The setting is fantasy, sort of, but more joke-fantasy than Tolkien-fantasy; this is the sort of fantasy that allows for things like photographs and coffee and chainsaws. The plot is typical of fantasy, though, even though it's a joke here--you have to hunt down the ingredients to a pizza, and deliver it safely. Along the way, you encounter a dragon and a vampire--along with a gnu and a crazed dentist, of course. The layout is sufficiently unencumbered by sense that all sorts of things can sit side by side, such as a spice mine (why not?), a dragon's lair, a haunted cemetery and a travel agency. Obviously, Phred Phontious is not trying particularly hard to convey the scene or draw you into the world it describes; the player may safely register the given stock situation, figure out the twist, and never bother to try to visualize anything. The result is, while enjoyable for a while, oddly forgettable; I found that I could hardly recall the details of the game just hours after playing it. (The silly place names--Thikk Forest, Idubeleevinspukes Cemetery, etc.--don't help.)

Implementation-wise, Phred Phontious needs work. One significant object is hidden in a scenery object that barely gets mentioned, another important object is never mentioned at all, an enemy notices your hiding place under one set of circumstances but not another--though it would be just as easy to spot you--and another fellow goes on addressing you or preventing you from doing things even after he falls asleep. Other objects act _very_ illogically--a rope in this game has some unexpected properties, and another object embedded in scenery must be dislodged by an action that I never would have guessed. At another point, you find yourself in a hole and are told that "it looks uncertain whether you'll ever make it out." Is the challenge to find some creative means of getting out? No--just finding the right syntax. There are other things, illogical bits that didn't slow down gameplay but still left me wondering--for instance, the character brandishing a key next to a locked cage, except that the key doesn't unlock the cage--the cage is irrelevant to the game--but rather a gate far far away. There is a bottleneck right at the start of the game--you have to discover a hidden closet, but the game gives no hint that it's there. Elsewhere, you have a few turns to search certain scenery and get an object; if you don't find it then, the game closes off.

Even amid gameplay problems, though, there are some memorable moments--and even if the setting is clumsy more often than not, the author does manage to send up fantasy conventions in amusing fashion now and again. Two puzzles hinge on dreadful puns--I, personally, enjoyed them, but then again I have a weakness for these things, and I don't advise that the author do this in the future. The way you get rid of the dragon is reasonably creative, and the gnu-milk puzzle--the first part of it--is clever, even if distasteful. And the endgame is quite rewarding, though made more difficult by the requirement of random scenery searching; I enjoyed the puzzles in the endgame more than any in the game. Though there are coding problems aplenty associated with the puzzles, many of them have excellent ideas; with some more time and attention to programming difficulties, the author might produce a first-rate--and very challenging--game. (One puzzle I never figured out: a "last lousy point" that's a clue from a British crossword.)

Phred Phontious is large, hardly finishable within two hours unless the player relies heavily on the walkthrough, and the game both encumbers you with a lot of objects and limits your inventory severely. Perhaps the most welcome thing about the endgame was that the goal was clear and the territory to explore limited; there was no question of wandering around looking for the right object only to find that the solution actually turned on a bad pun. Moreover, the endgame is the only area where the room descriptions come alive--and they do for a very obvious reason then, of course, but it does make things more vivid. And even though it's predictable, the ultimate ending does, somehow, feel satisfying--no "to be continued" messages or any such thing.

This is a game for the puzzle fan, in short, specifically the puzzle fan who likes to see fantasy sent up and doesn't mind some incoherence in the setting. Though the player should save often--the game closes off without warning--Phred Phontious is one of the few competition entries that I found enjoyable despite serious flaws, and I gave it a 6 on the competition scale.