The Unholy Grail

You're a scientist investigating the mysterious demise of lots of local marine life, which leads you to Sinister Conspiracies and such. Slow-starting--it's not initially clear what you should be doing--and hampered by some unfortunate game design choices, notably a remarkably tedious sequence involving 80 turns of travel to and from a certain location, but it's also well-written and the puzzles are reasonably original. It's not incredibly realistic, but the sinister-conspiracy genre doesn't really thrive on realism anyway. JACL, the game engine, isn't the equal of Inform or TADS, but it's pretty good for a homebrewed effort.

-- Duncan Stevens