It is a cliché to say that something is "ahead of its time," and I've been doing that more often lately than I would like, but Deadline is truthfully difficult to even believe.

Deadline, either by way of its design decisions or simply by its premise, circumvents every pitfall common to other Infocom text adventures. Unlike Zork 1, Deadline is not mimicking another existing game. Unlike Zork 2, Deadline is not riddled with bizarre logic. Unlike Zork 3, Deadline consists of a singularly giant overarching puzzle and thus does not suffer in its pacing. Unlike Beyond Zork, Deadline does not ambush the player with arbitrary softlocks. Unlike Zork Zero, Deadline is confined to one manageable location of limited scope. Unlike Planetfall, Deadline holds a player's interest from start to finish and uses its clock mechanics for good.

Deadline is, at least to my knowledge, the first game to use an in-universe clock that advances as players go about their business, with time-limited events and NPCs who operate on pre-scheduled routines. It can be completed in a trivial amount of time by a player who knows exactly what they're doing, but for someone playing for the first time, it might take a steep number of runs before successfully solving the mystery and making a proper arrest, but very little is lost when starting over. It's an opportunity to be in different places at the same time, and see where that leads.

This is... a fantastic implementation of an investigation game, commanding only the tiniest fraction of the attention given to the likes of Zork. Let's fix that.

The ZorkQuest games are among the earliest of visual novels, and while I have no interest in getting into the semantics of what is or is not a "visual novel" right now, in the case of ZorkQuest there can be no other possible designation. They are in no way puzzle games, nor are they roleplaying games or even adventure games. They are graphical, and that seems to be their primary selling point, as they do involve creative use of an Apple II's visual capabilities. They also... HAVE sound, as much as anything on an Apple II ever does.

The only interaction that a player has with the game, other than passively observing it, is in jumping between character perspectives to choose which scenes actually play along the pre-determined narrative. That interactivity is... kind of neat, but the thing must then inevitably live or die on the strength of its writing, and Assault on Egreth Castle is definitely nothing special. It's a competent but generic tale of fantasy tropes that would sufficiently entertain a child for a couple of hours.

While lovable for its freakitude, and laudable for its attempts at furthering the still-young graphical adventure subgenre, playing Return to Zork is... jarring and uncomfortable. It feels like a claustrophobic chain of non-sequiturs, bad puzzles, and poor usability. All of that said... Return to Zork is undeniably charming and comes equipped both with genuinely impressive presentation for its time, and a more intuitive menu system than most of its contemporaries, and that should certainly count for something.

Myst came out almost exactly a month after Return to Zork, and it completely embarrassed it. How warranted that embarrassment is can be for someone else to debate, but the reaction is clear. Myst obliterated the sales charts and was accepted by most as the future of first-person graphical adventure games. A few years later, along comes Zork Nemesis, a game that is JARRINGLY distant from the series traditional parodical tone and is entirely transparent in its inspirations... though I suppose Zork always was. This is not at all to say that Zork Nemesis is some meritless sellout. Zork Nemesis is by no means an uninspired Myst clone. It comes to the table with its own lovely aesthetic, its own technical offerings, and of course, its own puzzles.

Zork Nemesis is not bound by a sequence of static images like Myst is. Environments can be free-looked upon in a full 360 degrees, and occasionally even with a Z-axis. Well-acted FMVs are frequent, and the game drips with its own beautiful style. The game also has far more plot and characterization to chew on, leading to a better sense of pace than one sees in Myst.

If I didn't know better than to even ask this of Activision, I would beg for a remaster. Not some nonsense like the recent Myst remake in Unreal 4 with all of the FMV ripped out, but something that I don't have to play in a pathetically resolutioned DOSbox window, where the slightest flick of my mouse makes the world whirl around me and I don't have to fumble desperately with the dragging hand cursor to get a lever to respond.

Clearly, my expectations for Zero Escape were not high enough.

I don't like calling games such as this or Ace Attorney "visual novels" because they're not novels. They're narrative puzzle games. There is absolutely a "game" in finding and acting on the contradictions of an an Ace Attorney game, Zero Escape is much the same, with elaborate puzzle sections that vary wildly between "absolute babycore" and "actual math homework." I don't like math. My time in the education system poisoned me against it so viciously that I quickly get fed up with even basic addition. Even still, I'll be damned if 999 didn't at least KIND OF get me to care about the numbers. I played on the DS rather than the remastered Steam version I also own, and I would recommend that others do the same. You don't need the voice acting, you don't really need an art upgrade, and most importantly and interestingly, you don't need the Quality of Life.

