Zork III

Adventure Classic Gaming

In some ways, Zork III: The Dungeon Master is the original Myst clone. There is a sliding blocks puzzle and some mechanical puzzles, all in the context of little plot and lots of ambience. There are also some standard inventory based problems, and a few very strange people to deal with. As such, there is not much of a story to propel you through the dungeon, just your love of exploration.
-- David Tanguay
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SPAG
Gloom and emptyness
It is hard to put a label on the mood of Zork III -- "brooding," perhaps, but that would make it more ominous than it is. If anything, it seems like a T.S. Eliot scene, with its barren landscapes and wisps of mist and enigmatic encounters with unidentified characters. (...) The adjective "gray" never appears, as far as I can tell, in any of the room descriptions in Zork III, and yet there is a grayness about the game environment that makes the feel of the game far more real, more coherent, than the other two, even if the scenes themselves are less picturesque than those of Zork II.
-- Duncan Stevens
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SynTax
A smaller game than Zork I and II and this time you are not collecting treasures. The parsing is good and the descriptions of locations excellent as usual, with plenty of atmosphere.
-- Joan Dunn
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>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction
Where parts 1 and 2 were light, playful, and adventurous, Zork III feels austere, somber, ominous. If not for the appearance of the brass lantern and the Elvish sword, it would hardly seem like it belonged in the same set as those other games...

What’s going on here? Primarily, I think it comes down to the fact that the Infocom Implementors had run low on pieces of the mainframe Zork to adapt for microcomputers. Zork I and Zork II covered the vast majority of that original mainframe game, leaving just a few set pieces for Zork III — pretty much just the mirror box, the royal puzzle, and parts of the endgame. As a result, they could create a game with its own sense of thematic unity, freed (mostly) from the hodgepodge aesthetic of mainframe Zork.