Maiden of the Moonlight

Baf's Guide

A 17th-century Scottish ghost story involving a wicked baron, his beautiful daughter, and the poor lad who loved her - all of whose souls remain inside a decaying manor house. You play a soldier, just returned from fighting the Roundheads and determined to put the ghosts to rest. One of the better ghost games - good setting, solid story, quite a lot of exposition scattered about (some of it quite long), and a bevy of mechanical and magical puzzles, including one very good large-scale one. Requires a little learning-by-death - entering one particular room can end your game prematurely, and there's no way to know it except by experience. Has a few subtleties that few will notice without using the adaptive hints.

-- Carl Muckenhoupt

SPAG
Simple but clever puzzles, with the only annoyance being the very, VERY forced method of getting the perfume bottle over the fence. (Was this necessary?) I liked having to piece together solutions from the writings, books, and room descriptions, though there's the occasional guesswork.
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SynTax
[...] the program tells me that there's a path made of flagstones to the west (if my memory serves me right). I tell the program to examine the flagstones, and it replies that it has no idea what 'flagstones' are! [...] I must say that I none the less enjoyed many of the descriptions of the various locations I visited and I stayed with the game at least 15 minutes before giving up completely!
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>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction

Maiden is both exciting and irritating — it promises drama and intrigue, but many of the obstacles to be overcome along the way are simply brute force barriers, with none of the subtlety of the best interactive fiction.
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