Ocean Dancer

I wanted to like this one.

The story, such as it is: after escaping your bedroom, you find yourself captain of the eponymous sailing ship, searching for the lost sons of the previous captain. The game is amazingly, almost endearingly primitive. There are no descriptions of anything. Almost every command is met with "I can't" or "I see nothing special." You can't even recall the room description without exiting and re-entering. There are severe guess-the-verb problems, starting with the opening room. But for all that, I was still having a good time about 2/3 of the way through it. The puzzles (mostly) made sense. I stumbled around the map but somehow always found the right place to be, and I was able to progress with a little help from the walkthrough when verb-guessing became impossible.

But then I hit a point where the game is simply broken. An object that is supposed to be there, isn't. Following a footnote in the walkthrough, I came to learn that the only way to complete the game is to hack it with The Quill to conjure the missing object. That's quite a ways beyond where I was prepared to take it. It's a shame.