You are likely to be eaten by a Grue...

So simple, yet addicting as hell.  I spent hours on this damn game as a kid...no pictures, no CG graphics...just text, and your imagination...MY imagination of the land the character resides in was entirely based on the farm surrounded by a forest that I grew up in...I hate to pull the cliche "why, back in MY day" talk, but I just gotta' say...kids today have NO. CLUE. how easy they have it with video games and their memory cards/saved data, visual assistance, access to online walkthroughs/cheats...THIS was back when you had to draw your own maps as I did with my Dad's computer paper, write down clues and hints and figure it out on your own...and this game showed little mercy in the difficulty department.  It's hard to imagine a text game being "difficult", but if this game wanted to, it would just plain kill you outright.  You encounter enemies and obstacles in the game that WILL kill you purely by chance.  You can type "use sword" or any useful action to defeat the enemy or progress, but it didn't always work.  Several times, I would fight the Troll in the cellar of the house and get killed just because the narrator felt like it...that, and if you got to a certain point and DIDN'T obtain an item beforehand, or perform a certain action on that item, you were completely S.O.L, no second chances, no hints, nothing.  This element of difficulty remained well into the "Graphic Text Adventure" era, and was a common frustration factor in the "King's Quest" series...but I digress.  The farthest *I* ever made it was into the labyrinth, where on every attempt, I either found a key to a dark gate at the center of the maze, never to actually stumble on the gate/get killed by a bandit...OR I would find the gate, but never able to find the gate key. It was literally like the game was teasing me, and then acting all innocent and unaware of it's trickery by constantly saying, "I don't understand the meaning of the word ___". But I knew what it was doing...and I never found my way to the prize, which would have only been gloriously described in text anyhow...but back then, that prize was worth a king's ransom in a child's eyes.  I swear, I can hear that damn floppy disk snickerng at me right now...Fuck you, Zork....yeah, I don't CARE if you "don't understand the meaning of the word "fuck"."