Lost

This is a large and as far as I am aware also an obscure science fiction game which I played within DOSBox-X.

I nearly didn't bother to continue after unscrewing the lid as there are three elementary spelling mistakes on the introductory page; if you can't scrub up at the initial interview stage are you going to be a suitable employee of my time?

Leaving typographical howlers behind the game develops an intriguing premise - you stumble upon a glowing cylinder and a strange dead humanoid at the edge of the forest. Entering leads into a typical spaceship setting, steel corridors, airlocks, glowing buttons and touch panels worthy of any 1970s science fiction series. Equipment manipulation (you panic and destroy your route back home by pressing an incorrect button) eventually reveals that the spaceship was on an eight destination mission through the solar system to seek out new lives and to boldly go where no TADS runtime error 612 has ever gone before. There are of course shades here of Graham Nelson's Jigsaw as the cylinder acts as the central hub for your quixotic travels.

Each destination must be visited and information learned before you can begin to consider how to handle your final homecoming and there are interesting social comments about the human condition interspersed with the futuristic overarch of the story.

Few items and objects can't be examined and the responses are both interesting and often badly spelled. UNDO, TAKE ALL and X are all understood. Occasional run time errors are annoying but there is some clever coding to deal with different scenarios at the same location and changed states together with better than average NPC interaction. There a lot of mechanical and physics/chemistry posers here amongst the more traditional text adventure puzzles.

Save often as death is often sudden and unexpected.It can be made unwinnable and there are instadeaths a plenty, however what can you expect when you blunder aboard a spaceship and randomly tamper with incomprehensible equipment? The Luddite in you will be bound to render the equipment useless and kill you more than once.