The Usurper: Mines of Qyntarr

Mines of Qyntarr is an unquestionably awful game. It plays like when I wrote BASIC tributes to Zork--or I would've if they hadn't run out of memory. Lots of points to collect, lots of simple but illogical puzzles except for the ones based on received knowledge, and lots of verbs to guess. And far too many locations to fit on one piece of paper.

You drop treasures in a well, which is not the trophy case from Zork I. There's a cool talking idol, but there's also a puzzle where the challenge is mostly to look up Funambulate by looking in a dictionary--that's like googling, for you younguns--and another that is different on the Apple than the PC (Spoiler - click to show)"Approach Queen" vs "Checkmate". Plus there's a monster called a yallou, which couldn't be copied at all from the grue.

Sir-Tech bit the dust soon after this, so the promised sequel never happened. I can't say I'm really sad. I wasted money on Wizardry I so I could play II and III. I just thought the games were too tough for me at the time. I'm just not sure I've ever seen such a large-scale, categorically awful game as this. Well, not one you would pay for. It even made me feel like a schmuck for wanting to write a game exactly like this as a twelve-year-old.