Baf's Guide to the IF Archive

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Unholy Grail

Author:Stuart Allen
Genres:Espionage
Science Fiction
Released:1997
Review:

You're a scientist investigating the mysterious demise of lots of local marine life, which leads you to Sinister Conspiracies and such. Slow-starting--it's not initially clear what you should be doing--and hampered by some unfortunate game design choices, notably a remarkably tedious sequence involving 80 turns of travel to and from a certain location, but it's also well-written and the puzzles are reasonably original. It's not incredibly realistic, but the sinister-conspiracy genre doesn't really thrive on realism anyway. JACL, the game engine, isn't the equal of Inform or TADS, but it's pretty good for a homebrewed effort.

Rating: ***

Reviewed by Duncan Stevens (02 Jul 2000)

Competitions/
Awards:
15th place, rec.arts.int-fiction competition 1997
Related Links:SPAG reviews
Downloads:
AcornJACL.spk (28.75 KB)
Acorn Archimedes runtime
config (127 bytes)
JACL data file
copying (18.03 KB)
license
grail (446.03 KB)
JACL executable (version: 1997 competition release)
jacl.c (89.06 KB)
C source code for the JACL runtime
jacl.elf (69.00 KB)
Linux runtime
jacl.exe (106.30 KB)
MS-DOS executable (MS-DOS runtime)
readme (1.12 KB)
author's notes
walkthru (1.33 KB)
Walkthrough


Baf's Guide to the Interactive Fiction Archive
Copyright © 2012 Carl Muckenhoupt
All reviews included in this site are copyright © the credited author of the review.