Elsegar I by silicon14
Elsegar I is a parser adventure that can be fairly described as ‘retro’. No story to speak of; a protagonist who is a nameless and faceless nobody; a world that consists of locations randomly stringed together; puzzles that exist just because, you know, there should be some puzzles; locations that serve only to enlarge the map, since they do not even contain objects with a description. And then the game even throws a maze at us!
To be honest, I feel a little bad for picking on this game. It looks very much like the work of an author who has discovered the possibility to make text adventures for themselves, but who has not had much contact with recent examples of the genre. My advise would be to play some of the great parser adventures – maybe The Wizard Sniffer, Alias: The Magpie, Steph Cherrywell’s games, Sugarlawn, this year’s The Impossible Bottle – and then write something with an enlarged sense of possibilities and craft.
As it is, here’s what I read in the game’s walkthrough:
A maze that I have to map by hand and randomised combat? Okay, that is too much for me. I quit.