Gruds in Space

The Good
The remarkable thing about Gruds in Space is that it fully commits to being a "graphic adventure" rather than "a text adventure with illustrations". Text descriptions throughout the game are markedly minimal, with them only really cropping up to draw your attention to specific details in the screen that might not be immediately obvious; everything else is done through the graphic window.

And it works! The game provides a convincing feeling of adventuring in the first person (albeit with a pathological inability to face any other direction than due north) and is very intuitive to navigate. The puzzles are challenging without being overly obtuse, and the environments you'll navigate are laid out logically with none of the annoying "if you leave this room from the south, you'll enter the next from the east" nonsense found in some pure text adventures.

While the storyline is simplistic, it makes sense and it's nice to see some actual characters taking active involvement in proceedings -- as well as presenting a few unexpected surprises here and there.

The Bad
Disk swapping, and seemingly no support for multiple disk drives! It's not too bad for the most part, as much of the game is on side 2 of the floppy disk, with only the program file and certain select areas on side 1, but having to swap back and forth to save your game is mildly inconvenient. This will be nothing new to experienced veterans of text adventures on floppy disk-based systems, but it can be cumbersome, particularly on emulators... though in that latter case you can always just use state saves instead.

And you will want to save, because there are a few areas in the game where it's possible to stumble in relatively blindly and find yourself completely stuck -- not dead, but unable to move. At that point you have no choice but to either load a saved game or restart the whole game.

The Bottom Line
So long as you're open to navigating a graphic adventure with a simple text parser (and it is a pretty simple one, only really requiring two-word inputs for the most part) and are willing to save your game relatively frequently, Gruds in Space is an enjoyable game and an interesting look at the early days of adventure games where the emphasis is on visuals rather than text descriptions.

Purists may scoff, of course, and they certainly did back in the day, but Gruds in Space deserves to be better-known than it is. Recommended.