Journey Into Darkness

This game was very different than the usual hosted game. It eschews a lot of the conventions; if there was a book on 'don't do this in interactive fiction', it would break a lot of those rules. Actually there is a book like that and it contains Graham Nelson's Player's Bill of Rights (originally for parser games):
1) Not to be killed without warning
2) Not to be given horribly unclear hints
3) To be able to win without experience of past lives
4) To be able to win without knowledge of future events
5) Not to have the game closed off without warning
6) Not to need to do unlikely things
7) Not to need to do boring things for the sake of it
8) Not to have to type exactly the right verb
9) To be allowed reasonable synonyms
10) To have a decent parser
11) To have reasonable freedom of action
12) Not to depend much on luck
13) To be able to understand a problem once it is solved
14) Not to be given too many red herrings
15) To have a good reason why something is impossible
16) Not to need to be American to understand hints
17) To know how the game is getting on

This game breaks about half of them, but maybe some rules are meant to be broken. It unabashedly presents the player with a 'gauntlet' style game, where almost all choices lead to death, and you have to go to a savepoint (which is provided once a chapter) every time you die. Except it's possible to get into 'dead man walking' scenarios where every option from your save point kills you, and there are items that you have to have from a shop at the beginning of the game (which is very easy to miss as you have to guess the correct option out of 5 to get to it) and pick the right items (which you need to gamble a little to get all of) and make sure not to use the item at the several useful parts of the game where it could come up, repeatedly requiring you to play the entire game.

On the one hand, it makes a 100K word game punch above its weightclass as each playthrough takes a lot longer. On the other hand, it's pretty frustrating, and I quit after navigating a maze one death at a time (where the options are like 'left, right middle' and all but one of them kill you and send you to the back of the chapter) and reaching a city with a lot of options, only to realize that every option lead to death since I didn't buy the correct option from the first chapter (yet again).

Story-wise, it's an old-school British exploration game rooted in traditional archaeological action story tropes, like brutish savages who are technophobic cannibals and dashing adventurers that accompany you through the jungle.

I did read some of the code after I died, and I was close to the end. Parts of the game were quite funny; there is a monkey involved with a lot of choices, many of which accidentally or purposefully injure the monkey. After accidentally getting into randomized rpg combat with the monkey, I tried to dance with the beautiful boxing champion lady on my team, only for her to say:

"I'm sorry Jack but watching you beat that monkey senseless in the middle of the dancefloor hasn't really put me in the mood for a dance. I guess it's a lesson for us all really. We think we are better than the animals, but I wonder if we aren't worse?"

You apologise.

Overall, it was a fun and wild ride, but I just didn't enjoy having to start from the beginning so many times (at least 10-12 playthroughs from the start and 20+ restarts from chapter saves). Too many of the choices were just 'go left or go right'. This was all completely intentional, so I think the author has completed their full vision and doesn't need to change anything, but I like not repeating several parts over and over without variation.