The genre is vaguely fantasy, though the settings go back and forth between modern-day and otherwise (within the same game-- medieval castles and mysterious machinery sit virtually side by side). The premise of Holy Grail involves medieval stuff, as you might imagine, but it hardly matters, since the plot is all but irrelevant to these games; the objective amounts to object- collecting. (True, in Frustration, the idea is to pull together items on your shopping list--but it doesn't really change the game significantly, since you don't find the relevant items in places you're looking for them, unless you look for honey by climbing trees in deserts.) All four games are out-and-out puzzlefests in the tradition of classic IF--the objective provides a vague excuse for your being there, and a nice ending message, but doesn't really affect what comes in between.

The puzzles themselves are at once varied and oddly monotonous. Keys for doors play a very big part--all four games are simply littered with keys--and magic potions with various unforeseeable effects are also a recurring theme. All four of the games feature at least one math problem and at least one maze, and all of them revolve around singularly bizarre magical transportation systems which make it annoyingly easy to strand yourself somewhere and make the game unfinishable. Not many of the puzzles break out of the apply-object-X-to-obstacle-Y feel, and many of those that do rely on trial and error and weird intuitive leaps. One puzzle in Golden Fleece, for example, involves what amounts to a giant see-saw, and requires lots of tedious object-moving to balance the seesaw properly; another at the beginning of Holy Grail involves, in essence, a timing device to open and close a door. Creative puzzles both, but highly obscure--and the relevant descriptions don't help much.

There are other, stranger similarities. All four games have at least a few "Broom Cupboard" locations--Jim has a fondness for the things, whether or not there are brooms around--and three of the four have at least one long hall that you traipse along, opening doors. All of them are inordinately fond of buttons or switches that trigger something else somewhere in the game, no longer a favored approach to IF design; likewise, all of them have lots and lots of useless rooms. In fact, the author sometimes gives the impression that someone's requiring him to have a certain minimum number of locations (perhaps he worked for Sycamora Tree), because he often seems to make fun of himself for throwing in useless rooms:

Small Chamber
   The small chamber you have entered has but two features.  One of these
is the small doorway inset into the wall to your north, whilst the other
is its total lack of interest.

Almost-featureless Chamber
   An involuntary gasp of recognition issues from your throat as you pass
into this dead-end chamber.  Wonderingly your gaze travels over the walls,
floor and ceiling, remarking on the total absence of mossy growths, damp
patches, stalactites or any other remarkable features.  You are about to
come to the the apparently-inescapable conclusion that this is a
featureless chamber, when your eye comes to rest on a knobbly little bit
of rock with a texture and colour marginally but sufficiently different
from that of the surrounding rocks as to make the chamber
almost-featureless.

As games, all of MacBrayne's works are only somewhat successful. Certainly, if you're looking for an involving story, these don't have much to offer--but even on their terms, as collections of puzzles, these games have some problems. Too many of the puzzles rely on guesswork and on experimentation rather than on logic as such; it's hard to imagine that most players actually like pushing a button and then poking around the landscape to see what, if anything, happened. Much of the transportation involves going through one-way doors of sorts--and if you failed to bring something with you, or press a certain button that will end up opening a certain door, you're stuck. In other words, there's a lot of unfairness and player-unfriendliness going on. There's one puzzle in Frustration that turns on a rather silly pun, and another in the same game that amounts to a stubborn-parser trick, and another in Holy Grail that's the ultimate in knowledge- obtained-by-screwing-up. There are moments of creativity, but they're outnumbered by rather mindless give-object-to-obstacle puzzles.

The shame of it is that Jim MacBrayne's games clearly reflect some real effort--there are lots and lots of objects in each one, for instance, and the objects all interact in more or less sensible ways. The writing is thorough, and though it's a bit overdone in places, it's usually good enough to convey the scene efficiently. There's some entertaining whimsy scattered here and there as well--there's a cut scene in Frustration involving a giant teddy bear (really), and there are numerous jokes of varying degrees of cleverness scattered through all four games. There's even a sense of dramatic progression at times-- particularly in The Mission, where your quest for the toothpick of Quetzlcoatl (really) is periodically interrupted by scenes out of some old boys' club, where the potentates who commissioned you with the quest speculate on the chances of your completing it. It's a cinematic device that I'd never seen in IF, and it's used to great effect here. The problem is that standards have changed since MacBrayne wrote these games, and even well-written puzzle- fests don't elicit much more than a yawn anymore--even when they don't have the game design flaws that these have. The year when these were released--1996--saw thoughtful efforts like So Far, Delusions and Tapestry that integrated story with puzzles in a way that little, if any, IF had done before; obsolescence, for old-style fantasy/puzzle IF like MacBrayne's games and Path to Fortune came suddenly. Works on the wrong side of that divide are treated more like museum pieces than works of actual interest now--and while the development is a healthy one is many respects, it left some games that were clearly the product of considerable labor out in the cold.

It can't fairly be said that these are terrific examples of their kind; they're flawed in several respects on the design front. But they're solidly put together, and nostalgic old-style IF buffs just might enjoy one of them; Holy Grail is probably the best of the lot, but there's not much to distinguish them. For most of us, though, the main function of Jim MacBrayne's games is to offer some perspective on where IF has come.