The Grand Quest

This game pretends to have a story, but it doesn't. We know that there is a Grand Macguffin at the end about which the protagonist is obsessing, but we don't really get a sense of why. Some "show, don't tell" would be ideal here to give us a better understanding of why we're on this quest in the first place.

So the game doesn't engage us. There is a locket which gives some indication of the protagonist's home life, but that is all the characterisation we get. I found it dead easy to slice through the ghostly image of the protagonist's son because, frankly, I know it's an illusion and nothing has pulled me into the irrational world of emotional attachments. In the game world, it is clearly meant to be a question of what the hero is willing to give up in order to get to his objective, but I the player have less attachment to him and his concerns than I do to the average Sim on "The Sims".

The puzzle with the cards and the boxes was a tough one, but it was not difficult to work out the underlying principle; that is, if one realises that the changes occur differently depending on whether the receiving box is open or closed. It was tedious to type out multiple commands for a single change.

I was disappointed in the ending. I got the impression from the opening text that the right thing to do was to walk away: after all, it said that no-one could possess the goblet, and that the true reward was simply in seeing it. In fact, both endings at that point felt profoundly unsatisfying.

As a breakfast, this would be an energy bar. Some people may like that sort of thing, but ... there's not a lot of joie de dejeuner to it, is there?