Zork: Grand Inquisitor

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Obey! Conform! Abstain! Ignore! Deny! Refrain! Cease! Appease! Shun! Avoid new sensations. Avoid all sensations! Avoid any sensation! Avoid unnecessary pleasantries! Avoid necessary pleasantries! Avoid libation! Avoid fermentation! Avoid all these in combinations. Save often! Floss regularly! Floss meaningfully! Floss athletically! And above all, never forget who is the boss of you. ME! I am the boss of you! I am the boss of you! I am the boss of you!
—Mir Yannick, Grand Inquisitor

Zork: Grand Inquisitor is a humorous 3D Point-and-Click Adventure Game, part of the Zork series, combining high quality (for 1997) 3D pictures, slightly lower quality animations, and text to describe the ending and the death scenes.

(Full back-story can be found here, though parts of it conflict with the story in the game.)

About a hundred years before the start of the game, two fellow wizards-in-training, Mir Yannick and Dalboz of Girth became friends. However, while Dalboz was the most powerful and promising wizard in training, Mir was found to suffer from M.D.D. (Magic Deficit Disorder), and flunked out of the school. The two friends had a falling out, as well as Dalboz accidentally casting an immortality spell on them, and they went their separate ways. Dalboz retired to a cottage underground and became extremely bored (yet unable to kill himself), while Mir joined the Zorkastrian Seminary and advanced its ranks. During this time, magic began to decline, aided by Mir's use of the Totemizer, an ancient invention he refurbished, which rather than killing a magical creature or user (and thus allowing their magic to escape back into the environment), it would pulverize them and squish them, sealing them in a tiny token, forever unable to escape without the use of magic.

Dalboz came out of retirement to confront Yannick, but in the ensuing struggle Dalboz was nearly killed, but was transformed into a lantern (which Mir didn't see), and forgotten about.

With magic on the decline and the world in his hands, Mir Yannick ruled the land with an iron fist, using Totemization for the smallest crimes, and banned all magic use, instead forcing everyone to rely completely on technology, which had previously just been a supplement to magic (Zork has a technology level somewhere around World War II. They can harness the power of electricity, and have radio, television, and movies, but don't have the technology for cars, planes, or firearms).

Enter the player, a vacuum salesman from Parts Unknown, who enters Port Foozle moments before curfew, and must find someplace to stay before he's found by Inquisition guards.

Tropes used in Zork: Grand Inquisitor include:
The mighty Inquisitor himself
  • Aliens in Cardiff: One possible death sequence involves being totemized, tossed through a wormhole, and ending up spending eternity as a piece of litter lying on the side of the Jersey Turnpike.
  • All Crimes Are Equal: Stand around after curfew, and you'll be Totemized. Use magic, and you'll be Totemized. Climb into the Totemizer machine and you'll be Totemized. (Also, the penalty for solving a puzzle incorrectly is almost always a gleefully narrated death.)
  • Always Close: Averted when you pour Cola onto Zork Rocks, making them go critical, but played straight when Antharia Jack is always right about to step into the Totemizer when the power goes out.
  • And I Must Scream: Getting Totemized definitely falls into this category. And yes, it can happen to the player (although the game mercifully spares you the details of the long-term effects except in text form).
  • Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: Dalboz in the ending. You end up taking over his role as Dungeon Master.
  • Beneath the Earth: The Great Underground Empire
  • Big No: Over an uncooperative vending machine.
  • Bottomless Pits: You don't die, and raise a family with someone else who fell down the bottomless pit. (But it's still a Nonstandard Game Over.)
  • Calvin Ball: Double Fanucci
  • Canned Orders Over Loudspeaker: You encounter this a few times through the game; fiddling with a loudspeaker in Port Foozle is part of the solution to a puzzle.
  • Continuity Nod: One of the Cosmic Keystones is kept inside the white house. The one with the mailbox. The Coconut of Quendor was also featured in Beyond Zork, as the perfect container for the knowledge of magic during magic's destruction.
    • The Cube of Foundation was the main plot device in the last game in the Enchanter trilogy, Spellbreaker.
      • Many of the spells in the game first appeared in the Enchanter trilogy.
    • Flood Control Dam #3 features in several earlier Zork games.
    • When the player gets the door to Dalboz's house drunk, he says "Want some rye? Course ya do!" This is an oft-repeated line from Return to Zork.
    • Scenes from Zork Nemesis appear as images on the pillars puzzle at G.U.E. Tech, and there's a reference to Thaddium on the soda machine (appropriately enough, the time-delayed explosive item shares some similarity with the Irondune breakout puzzle in Nemesis).
    • Indeed, the game can be seen as one big Continuity Nod to the earlier Zork games.
  • Control Room Puzzle: Two of them, one at the dam and the other in a prison.
  • Cool and Unusual Punishment: The Totemizer
  • Cosmic Keystone: A Cube of Foundation, the Skull of Yoruk, and the Coconut of Quendor.
  • Cutting the Knot: That cage surrounded by chessboards? All you have to do is smash it with a wooden plank.
    • Also, the easy solution to the Hades Shuttle Courtesy Phone is to cast Kendall, the "Simplify Instructions" spell.
  • Discard and Draw
  • Dangerously Genre Savvy: The two-headed beast's opening monologue.

