swallowing a la the grue.
Coincidentally, I am an aficionado of all things interactive-fiction… ish. You can download Zork: The Undiscovered Underground here at the IF Archive (it was released as freeware when Grand Inquisitor was out, iirc, not Nemesis). The manual is available as a .pdf, too.
