Madness & the Minotaur

_A bold adventurer descends into the enormous labyrinth of the Cretan King
Minos at Knossos, hoping to part seven mythical monsters (including the
terrifying, titular, Minotaur) from sixteen treasures and escape with his
life, helped only by a handful of arcane spells acquired while navigating dead
ends and the enigmatic ramblings of an inspired Oracle wandering the maze._

It’s not entirely fair to blame the period hardware limitations for this
game’s poorly-aged VERB NOUN text parser, as Infocom first launched home
versions of Zork I a year earlier, but at the time its grammar was still
industry-standard par for the course. What made this title stand out is also
what kept its adherents on their toes (… for decades) — inconstant internal
rules and conditions that changed every time the game was played.

Much like the colour of potions in Nethack shuffling their associations with
spell effects between games, this game not only jumbles the relation between
spell names and their effects, but also the conditions that must be met in
order to learn them! Similarly unpredictable are the locations and
vulnerabilities of monsters and treasures. Add to that a huge (four floors of
64 rooms each) maze full of one-way passages, bogus “dummy” treasures,
realtime monster movement, unreliable and abstruse room connections and you
end up with a devious dungeon indeed.