It continues to amaze me that Sierra insisted on adding graphics when they were so dreadfully ugly. The parser wasn't very good, either.
Hmmm.... in fact the game was pretty unimpressive. Didn't stop me from buying it, though - must have been the nice looking cover.

The typical pattern in C64 adventures of that time. Make a mediocre to awful text adventure game, then beef it up with graphics. To me, it usually rings alarm bells when I see graphics... Still, I've seen worse than this one here :-).

Mark, I don't think your comment is fair in this case. Sierra didn't approach these games by writing a simple text skeleton and adding graphics - they produced the two together. Mystery House is the first adventure game that ever had graphics. Ulysses is only 3 games later than that.

The home system for these games was the Apple II. Adding the graphics in the first place taxed memory and disk space and prevented the parser or text content from being complex. I don't know who did the c64 ports ('Bobbit'?), but in following the Apple II games, they're broadly being defined by the Apple II versions.

@Mark: Yes, I've seen worse, too - in some of the other Sierra titles :)
@Blurgle: I don't think Mark's comment is unfair, per se. Sierra could have gone with a text-only game, but they decided to add graphics, well knowing it would (severely) impact the amount of text that could be implemented in the game. The parser was likely to suffer as well.
And even if the Apple II version was the initial one, there was nothing to prevent Sierra from "beefing up" the C64 version, to the extent that this was a possibility.

Well-intentioned, but a bit of a mess. The mythology is all wrong, but hey-ho, par for the course for a Sierra adventure. Generally easy, though the parser is too limited for some puzzles, mazes abound for their own sake, and the message "I don't understand that" means that the parser understood, but the action was not legit. Questionable design, but there was not a lot to choose from in 1982.