Crypt

In the back-chamber of this small church on the English countryside, you meet the sleepy vicar. He recounts of the crypt below that was made by a predecessor of his, and of the legends that there are catacombs below that go back to Roman ages.

He then promptly falls back asleep, leaving you to your own devices to explore the undergound passages.

The oldschool game Crypt is a thoroughly unambitious and unassuming crypt-crawl. This was a big part of its appeal to me. It basically says: "Here, some underground crawlspaces. Now leave me be and go find some treasure. Oh, and try not to die too often."

The command INFO returns a short text where the narrator/parser introduces itself and immediately apologizes for not being as sophisticated as the one from Adventure, understanding only six directions (no diagonals) and a small number of verbs. Its vocabulary is indeed quite limited. The instances where you would GIVE or SHOW {object} in another game require you to DROP {object} here. There is no EXAMINE or LOOK {object}, so you must glean all the information from the sparse room descriptions. Since I'm normally an examine-it-then-poke-it type of adventurer, this required me to adjust my style.

The descriptions are practical and short to the point of sounding cold and distant. This can be unintentionally funny, as some of the treasures would shatter all knowledge we think we have about the Middle Ages or the Roman presence in England.

Apart from figuring out where to DROP the appropriate object, the only puzzles lie in mapping out the mazes. Just as the game itself, these are unoriginal and not too complicated.

Technically, everything works smoothly. I found one typo and no bugs.

A run-of-the-mill treasure-search which I enjoyed very much for the few hours it lasted.