Lurking Horror: Infocom's Only Horror Game 

I remember hearing about the rubber centipede from an ancient channel (Techtite) that the rubber centipede was not mentioned on the box's contents so It would give players a scare before even opening the box, a neat Idea.

The rubber centipede is peak elementary school haunted house tour, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't somwhat charming.

The "Frobozz Magic Floor Wax (and Dessert Topping)" is probably a reference to an ANCIENT Saturday Night Live skit, a commercial for Shimmer Floor Wax. I tried to find a video online but it's being elusive.

In hindsight, arcade games and computer games like this weren't all that different. In both you're supposed to lose over and over again, learn from your experiences and use that to beat the game. The way you pretty much have to use knowledge your in-game character couldn't possibly have, reminds of a particularly odd bit in Shadowgate. There, you find a chained woman, who's actually a werewolf you have to kill. But the only way to find that out is to cause her to transform, at which point she immediately kills you. So, in-universe, the player character rams an arrow through a seemingly innocent woman's body, while, at most, only having hunch that she might be evil. The 2013 remake changes that, so that she doesn't appear to be a prisoner and transforms right away before she kills you. But she does that weird villain bit, where she tells you her plan/backstory (don't quite remember) beforehand, which is pretty pointless when she plans to kill you anyway. Also this video (and by extension game) enriched my knowledge. I never heard the word "unctuous" before and didn't even know what a hyrax is.

It indeed does make a nice job of making the campus a live-in, historied place.

Ha, now we know where they got the idea for the "head of the navigator" in Monkey Island from.

This one was interesting, but I was really surprised at the almost abruptness of the ending. I really would have expected it to be longer. And I wasn't enjoying it but that enjoyment was sort of curtailed when we got to the end so suddenly. Thanks for your playthrough and analysis! Can't wait for the next one

I think this video is important to keeping this game preserved in a way that a modern audience can actually meaningfully appreciate. The combination of Lovecraftian mysteries, 80's MIT culture and slang, and references to all kinds of things that largely aren't timely anymore (plus the general eloquence of the prose) is like a brick wall to anyone under 40 in this day and age. Let alone the copy protection and at times genuinely obtuse game design. If you can't understand what a text-game is _saying_, you can't play it. You won't get very far, and what progress you do make, you won't understand. So thank you for this.

I've been waiting for your next video; I'm so excited to watch this! Wish I could support you more, but you definitely have my upvotes!

Love to see people still talking about these classics! However, I have to disagree with the idea that learn-by-dying puzzles like the rats and alchemy lab ritual are bad puzzle design full stop. Rather, they’re just of a style that has fallen out of favor because the prevaling attitude toward saving and loading has changed. People have fallen out of the habit of saving frequently, and see dying and reloading as a chore or punishment now, but back at the time we were constantly saving, trying things, reloading, trying other things, and so on until you’d figured out the most optimal path. That was just the process of exploring and figuring out the game, the same way dying several times to a boss until you figure out their attack patterns is the process of beating a modern Dark Souls game. We never had any expectation of being able to beat a game in one go without dying and reloading. Plus, deaths often came with jokes that you wouldn’t otherwise get to see, so it was all part of the fun.

Puzzle design in text adventures has come a long way since those days.

You can actually "Get Ye Flask"!? Simply Amazing.

In you opinion, are the notes "from people at the end of their rope" trope the predecessors of the inexplicably complete journals including their deaths that are found in games like the Elder Scrolls? Are these good narrative elements in your opinion?

I think the "bad game design" puzzles are designed that way on purpose. This is a horror game. Make all the puzzles basically unwinnable the first time, combine it with timed horrors lurking to kill you in a few turns of futility, and you get the game's purpose: you are supposed to experience dread and horror from all the deaths... whether that was successful or not is up for debate.

I played this a lot back in the day. I didn't manage to solve the whole thing.but I saw a lot of the locations that came back to me during your playthrough. I couldn't agree more regarding the atmosphere of the game, I still have strong images of many of the key places. Enjoyable at the time but I would find the fail to proceed style annoying these days.

Never completed this one, but the setting was interesting. I did complete A Mind Forever Voyaging though, which is almost as obscure as this one.

dude read out what you are typing I was hoping to listen to this while I draw

Didn't know about this one, neat!