IFComp09 reviews: The Grand Quest
MONTFOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORT
At least there were only two riddles in this one, and one was inoffensive while the other was actually clever.
The eponymous Grand Quest was for the Holy Grail, and the opening text made me hopeful that we'd be going on some metaphorical journey through the soul to find the true meaning of virtue and all that.
The game does touch on this at a few points, but it's a very few. However, except at the very beginning and the very end, the moral questions, such as they are, are universally "are you willing to give up that which is Good for that which is Best?" and the answer is always "yes".
This includes taking or at least simulating actions that would normally be considered sins, which we must commit or fail.
I'm pretty sure this is not how holy quests, of which The Grail Quest is a paragon, are supposed to work. If the quest consumes you, burning away who you are, the parts it burns away are supposed to be the bad parts. That's a big part of what makes it a holy quest instead of an unholy obsession. In fact, I blew the first few tests precisely because I figured the rules were that if you were willing to give up the Good, you did not deserve the Quest in the first place. (The treasury and tax room were fine, though not particularly challenging; the tax room in particular you simply followed orders and proceeded.)
The stuff that wasn't riddles or committing sins was logic puzzles and one immensely complicated multistep machine puzzle that I fiddled with for about 10 moves and then played the over-50-move solution straight out of the walkthrough. It didn't even grab me well enough to reverse-engineer the mechanic.
So yeah, no. One could probably write a good grail-quest game where every single move command was > NORTH, but this is not that game.