Zork: Grand Inquisitor (PC) | 1.13 GB
Genre: Adventure / Puzzle
Link (s): hotfile | uploading | rapidshare

In the first of many clever references to its predecessors in the Zork series, Grand Inquisitor opens with a bald foppish dictator banning the use of magic throughout the Great Underground Empire. For gamers who plodded through the rather tedious Return to Zork and oddly humorless Zork Nemesis, the plot device is an obvious metaphor for what has happened to the longest-running series (20 years!) in computer gaming. Zork's signature wit and absurdity seemed to have been lost in the jump from text to graphic adventuring. Well, the magic may be gone from the land, but it has not vanished from the game. Grand Inquisitor is the best graphical Zork yet, and one of the most consistently entertaining adventures of the year.



The puzzles themselves are familiar Zorkisms. How do you retrieve the Coconut of Quendor from the soft palate of that sleeping dragon with some combination of inflatable toys, a gold tooth, and a bicycle pump? What exactly is the use of a magic spell that makes the color purple invisible? Of course, you will need to figure out how to make the Totemizer machine work in your favor and decipher a cryptic map of prison cells in order to free poor Dirk Benedict - the usual reverse engineering tasks of the computer adventurer. They are not tiresome or gratuitous, however. Grand Inquisitor succeeds in keeping the obstacles solvable and sensible (in a Zorky kind of way) within the fictional world.

Zork Grand Inquisitor Tech Info
Publisher: Activision
Developer: Activision
Genre: Adventure
ESRB: TEEN
ESRB Descriptors: Comic Mischief, Suggestive Themes, Use of Alcohol and Tobacco

Game Information
Number of Players: 1-2

Minimum System Requirements
System: Pentium-90 or equivalent
RAM: 128 MB
Video Memory: 15 MB
Hard Drive Space: 500 MB