Eric the Unready

If you dislike text adventures, or if you don't know what a text adventure is, this game is not for you. Look elsewhere, you'd just waste your time with obscure stuff too nerdy for you. So Eric the Unready, like all Legend games, has graphics. Back in 1993 those may have looked good, nowadays they're rather likely to cause eye cancer. But since today the game is running via DOSBox you can play it in window mode (just tab out of the game and it'll switch to window mode) and in a small enough window the graphics have a nice comic touch. A side effect of the graphic interface is the compass rose which lets you navigate the game world with your mouse. Bob Bates' writing is terrific, which could be expected after his four former games for Infocom and Legend. If you enjoyed the humour of e.g. Monkey Island or the Monthy Python movies you'll enjoy this one, too. The outlandish story rushes from scene to scene without noteworthy cohesion, but whatever you experience and do will have you laugh. The puzzles are mostly okay, sometimes even clever. A puzzle is "clever" when it takes you some time to sort it out and come up with a solution yourself, after which you pat your own shoulder and call yourself a bright spark - that's what text adventures are about. In a few cases the puzzles are obscure or flawed, and you'll probably need to look up a walkthrough, e.g. here: https://www.walkthroughking.com/text/erictheunready.aspx Like, once you need to SEARCH something you already EXAMINEd (considered bad design nowadays) and one time you need to make yourself smaller, but instead of a clever puzzle which covers alchemy, magic or amputation you simply have to KNEEL. All in all a 9/10 (or a 5/5). Yeah, it requires reading and typing, so if that's not your mug of beer you're out. For the very, very, very few who like text adventures this is a classic, a gem among the (late) games of that era. Looong playing time, so worth way more money than it costs today.

Much is said about the style and humor, which I also think are great (beside some distasteful jokes, but they are not enough for spoiling it). Funny, witty and many popcultural references. For a text adventure it is also easy to play. You can see a verb list and the objects at all times, so there is good overview of possibilites. The pictures, may they not be very good, also play their part in remembering the scene and thinking about options. I also did not encounter dead ends. The time limit for each day ist also nothing annoying as it is okay for exploring and even if you fail it: when you save your game once in a while (beginning of each day) and you know what to do, it is just a matter of some commands to get to a desired point in the game.

‘Eric the Unready’ is my first Legend Entertainment interactive novel/adventure game. It’s a game I was aware of as an early teen, but I was so into my Sierra and LucasArts adventure games that I let it slipped by. Now I finally got the chance to play it. ‘Eric’ is a funny game, with humour filled with pop culture references from the 1960s to 1990s. In that way, it doesn’t hold up well, and it’s hard for younger audience to get into. Yet, if you were born at the right time, you will likely find ‘Eric’ amusing. Unlike the ‘Spellcasting’ trilogy, which I have reviewed, ‘Eric’ is more lenient and forgiving when it comes those time-consuming turns. In-game time still plays a role in some quests, but you’re given more freedom to explore and try different solutions to puzzles. This alone makes ‘Eric’ a much more enjoyable game compared to its predecessors. As a long-time Sierra and LucasArts gamer, I found the spreadsheet-like parser interface needing some getting used to. This was particularly so since I could also use a mouse on the static picture in the upper right hand corner to look at items. It’s a shame that the pictures only take up about 25% of the screen, especially with the SVGA graphics. It’s a sign that Legend was already falling behind the times while sticking its traditions. If I need to nitpick about this otherwise entertaining game, it would be the art. It’s very inconsistent with the animated cutscenes having one style, the character close-ups having another, the attractive females looking the best, and most other characters having a grotesque grown-up Cabbage Patch Kids look. It would have been nice to have one art style throughout the game. It was also disappointing to only see recycled art assets for the ending. Overall, I was really pleased by ‘Eric’. It’s fun and can be challenging in a few instances. It’s a nice game that will appeal to gamers born in the 1960s to 1980s, who are also well informed on the popular culture of those times.

Eric is a very well written, humorous romp through a generic fantasy and not so fantasy world packed with easter eggs, references, and general silliness. It was one of Legend's later games, where you don't have to write out everything, instead can find all the right answers through the provided prompts. Though you shouldn't read this review. As anyone in the game who wasn't raised in a convent could tell you: reading puts you to sleep.

A good, classic, if somewhat opaque point and click/text adventure game. Really, more like an augmented text adventure than point and click, sort of like classic Zork/Colossal Caves but with pictures. It has something of a learning curve, but is a very rewarding experience. Some of the references are a bit dated (for example, one character is an expy of Rob Schneider's "Rich the Copy Guy" from 90s SNL), but on the whole, it's is a very enjoyable comedy adventure romp, suitable for any fans of wry humor.