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The little town of Punster is suffering from an outbreak of a plague of verbicide. Language itself is in danger. Here are eight short stories set in Punster, for you to unravel, to break the plague. The stories mainly involve word play, but each in a different way.

In Eat Your Words, you find yourself in the Teapot Cafe. Here you must use well-known sayings within the context of the story.

The trouble is, this plot is rather linear, and if you miss out on a saying, you may not get a chance with many more.

The Shopping Bizarre story find you cast is a dessert aisle in a supermarket. So far, so good. This one involves puns. You see a man with bad breath, so you hop over to the Meets aisle, and type MINTS when you spot the mince. Thus you can cure the bad breather.

In Play Jacks, you are confronted by a contraption with many controls, and using each one in turn converts it into something else beginning with the word JACK.

For example, Jack in the box, Jack-knife, Jaccuzzi... and you have to use the different objects obtainable, to solve the puzzles. Two sections in particular are great fun. In Buy the Farm, you must guess the well-known phrase or saying. So when I had taught an old dog some new tricks, and he ran off and knocked over a milk churn. I was soon not crying over the result.

Shake A Tower is a story of spoonerisms, and that too proved highly playable. Easy prey was the queer old dean, and quickly spotted was a shoving leopard.

Treat Nord And Bert as a parlour game, play it in a group and you'll get a lot of fun out of it, even if you do speak English. It's nice to see Infocom branching out with new ideas.