Enlightenment

I put a significant amount of effort into solving Enlightenment without hints, as I like the challenge and think that in general that's how IF should be tackled--by fanatically dedicated puzzle enthusiasts, who will stop at nothing for the glory of spoilerless conquest, etc.; but I'm now tempted to add this to my ever-increasing list of games that I'm not really prepared to believe that anyone has ever solved without consulting the hints. (It's not that I think that any game I can't solve without hints is automatically in that category. Far from it.)

What tripped me up and was most infuriating, upon learning the solution was:(Spoiler - click to show)getting the battery out of the sword. For whatever reason, the combination of not being able to drop the sword and what seemed to me to be an underclued reference to its battery compartment, etc., led me to think that it was much more likely than some subsequent turn-of-events would get rid of the sword for me than I would have to do it myself. I also think that getting a message about wasting water whenever you tried to pour it on something other than the lamp would lead someone to conclude that such an attempt would be equally futile, unless you were trying brute force combinations, which also seems to be only the way that anyone would ever guess that the amulet would fit into the tinderbox.

While I appreciated the humor of the "full score" command, I also think it would have been better design for that list to hint, at least obliquely, at the solution to some of the puzzles. I also didn't quite get what was going on with the stars after "grue"; the game makes some copyright acknowledgment to Activision in its opening text; and a lot of philosophy publishers would be paying royalties to them if "grue" were somehow IP-protected.