The Grand Quest

So you thought you were in for a cave crawl? Actually, it is more like a quiz show, only set in a Steve Jacksonesque fantasy dungeon and presented by a mysterious Guardian of the Goblet.

You wander through a series of rooms, each containing a puzzle. By solving the current puzzle you gain entrance to the next room. In the last room looms the Goblet of your dreams.

The puzzles are varied in character, difficulty, and fairness, but none strikes me as really ingenious; and presented ‘raw’ like this, out of any particular narrative context and without any other in-game motivation, they fail to hold my interest.

The world, sparsely furnished as it is, is only minimally implemented: if, say, the heavy treasure chest in the middle of the room is not needed to solve the puzzle of that room, then, try as you might to open it, “you can’t see any such thing”.

This is most certainly not a game to put in the hands or computers of anyone new to IF.

(And the ending! Is that the sound of the author laughing at me?)

This game is just a string of puzzles with a thin story set up around it. The first few puzzles are fairly fun, though occasionally underclued. The last puzzle is just brtual, involving a machine that transforms playing cards.

The game doesn't seem to be butgy, and it seems to be intended to be frustrating and difficult, so it succeeds at what it wants to be. But it is under described, and too hard for my taste.