The plot, oddly, is perhaps the weakest part; authorship system limitations don't limit a game's story as such, and yet Dunjin feels like it doesn't know what it wants to be. You're set down outside a cave and sent off to explore without much of a sense of what you're doing--the documentation doesn't provide much guidance--other than a sign nearby advising that you're to bring treasures to the Adventure Office. Shades, naturally, of Colossal Cave, but that game was content to be a treasure hunt. This one tries to throw in another plot; trouble is, you don't really know what it is (though you get a few hints) until more than two-thirds of the way through, and it hardly makes sense of what's come before. For example, one key object is hidden in a place where no one could get to it without some fairly drastic measures--who put it there? where was it before? Similarly, you accumulate clues about a certain crystal you have to use long before you have any idea what the crystal is, or why you would need it; that comes at the end of the game. The scoring system makes the extra plot central and the treasures extraneous--the treasures are bonus points at the end of the game, essentially--but it's hard to say that you pursue any particular goal through the bulk of the game.

Disregarding that flaw, though--and it's hardly unique to this game--Dunjin does manage to be quite entertaining. There are several very clever puzzles that involve magic, and others that involve defeating magic in novel ways. One distract-the-guardian puzzle recalls Trinity, and the premise is much funnier (and appropriate for the author's Swedish origins). There and at other times, the author sends up the adventure-quest genre in entertaining ways--notably, in your interactions with a genie, in figuring out a certain "magic word," and in your discovery of old beer cans in an unlikely place. The conflation of locales that was occasionally distracting in Colossal Cave works better here because it's in the interests of humor: that a crucial bit of information is written on a candy wrapper, and that a key clue involves a Beatles song, provides an element of silliness that feels just right, somehow. In that the plot, when you discover it, is fairly standard save-the-princess and get-the-fabled-object stuff, Dunjin feels more like a conventional treasure-hunt than a parody as a whole, but there are more than enough funny or offbeat moments to keep the player involved. (My personal favorite--when you've disposed of a guard dog, the game chimes in to let you know that the dog didn't actually suffer a nasty fate. A sort of "no animals were harmed" touch.)

It would take some remarkable writing to make Dunjin feel like a truly coherent game environment, with computer labs and dragons and conventional houses and dwarves' mines virtually side by side, and accordingly Dunjin's writing is best described as competent; virtually all locations have a few compact sentences conveying the scene. (The computer lab, with a full screen of text, is the exception--one wonders whether it was modeled on something in the author's own experience, given the excess of detail.) There are mini-settings that are well done--a coal mine in particular, and some scenes, such as your view of a valley, are arrestingly described--though others, such as a series of tunnels, could stand some more detail. A big sprawling treasure-hunt like this should convey the relevant details as clearly as possible, though, rather than striving for atmosphere at every turn, and Dunjin does that quite well at virtually every turn.

Getting through Dunjin is a project. There are many distinct areas of the game to discover, each with at least 15 rooms to discover and make sense of, and often solutions involve objects found in obscure places, far away from the relevant puzzle. The end in particular requires either lots of foresight about the proper objects or some major traipsing around--there are some shortcuts provided, but one of them closes off at a certain moment. None of the puzzles are extraordinarily hard, and none that I recall require knowledge obtained by death, but the sheer size and scope of the game make everything feel a little daunting. Dunjin does strike a nice balance between linearity and breadth--the various sections of the game that you discover give you enough of a choice that you have several different puzzles to work on, but they're not quite big enough to make the whole thing feel aimless. But there are a few slightly unfair moments as well where the game closes off with little warning; saving often is vital. (And, of course, there are mazes--four, by my count, none huge but three big enough to require mapping with objects.) All of the puzzles are logical, though; none bend the rules of the universe, even the fantasy universe, too much, and the small illogicalities here and there (a gate that you can close and then walk through, a key hidden in a somewhat absurd place) don't detract much from the game.

As noted, the game was written in Pascal, and the system performs admirably. There are a few disambiguation problems--the game has a few too many books and pieces of paper, and getting them all in one place is occasionally not a good idea--but very few and none fatal to interacting with an object. The 1998 player may miss "undo" and such, and there was no "script" command that I could find, but the parser does handle a fairly wide variety of verbs and recognize pronouns as well. (Wow.) There are some complicated code tasks--timed and landscape-changing events--that go off without a hitch, and the few moments that require exact syntax weren't sufficiently clumsy to slow me down for long. Though it's nothing special, I appreciated the game not kicking me right out to the DOS prompt when I died or otherwise ended the game--it's the sort of user-friendly thing (especially in Windows) that can make a difference in overall enjoyment. The only real problem I encountered is that the rooms don't have names as such, and traveling through them a second time yields "You're in corridor" and such, often not sufficiently descriptive to remind me of where I was (particularly in a game this size); I had to switch the thing into VERBOSE to make sense of the game environment. But that's hardly a major drawback, and when compared to its AGT contemporaries, the gameplay in Dunjin holds up quite well.

On the whole, then, this is a diverting (and lengthy) romp through a rather diverse dungeon; it deals a bit too heavily in fantasy conventions, particularly toward the end, to appeal to the player who genuinely dislikes fantasy, but for those who enjoy the genre and like seeing it sent up in some fairly clever ways, Dunjin is worth checking out.