You, the player, have come to visit your friend John Baker--who, for an author included in his own game, takes quite a verbal beating; we certainly don't get a very good impression of John's habits and tastes. There is no sign of John in the apartment, though, other than junk scattered here and there and a diary left in the bedroom suggesting that John has stumbled into a confrontation between a Fire Witch and Ice Wixard residing in his basement. (This suggests to you about John that "years of heavy drinking have finally destroyed his mind.") Nevertheless, you investigate the hole in the basement and, sure enough, find all manner of strange things, none of them obviously supporting the claim that an Ice Wizard and Fire Witch are in the area (until the very end) but intriguing in their own right. The best of the puzzles is one involving a devil and the task he assigns you: the solution requires an intuitive leap of sorts, but a sensible one, if that makes sense, though most are fairly clever and rewarding to solve.

There are few moments in John's Fire Witch that break the spell, so to speak, by drawing the player's attention to the mechanics of the game. One is a painful guess-the-verb moment, coupled with some illogicalities on the solution to the relevant puzzle (why one particular solution to the ring problem is deemed correct, and another incorrect, is less than obvious to me). There is a puzzle that cannot be solved until a certain number of turns have passed--and if you move through the earlier part of the game efficiently, you may find yourself a bit puzzled about why there's no apparent way to move the game forward. (Or simply irritated about having to wait 50 or so turns for something to happen.) The inventory limit is fairly small and requires some step-retracing (arguably, this is more rather than less realistic, since the classic adventurer seems to have eleven hands, but it does complicate things), and there are a few situations that require somewhat exact syntax. But most nouns and verbs have several substitutes, though the game occasionally fails to fill in logical gaps (for instance, "sleep" with a bed in front of you puts you to sleep on the floor). Moreover, the game is free from scenery-object confusion, free from disambiguation problems, as far as I could tell ("which do you mean..."), and takes the trouble to code many specific responses to non-useful actions, lending to the polished feel. In short, even if there isn't much there, problmes that distract from what is there are relatively few.

The writing is mostly good, though it has its rough moments--the death of an adversary is somewhat unnecessarily gruesome, something as unusual as a bridge made of ice gets virtually no description, and the game takes it upon itself to tell you when you stumble into a crystal grotto that "the overall effect is quite beautiful." Let me conclude that, John. You just tell me what's there. Still, most of the writing is solid, though some of the better descriptions are in the apartment rather than in the tunnels, which often feel, well, just a bit generic, and occasioanlly a tad clumsy. For example:

Long Tunnel (1)
This is a long tunnel leading north and south.  It has definitely been 
purposefully made, being tiled with crafted stone.  It looks like something 
that would have been created centuries ago.  You can see the Red Crystal 
Grotto to the north, and a side corridor leads off to the east.

There is a loud and horrible rushing noise in your ears, and the room appears 
to be filling up with what you would describe as steam if it were not so very 
very cold.