Dan Gahlinger is to be congratulated on his memory in recreating this long lost old VAX mainframe program. It has a lot of potential as a large, old style puzzle fest if the game is properly tested and more items available to EXAMINE.
It is unfortunately very buggy. Examining an item often gives the description of a different item you may not have found yet. EXAMINE PLANK gives you the description of a plastic card for instance, and the white candle carries the description of a bar of soap.
THROW BOTTLE caused the game to crash with a run time error. There are also numerous typos throughout the descriptions.
The best part of the game is the maze, which is described as unmappable but contains hundreds of witty sayings and gnomisms from down the ages; everything from old Jewish Jokes to Woody Allen observations.
The version is displayed as 3.5 developmental and hopefully can be redone by the author.
Very buggy and the items table seems to be corrupted as manipulating one item often refers to another. Many spelling and grammar mistakes too.
Nicely done and the background story slowly evolves. Terse but evocative descriptions.
Some opportunities to make the game unwinnable, both deliberate and unintentional. Some clever puzzles in here.
They seem to become harder as the game progresses, which is always a nice touch in my opinion. Unfortunately the bugs render some puzzles at best solvable only after several reloads and some completely unsolvable.
If the bugs are ironed out then this game would score considerably higher.