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Review
I came across this game because it is heavily tagged. I assumed that it was something of a joke game, along the lines of IF Quake.
It will not run on the modern version of QTADS, which complains that the game is requesting TADS features not provided by that interpreter. I had to find an old Windows XP virtual machine to run the HTML TADS 2.5.16/3.1.2 interpreter available at the IF Archive.
The implementation quality is quite poor. For a while I thought that this might be a troll game, i.e. one that was made to be frustrating on purpose.
A typical example of interaction:
>I
You are carrying some handcuffs (which contain a lock).
>OPEN DOOR
You can't open the door while handcuffed!
>OPEN HANDCUFFS
Those are not something you can open.
>REMOVE HANDCUFFS
You can't take the handcuffs off while they're locked!
>UNLOCK HANDCUFFS
You don't have a key! Maybe you can pick the lock?
>PICK LOCK
The story doesn't understand that command.
It's not hard to obtain an item that seems useful for picking locks (at least in fiction): a paper clip. However, the exact command (Spoiler - click to show)PICK LOCK WITH PAPER CLIP must be used, which doesn't seem typical for TADS. I'm not sure what the author did to gum up the normal function of the TADS parser, but this pattern repeats with other two-noun actions, so don't assume that a parser error means that the verb word you chose won't work.
Once you escape the castle in which you are imprisoned, the game becomes fairly silly. There's no score, exactly, but there is a mini-game of finding gold bars, and you are informed of how many out of fifteen you've obtained by the end of the game. Some of the actions to get gold bars are rather unexpected. I managed fourteen; there may be something extra if you get them all, but I don't think so, because a bug in the counting logic can cause your count to be increased to more than fifteen, and the ending is no different in that case.
The plot, such as it is, involves meeting a time traveler in the forest, opening a techno-magic portal to Japan to see a giant robot, and talking to a Romanian villager to end the game. In other words, this is basically a goofy learn-to-code exercise put forth to the public as though it were a real game. It has all the charm that such sincerity usually engenders, but it unfortunately falls short of actual entertainment.
It's not a troll game, and I don't regret playing it, but I wouldn't recommend it other than as an example of how a poorly-functioning parser really wrecks the playing experience.
