Uncle Zebulon's Will

Uncle Zebulon's Will is an excellent puzzly adventure game. It takes about an hour to solve it and the ending leaves the player wanting more (it also hints at a future sequel that never materialized, unfortunately). The game contains only 12 locations, something that you're even told when giving the SCORE command, so you know how much there is left to explore, and each of those locations are well described. The world is static: there are no NPCs to speak of, save one which isn't more than a door guard, and the author uses room descriptions to describe what isn't in the room rather than what is, but manages to create a great atmosphere.

In this short game, there are few puzzles to solve, but they are all interesting and go beyond the find this, give that variety. There's a bit of searching, some transmutation and some mythology (which requires no previous knowledge on the part of the player). It does feel like the author grabbed themes from a rather mixed back, combining remote magical worlds with classical mythology, but then the game is so short that it would be hard to tie it all together into a more coherent story.

The game offers a few quality-of-life niceties: in some rooms, when you go into a direction you can't go, the game will helpfully tell you where you can go. There is also a hint system that is part of the game world (as opposed to a HINTS command). Finally, room descriptions change when things happen in the room. These are things you'll find in smaller games (although I'd love to see them in a game of any size) and they work well.