Ratings and Reviews by Mikalye

The game is short and I played it a dozen or so times to try to experience the multiple options. There are three perspectives on what/who the Knight might be and what it all means, and on my first play through I was genuinely intrigued to see what happens. But the ending(s) let the game down.

(Spoiler - click to show) There are three endings, one corresponding to each of the three perspectives of the knight - He slumbers, he never was, he is metaphorical but the treasure may be real. At the end, you pick one of them to be true and that is it. You pick, you are right, the game ends. In all cases I was left thinking "Is that it?"

vermis does manage to evoke atmosphere in this very short game, and I accept that the 500 word limit on the Neo-Twiny word jam is an extremely tight limitation. So I respect the effort but that ultimately was not enough for me to consider the game successful.

I went to MIT. Almost all of the Infocom team went to MIT. It would make sense that there would be at least one game set at MIT, and this is it. The GUE Tech Map is basically the same as the MIT campus. The Aero lobby sits at the entrance to the department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the Great Dome sits on the infinite corridor (which is what it is really called), and with some minor changes (e.g. what in real life is the Green building, is now the Brown building), the map is MIT. Even the steam tunnels are largely real (albeit exaggerated to make a game).

Given that, I perhaps have a different response to this than many others, because there is an element of nostalgia built in, but I finished this while still a student at MIT. Looking at it with fresh eyes, 30 years on, many of the criticisms leveled at the game are both right and wrong at the same time.

They are right, in that this never really becomes an atmospheric horror game. At no point are you even a little bit creeped out (compared to say Anchorhead). Rather, Lebling's silly sense of humour, which was at the crux of the Zork series) is given full rein. Be it the inscription over the western entrance to GUE Tech, or the graffitti in the elevator, Lebling regularly puts in a gag because he can. Partially, as a result, the horror never really builds. This has led many to dismiss the game as a horror-less horror game. But while that is true, it is also wrong as well.

It is not a valid criticism of an apple to note that it is not a banana. Someone going in looking for a horror game that will scare their socks off is in for a bad time. However, this is a Zork game with a horror overlay, and a decent one at that. The puzzles are generally decent. The internal logic holds together, and while it is a bit silly, that is not necessarily a bad thing.

This was the biggest game around at the time (early 80s). Bigger than Zork, way bigger than Colossal Cave. Bill Lucke and Luke Frolik wrote a parser arguably better than Infocom's and built a huge game. Unfortunately the game was written for HP3000 series minicomputers. The game was never officially released, but found widespread distribution through the HP INTEREX user community. It was huge. It was not always original (if the authors found a really clever puzzle in a different game they sometimes stole it), but there was a huge amount of original content. I lost hundreds of hours to this game in an MIT computer Lab in the early 80's.

I haven't seen this game available anywhere in 30 years, until this year's re-release but it was amazing.