I knew to expect more crossword and less story when things took a turn for the surreal here. That is to say, within two or three turns into the game. Suddenly, I'm in a deep, dark place (Erebus, no doubt) and all alone. There are strange glyphs carved into the the ground, all around....
Also, it seems that someone has rendered my clothing utterly disgusting. I took this to be the game's way of hinting that the game should be played naked -- or, at least, that the protagonist should continue through the story (crossword?) naked: it's October in Canada here, and I am too cheap to raise my thermostat any higher. Given the hints of influence from Greek mythology, I am not surprised. At the nakedness, not the Canadian autumn. The ancient Greeks seem to have had a fetish for naked heroes, if what I've seen of their art is anything to go by.
(As further evidence, these clothes are destroyed if one grows to giant size while wearing them. Subversive.)
The central puzzle here involves creating words out of a pool of "letters", said letters being objects that sound like letters of the alphabet. I suspected as much when the sheep I found were specifically called "ewes". I had some fun initially creating a bunch of items, some important, some not so much. But after a while, it began to get tedious: the letters disappear after being used, requiring one to go out and obtain new ones; some of these, such as the tea, require multiple steps. And after all of that, if the word one thought up isn't as helpful as expected? Well, one must go and gather the letters again. It would have been nice if the game could assume, after having used a letter a few times, that the protagonist would take steps to obtain a replacement, and thus instantly have that letter on hand again after losing it to a word. Or, better yet, if one could simply ask for the word one wants to form, after having proven sufficient understanding of the machine and the methods of obtaining the necessary letters, and have the game automatically go through the tedious process of gathering up the required letters.
Of course, it would then be far too simple for the game to tell me what words I needed. There would be no fun in that; there's more fun in trying to work out the right words with the letters available ... but, as mentioned, this is effectively killed by the tedium of gathering the letters. Ordinarily, I would have enjoyed sitting around, mixing and matching until I came up with all the right words (being amused at the wrong ones along the way) but now I felt disinclined to do so.
Still, I got to run around like a Greek hero. I was amused by Polyphemus' response when given certain words or names: he still remembers how Odysseus tricked him, by the way, and he's gained a point or two of Wisdom since then, so you might want to avoid trying to repeat history or trying to impersonate an immortal. His response to being told that I was a sheep had me laughing out loud.
Scrambled eggs and hash browns, and tea with lemon.