Let's cut the crap, okay? You got this far, you know the drill: you're the adventurer, I'm we're your basic two-headed guardian-of-Hades-type creature. You're looking for treasure, mana, crystals, red pages, blue pages, whatever. It's all the same, really. The point is: you wanna get by. They always do. And we gotta kill ya. We always do. There's a little banter, a little slaying, chop-chop-chop yada-yada-yada, and then I gotta string your entrails all over the place and make a big mess.

Lucy Flathead: Ahh, the Adventurer's Creed. Steal anything that isn't nailed down, even if it's a federal offence.

Wartle: Go ahead and read him his rights.
Inquisition Guard: You... have no rights.

  • Rock-Paper-Scissors: "Grue Fire Water."
  • Schizo-Tech
  • Sharing a Body: The Hades beast, with two heads on one body.
    • After sending the Griff through a Time Tunnel, he'll start to complain about what you're making him do (stealing mail, touching a dragon's tooth, etc.). Is the AFGNCAAP sharing his body, or is it just a case of Breaking the Fourth Wall?.
  • Shout-Out: The Coconut of Quendor is an apparent parody of the Amulet of Yendor, the MacGuffin from Rogue (and subsequently Nethack).
    • Two types of things the Hades beast assumes you're looking for are red pages and blue pages.
      • If you try to gain entrance to the tavern whilst playing as Griff, you'll occasionally get;

Floyd: We don't serve your kind here
Griff: Okay then. I'll just wait out here with the droids.

    • Near the start of the game, there's a computer in Antharia Jack's store showing a screen from the text adventure game Planetfall.
    • In the endgame, an off-screen guard says "Oh my god, They Killed Kenny!"
  • Speak Friend and Enter
  • Spider Sense: Dalboz and your glowing sword
  • Teleporters and Transporters
  • The Coroner Doth Protest Too Much: The previous Inquisitor "Tripped on the rug and accidentally strangled himself".
  • The Many Deaths of You
  • Timey-Wimey Ball: At one point near the end of the game, Lucy Flathead time travels back to Port Foozle before the Inquisition took over, and ends up playing a game of Strip Grue Fire Water with Antharia Jack. If you lose, Lucy would run out of Jack's house in a panic and hide in a nearby building, where she eventually becomes the unseen fish merchant that you had to take a can of Mead Lite from at the beginning of the game.
  • To Hell and Back
  • Hold Your Hippogriffs: "Sweet Yoruk!" and "Holy Hungus!"
  • Unwinnable: At one point in the game, the Griff gets the Coconut of Quendor from within the mouth of a dragon, but then someone in the dragon's stomach says that he needs a coconut to make a piina colada and tosses you rope for you to tie to a tooth. If you decide to drop the Coconut of Quendor down the dragon's throat instead to appease the guy, the Griff will comment, "Somehow I don't think that was its intended usage."
  • Who Wants to Live Forever?: Dalboz tries to kill himself in many ways, but cannot because of his immortality spell.
  • Wrong Genre Savvy: Upon defeating the Six-Armed Invisible Guard, Dalboz will inform you that "You gain 86 experience points and found a healing potion," before realising that he's being the wrong kind of Dungeon Master.
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