Quest ][

When midnight strikes after ten hours of Monkey Island and the graphics feel stale, you realize you've got a midnight alternative in your hands — something that plays detective in a form that resembles a photo album more than an adventure. Quest ][ from 1995 is a text adventure with some graphics, where you move through static images and try to figure out what's actually happening.

It's a point-and-click puzzle-solving affair running on MS-DOS, where you navigate locations and collect items. The scenario won't blow you away — typical sci-fi dilemmas you've seen a thousand times, and your objective gets lost somewhere among the puzzles. The game never tells you why you should look under this or that, so half the time you're staring into the void, the other half into a walkthrough on the internet.

Controls are key, and these are sensible — you click, collect, use. No unnecessary menus. Except the puzzles are built on logic that looks deep but actually just obscures the goal. You don't feel like you're solving a puzzle — you're guessing what the designer was thinking. The graphics aren't ugly, it's standard DOS-art that you look at more out of academic interest than enjoyment.

What to remember? That adventure games by the mid-nineties were already an established thing, and Quest ][ pretended it had something new to offer. It didn't. It just brought a name with a numeral you won't remember — precisely because nothing significant happened. The convention that LucasArts directed left nobody satisfied here.

Today it'll appeal to players returning to period-appropriate curios who want to try everything DOS adventures had to offer. Not to enjoy it, but to realize what they were missing. You'll play it in DOSBox or through the web, spend a few hours with it, and over time you won't remember it at all.