Johnny Red the ship captain, Pete the Rat(the obligatory Guy with the Eyepatch,) the Weasel and McGinty the salvage man. These are the four players among whom you, the designated diver of your treasure hunters, must successfully navigate in order to find treasure buried in the ocean and survive to tell about it in Infocom's Cutthroats. While not one of the tougher Infocom adventures, Cutthroats certainly has drama, interactions unusual for a text adventure, and even two possible and very different paths for the game to take. At any point you risk the game stopping not only when you die but also when your fellow treasure hunters lose faith in you(try waiting too long before making your dive,) or your team sees the mission cannot be continued. 

The narrative to start the game tells of Hevlin, an old shipmate, who after heavily drinking and talking too much slips you a book of shipwrecks handily duplicated in your game package. You wake up the next morning in your ratty inn room to find he has been murdered, and you find a note slipped under your door from Johnny to drop by the Shanty Inn at 8:30. Of course if you do not, or if you decline to look for treasure at the meeting, the game is over. Otherwise you have another meeting, and between meals and drinks, your band must work around the machinations of McGinty, who has been looking for the treasure for a while. One of the passengers may also be a traitor(you can even play a game you don't intend to win solely to snoop around after each one,) and given that Infocom's text parser is not sophisticated enough to let you wheedle(it does have two flaws--more than usual, one based on Drill as noun and verb, the other where it sees CAPTAIN as a set of bunk beds and not Johnny,) you will take the fall without the appropriate action or special item evidence. In addition, if you do not secure certain possessions, they will be stolen. There are many factors that can make Cutthroats unwinnable yet leave you drifting for a while, and this can be a bit annoying. Most time-shuffling puzzles work better, such as the procedure to remove the traitor; too soon, and there's not enough help to man the boat. 

A minor weakness may be that so many of the puzzles rely on the manual and in-box materials. This works decently when you have a list of items to buy and their prices(hard to put on such a limited screen,) but the extensive high-tide chart is overdone and useless, and the humorous inserts lack the usual punch, as they contradict the ancient salty-pirate feel of the game. Still the map of the wrecks and their descriptions add puzzles in their own right; for instance, there are four wrecks, but one is barren and another is unimportant. You may be misled guessing locations the first few times, but that's what the seven game save slots are for. 

Cutthroats is the sort of usual great story you expect from Infocom. The two different shipwrecks to search provide a nice stick-and-carrot to give the game another look as the two shipwrecks--and the different ships you must borrow to visit each for a successful dive--have different puzzles. Nothing is terribly difficult, though, and with only three relatively simple puzzles per ship, any one run through the game seems a bit stunted. In addition, one of the characters does very little indeed. However with the snooping and waiting combined with the general time pressure of several clandestine appointments before you board the ship, Cutthroats is enjoyable enough. 
 
