The parser represents the biggest adjustment. It's a two-word parser that simply ignores anything after the first two words, so GIVE X TO Y will generally work, but PUT X IN Y will not. This requires some fairly tortured inferences at times--DROP is sometimes taken as the equivalent of PUT, improbably--and on the whole it's not a major highlight. EXAMINE is disabled--the "initial" description of each object has everything that's relevant--and other standbys like ENTER and WEAR aren't on the scene either, and nor are meta-commands like UNDO and OOPS. (On the other hand, lots of highly unusual verbs are recognized, and there's no way of guessing what the game does and doesn't allow as a verb.) There are other, smaller differences--abbrevations like I and L aren't provided for--but the parser is the biggest adjustment, and whether it drives the modern player completely insane depends in large part on whether the player grew up on Infocom (whose parser was never limited to two words) or discovered IF only recently (and therefore never encountered the earlier, cruder days of IF parsing).
As you might guess from the above, the puzzles don't, by and large, involve particularly subtle object manipulation--i.e., discovering subtle hidden properties of objects generally isn't key to solving the puzzles. They do, however, involve some baffling logical leaps, and it's possible to solve some of them without figuring out the key, so to speak. Moreover, a few are simply infuriating--there's a maze that ranks with the most annoying in the history of IF, which is saying quite a bit, and an extended one-of-these-three-doors-is-telling-the-truth sequence. Some are more creative, admittedly--there's a "seven deadly sins" puzzle that would feel quite original if the idea hadn't been done several times in recent years (i.e., long after Sangraal was released)--but few are real highlights. Supposedly, Sangraal is the easiest of the three ported Topologika games; if so, that should give IFers pause, because in no sense are the puzzles in Sangraal easy, nor is the game design particularly forgiving. It's not at all hard to close off the game without realizing it, and some of the puzzles don't allow for trial and error. The game itself is fairly wide--lots of puzzles are available for most of the game--but many of the available puzzles aren't initially solvable, and solving them in the wrong order can render the thing unfinishable.
Sangraal's saving grace is its literacy and cultural acumen. The game is littered with references to various authors--Keats, Poe, Shelley, Homer, the Bible several times over, and many, many more. Some of the digs are rather subtle--there's a Wailing Wall that, initially, you get driven away from because you don't belong there, and you (minor spoiler) evade getting driven away by changing your appearance so that you look the part, a barbed reference to the ongoing controversy in Jerusalem over Orthodox Jews refusing to allow Reform and Conservative Jews to pray at the Wailing Wall. Equally subtle is the following:
There is a five-foot high pillar of salt here, which looks a bit like a running woman. But not a lot.Sangraal abounds with humor along these lines, and while not all the jokes work--one sequence involving the "Eleventh Commandment" and a bunch of computer programmers feels rather forced--most of them are funny enough to make the game consistently amusing. The drawback, however, is that much of the humor requires that the player think in the same bizarre and subversive way as the author does, and Sangraal is hence best played with the aid of a walkthrough or a helpful friend who's already finished it. Particularly difficult in this respect are the puzzles that draw on certain poems by Keats and Shelley--the logical progression is highly obscure.
Sangraal occupies such an odd niche that it's hard to liken it to any recent work of IF. There's no plot, really--the initial premise (retrieving the Holy Grail) is entirely irrelevant, as with most fantasy quests--and neither is there anything binding the game's world together. (I.e., the world depicted feels less like a setting than an excuse for a lot of silly puzzles.) The puzzles have a way of disappearing once they're solved, and most of them either give the player a treasure-type object or simply award points; none, as far as I can recall, changed the game's landscape, and not many even opened up new territory to explore. No doubt this is a function of the memory limitations of the day, which made it difficult to code for both a solved and unsolved state of a puzzle, but the effect is to magnify the random- collection-of-puzzles feel.
While it's an uneven work in several respects, there's plenty of wit in Sangraal, enough to overcome the clumsier bits, and if you enjoy rather obscure satire, you may well enjoy this.