As the title itself suggests, you play the role of sir Lancelot, the bravest knight of the round table. Actually, the game consists of two parts. In first you need to get to the castle and become a knight and in the second you have to venture on the greatest quest any medieval knight could imagine. You need to search the Holy Grail.
As you can already conclude by the screenshots, this game is a text adventure with graphics spicing it up. The graphics are nice and they do contribute to the feeling of the game, so you can really get into the spirit of things, but you don’t really need the graphics. Everything you need to know will be written on the screen.
The text is well written and you can choose to have the text only game. I mean, all the graphics are a fancy addition, but a nicely written story is the heart of any text adventure game, so hats off to Cristina Erskine and Pete McBride (who took care of the text).
The game has the save/load features and an UNDO feature to retrace your steps (this is a very useful feature lacking in many similar games). The UNDO was one of the things the producers were apparently very proud off, seeing how they especially mentioned it in the opening screen of the game.
Now with every text based game there is always the problem of which verbs the game will recognize. Again, the same problem is present here. The easy way out is the walkthrough, but the traditional way is by trying. The game will tell you if it can not find a verb in a sentence (even if you might use one), so obviously it doesn’t recognize what you want. On the other hand if it makes a comment on the verb you used (that it is not possible to do that at a certain time) it means the word is recognized, but not useful at the time. You can also give some general commands like find Merlin and you will take several steps at once (with a lot of description on the way.
The game is definitely worth playing as it is a very good text adventure game and I strongly recommend it. You might find it will take more of your time then you expected, because the story will really draw you in, so you won’t just be trying to finish it as soon as possible, but will actually enjoy trying different possibilities to see what happens. This game really is a great piece of interactive fiction (in the true meaning of the phrase).
To run the game you will need to run the MENU.EXE file (the only executable file anyway) and select the graphic mode. I suggest you chose option G (the EGA graphics on the EGA monitor), but you may want to check some other graphics out (or even run a game in text only mode).
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