Clearly Brøderbund tried to imitate Infocom, as the game is excellently presented and the story and narrative are compelling, but Essex delivers bad playability. The real-time element is too much in the way. The player ends up chasing several NPCs around the map, quickly interacting with them, for the event processor to suddenly make the NPC go away. The command TIME SLOWER can help, but up to a point. In addition, the game is agonizingly slow in most platforms, goals are unclear, and the screen shows too much random noise vs useful information. Could have been a hit if turn-based and coded not to read from disk every single second, but that's how it goes.