Encyclopedia of Elementals

This was a really, really long quest game, and one of the longer linear parser games I've played. It is also unfortunately kind of buggy.

It's a sword and sorcery quest game which is better downloaded than played online. You are a young boy who is imprisoned and who learns magic. Throughout the game, you gain the ability fight and have randomized combat. There are also timed events, including some of the hardest real-time events I've had in text games.

It's divided into 5 parts.

In the first part, you sneak around a castle at night.

Then, there is a long romantic and money-filled section where you either romance a rich woman or help a smith romance a poor woman (if you try to do both, you may lock yourself in an unwinnable state and have to edit your save file). You earn money from tasks including guessing the punchline to jokes.

In the third part, you must explore a ruined castle, fighting goblins and assembling items to explore with.

In the fourth part, you must learn more magic and assault a guard tower with timed events where you must hide from guards.

In the fifth part, you have a final battle against a necromancer and assemble a potion.

The game has a combat system with varying attacks and defences. It's a major part of the game.

Overall, the writing had some good plot points but weaker 'local' descriptiveness and line by line writing, and a tendency to include all important info in text dumps. There were severe bugs, like the final guards at the end of the tower just disappearing so the fight options were there but no responses (I edited the save file to include 'Gust' and used it to win). A fun adventure but the bugs were just killing me.