The Grand Quest
Owen Parish (2009)
In
The Grand Quest you find yourself fulfilling a life long dream, finally arriving at a maze of traps that protects a legendary goblet. There’s no story, no scoring, so the goal is quite clear. You have to get to the heart of the maze, obtaining this long sought desire. The problem is, the goblet is behind eight rooms each containing a puzzle.
This is an all puzzle game, so I don't think it will have a wide appeal, but even the puzzles themselves are poorly done. If it didn't have a walkthrough I couldn't have gotten as far as I did.
Eight puzzles poorly clued, uh, what can I say. Some are easy, and some are ridiculous. So, it starts off with a riddle using a solution that’s not even a word as far as I can tell. Riddles are bad enough, I don’t think they work well in IF, but make it easy on the player if you really think you need them. Use multiple choice. I’ve seen giving the player the ability to guess their way through work in other games, just a thought for other programmers.
Fast forward to the end of the game where there’s a crazy card puzzle. I wonder what the author was thinking with no explanation about how this thing is supposed to work. You can’t even experiment with it, the puzzle doesn’t let you know if you’re going in the right direction or not. On top of that the game couldn’t handle the ambiguity of both of my Jacks, so I couldn’t even complete it, something that could have been easily avoided.
I scored this game a 2. I don’t think that an all puzzle game really works that well, and one that is broken will find its way to the bottom of the competition. The story is uninspired, there’s little to no hinting, and the game can even be put into an unwinnable state. Add it all up, and you get a game that’s really not worth playing.