Quest for the Sangraal

Baf's Guide

Written in the mid-80s at Cambridge University, published by Topologika, and recently ported to Inform, Quest for the Sangraal is on a distinctly different wavelength than most IF produced nowadays. In one sense, it's a puzzle-fest with only the slenderest strand of plot to bind it together, but the puzzles themselves are pretty unusual: many of them turn on puns, wordplay, and literary allusion to an extent largely unfamiliar to those who grew up on Infocom. The gameplay can be frustrating--the parser, true to the original, is limited to two words and doesn't recognize a lot of verbs that are now standard, notably EXAMINE. The saving grace is the literacy and intelligence that went into the writing of the game: the allusions are varied and sometimes rather subtle, and the writing is usually dryly funny. Sangraal is not an easy game, however--finishing it involves some major intuitive leaps--and the player is advised to seek help rather than trying to make all the leaps himself.

-- Duncan Stevens