Adventures in Flesh

Adventures in Flesh is a text adventure for the Apple II written by Fred D. Williams and published in 1983 by Krell Software. The player is shrunken and placed inside the body of a patient with multiple illnesses, which they must diagnose in order to score points.

Gameplay


Adventures in Flesh is a text adventure in which the player character is miniaturized and injected into a patient who has up to ten disorders. Using the game's manual, a coloring book of human anatomy, the player then must navigate their way through the body to diagnose the patient based on clues and symptoms found in each area of the body, and they score points based on the amount of correct diagnoses. The program has a vocabulary of about 100 words; commands are mostly one or two words long, and the program prompts the player with available commands based on the area they are in at each turn.

Development
Adventures in Flesh was released for the Appli II home computer in 1983. Ports to the Commodore 64 and the Atari 8-bit computers were announced to the press but not realized.

Reception
In a review for Computer Gaming World, J. Robert Beck stated that adults would consider the game "engaging, if unsophisticated compared to the best prose adventures", adding, "Its shortcomings as an adventure program are well offset by its attention to anatomic detail and informative approach to a score of real medical problems." Beck criticized the "sketchy" documentation of the game. In her book Ace it!: Use Your Computer to Improve Your Grades, Kendra Bonnett wrote that the game had "interesting, sometimes funny, and always educational" responses, detail-rich descriptions, and "well done" documentation, though she added that the game's vocabulary "ideally should have been longer."