999 is, and you'll have to excuse the micro-spoiler inherent in this sentence, a game that is meant to be played more than once. It is however, like most puzzle games, somewhat difficult to replay. Puzzles are seldom fun to solve twice, and 999 involves solving a whole bunch of puzzles a whole bunch of times. For the most part, these puzzles can be blasted through with little resistance after you've solved them once, though I'd be lying if I said that the repetition didn't have its annoyances. Mercifully, even on the DS, the game features an adequate fast-forward feature and is short enough that repeat runs are nothing to be upset over. More to the point, 999 is structured in such a way that it is almost impossible for the player to not experience something new, substantial, and interesting on each run. This might be the thing about 999 that impressed me the most.

The other contender is the clockwork nature of its writing. Even though I can find logical or logistical wrinkles in its plot if I try, 999 is so excellent at threading its themes into neat little loops and layering its twists on top of each other that to focus on such lingering curiosities would be pedantic in the extreme. 999 knows exactly what it wants to be and how to keep you interested from start to finish. It unfolds itself in a truly well considered way that expertly delivers on dread and intrigue. The impenetrability of a mystery is always subjective, but for the vast majority of players, 999 will regularly throw well-timed curveballs that are properly foreshadowed without giving too much away. The clever will catch some twists well ahead of their reveals or occasionally have their suspicions vindicated, but no one is likely to get ahead of each and every one.

If there's a particular reason I'm not ready to christen 999 as a member of the five-star hall of fame besides the necessary repetition, it's the actual puzzles. As I said, some of them are Weenie Hut Junior material, and most of the rest are just doing actual math, though for someone less allergic than myself, that math probably qualifies as toddler stuff too. In itself, that's fine. It's merely the chosen accessibility level. It's mostly two things that raise my eyebrow: the total chaos of the difficulty curve among those puzzles, and the fact that in many parts of the game the actual difficulty often feels like it comes from pixel hunting and navigating the environment, rather than anything else. I got legitimately stuck on the very first puzzle because I couldn't tell that the thing I needed to interact with was a separate object, and the camera angle cut it off in such a way that I didn't think it was meant to be in my actionable field of view. This kind of stuff fades away quickly as the player learns how the game operates, but I can't help feeling that there's some clumsy design in play in some of these escape sections, and that it bears mentioning.

When all is said and done though, 999 will be sticking with me for quite some time, and as a Saw-Disrespecting Math Hater, I'm very glad that I didn't write it off.

Ghost Trick is the best kind of puzzle game. It finds an intuitive, flexible, and satisfying, and even narratively interesting concept to build on, and it elegantly expands on that concept along a smoothly tuned difficulty curve for exactly the right amount of time, all the way to its logical extreme... almost.

If there's any one thing I hold against Ghost Trick, it's the gameplay scenario it leaves on the table. Well... that and the stealth, but it very much feels as though the whole game's design is building toward a finale that never actually arrives. Aside from this one final step, Ghost Trick uses every part of the buffalo and has as much careful thought behind it as, for example, Starcraft 2's campaigns do. Unlike Starcraft 2 however, Ghost Trick has good writing and is something truly unique.

I don't think that Ghost Trick is flawless in how it unfolds its tale. There are some major plot and characterizational elements that aren't communicated as clearly as they probably should be near its end, but importantly, it nails its pacing all the way through. The drip-feed of information and new characters as the game progresses is enough to maintain interest the entire time.

When all is said and done, Ghost Trick is a feat of innovation, game design, and even storytelling, with only a few hairs out of place.

For its last hurrah, Zork finally produces something familiar to most modern players as a "normal" point and click adventure game. Not a text adventure, not a text adventure with RPG elements, not a bizarrely mature Myst-like, and not the jarring, surrealist lunacy of Return to Zork. It also runs comfortably on modern systems, something that I hesitate to say about its three closest predecessors. As someone who grew up playing Humungous Entertainment games, I felt right at home with Grand Inquisitor. That's a good thing, because after playing this many puzzle games in such proximity, my stamina was wearing thin.

Grand Inquisitor is quite pretty, well voice acted, and has MOSTLY reasonable puzzles with no terribly egregious outliers. It has charming FMV, and it got a couple chuckles out of me, but its humor is definitely... different from the rest of the series. Grand Inquisitor always has SOME character or another chatting your ear off, and they're not spewing constant comedy gold. I can easily see some old-schoolers hating the endless prattle, while I'm sure others who can gel with the comedy will appreciate the quippy companionship.

In any case, Grand Inquisitor is cute, harmless, and competent. An acceptable end to an interesting lineage.