Zork: Grand Inquisitor

The Good
First, I loved the humor. Nothing in the game is taken too seriously, and even the most dire situations have something to make you laugh. Plus Dalboz has a funny description for every item, and pop culture references pop up throughout the game.

Second, the puzzles are by and large doable, with hints for how to do them given by your trusty sidekick Dalboz or scattered around the underground. There were only a handful of things the first time I played that I couldn't do without a walkthrough, and only one I couldn't do the second time (it turns out to combine the Snavig scroll, one half needs to be in the viewer. So simple, but I couldn't remember or figure it out for a day).

Third, it's multimedia. The graphics are beautiful, some of them worthy of hanging on a wall or using as a desktop. You can really tell that whoever designed these levels really took their time and had attention to detail. The animations are good too. The cut scenes are really interesting, and fun to watch, and the audio is very good, both in the sound effects (3D sound, you know) and the voice actors. And the music is catchy, pleasant to listen to, and fits the situations.

Fourth, the story and setting was immersive. I really felt like I was in the world of Zork, where magic is used side by side with electronic technologies (though apparently no one invented firearms or combustion engines), and I could really get in to the game.

Fifth, the game didn't seem to shove it down my throat that it was a sequel, and didn't take any information the people who played previous games might have taken as a given.

The Bad
Well, the animation is significantly lower quality than the still pictures, and it shows. Whenever something moves, the screen (either the whole picture or isolated around the moving object) drops to about half the resolution it was before. It might be part of the technical limitations of the age, but compared to the still pictures, the in-game animations look shoddy.

A few of the puzzles seem so strange and contrived that you have to wonder how the developers expected the player to figure the puzzle out by themselves. Thankfully, it's only a few, and if you get stuck on a puzzle once you figure it out it's usually an "oh duh" moment.

Also, even playing again, the plot seems a little contrived, and things in the setting seem don't make sense if you think about them too much. There's a whole lot of Fridge Logic in the game if you think about practically anything. I won't list many here, but just as an example, what kind of nonsense is it to link a vending machine to students' lockers? Does that mean that students have to pay a Zorkmid to open their lockers, that they have to buy candy with it, and that anyone with a Zorkmid could open anyone's locker? Maybe it was partially intentional since the game is set in a strange world and it is only rated T (Really? T? I would have thought E. Hmm. Ah, here it is..."Comic Mischief, Suggestive Themes, Use of Tobacco & Alcohol" Well, I suppose wondering what would happen if you cast Snavig on a woman is one of the more fun parts of its Fridge Logic), but the sheer number and obviousness of the incongruities and plot holes boarder on carelessness sometimes.

While the death messages are humorous, I'm torn on them because they provide a sort of perverse incentive to try to get yourself killed in every way imaginable just to see the funny death message.

The only other thing I can think of is that its options screen doesn't have anything to adjust voice, sound, and music audio preferences. I couldn't make out the what people were saying a few times, but truth be told, it's not that big of a deal, because it allows closed captioning to be turned on, so I can make out even the few places that are hard to hear, then turn them off when I don't need them.

Oh, also, there're a few minor errors and bugs here and there, but nothing too serious.

The Bottom Line
I've never actually played a Zork game besides this one. Sure, I played a few turns of the original Zork (then gave up), and played through I played through another game, I think it was "Zork: The Undiscovered Underground" now that I look it up (huh. turns out the game was related to ZGI. I never knew that until now) though I could hardly go two steps without a walkthrough for those. But ZGI was different, in an unrelated sort of way. It was my first and only experience with Zork, and I fell in love with it even though I didn't really like the text adventures, and usually don't like puzzle games. Now, several years later, I decided to give it a try, but this time, see if I can do it with no walkthrough at all (like I mentioned, I needed to use it once for something so simple I was kicking myself afterward) and to try to do it without dying at all (still died 7 times). And playing it again, it's just about as good as I remember it, even if I'm not seeing everything for the first time.

In a word, it's good. It's sort of like how Portal is these days, in that it's fun even for people that don't tend to like puzzle games (and even people who never played a Zork game before). But unlike Portal, it's immersive, story-driven, and multimedia (and has a greater variety of puzzles), making it a true gem in the world of puzzle games.