Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure (1989)

I'm enjoying this a lot more than Maniac Mansion. It is, like MM, a little aimless - after some wandering you eventually get given the task of finding your father by vaguely following in his footsteps - but thanks to the 256-colour version it looks a lot nicer, there's incidental music, and there's Look At and Talk To (even if they are a little restricted)! And it's certainly more satisfying to navigate than a grid of mansion rooms.

However, I've just got to a maze (all the crappy tropes of the genre are flooding back to me!) and while it's not too difficult to navigate now I've mapped it out with my electronic pen and paper, it does make it irritating once you're stuck and having to wander back and forth, which I am. It really is just valueless padding. I feel a little guilty, but I think I'm going to have to check a walkthrough - I feel like I need something to pick the water up in (the wine bottle?) to use on the dry mud to get the torch to use with the hook to reach the rusty lock and get to the casket room, but I can't figure it out, even with relatively few variables. The shame!

EDIT: geez, you have to look at the wine, which makes Indy shame the guy by saying it's a bad year, then he'll let you take it. Not particularly intuitive. I might have got it just by being thorough, but Look At is still a pain in this game because you have to use it in conjunction with What Is. They're this close to the perfect Lucasarts formula..!

EDIT 2: ooh, those bastards! The torch was a lever for a trapdoor that sent me to a lower layer of maze!

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Finally got through that damn maze, by which point I was quite angry at the designers. Some nicely presented business and I'm at the castle, which turns out to be another maze. FUUUUUUU

I'm getting a map off the internet for this one, no way am I drawing out another one. This will be my policy with all mazes going forward (and left and right and back lololol).

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So, this maze also has a bunch of pointless empty rooms, making the way that the overhead layout doesn't tally with the side-on layouts even more frustrating, and a bunch of soldiers that you pretty much have to fight unless you're very lucky with your dialogue choices, in the shitty unforgiving combat system. Using online maps and guides doesn't make this process particularly easier or more fun, so fuck this game. I'd be tempted to find a savegame online to skip ahead, but a) that's a dangerous precedent, and sunglasses) I don't feel like the game has earned my ongoing attention. I don't think I ever got past the catacombs when I played this back in the early 90s, so I'm pretty disappointed that this is what was waiting for me on the other side!

Rating: Red.