[PC] The Legend of Kyrandia - Book One (CD-ROM version) (1992)

How:
Read about it since Amiga times, got on GOG.

Pros:
- No explicit actions: just one click for everything, which works surprisingly well
- Great pixel art graphics and smooth animations
- Good voice-overs overall
- Fast movement, can skip dialogues
- Autosave

Cons:
- Can get into an unwinnable state without knowing
- The game structure and puzzles feel like a King's Quest 1 remake
- Basic inventory puzzles and lots of trial and error
- Too many useless mazes and random items
- Limited inventory slots

You transmute into a pegasus!

Mixing potions time! This is completely random and I created all possible potions.

[PC] Gobliins 2 - The Prince Buffoon (1992)

How:
Heard of it since Amiga times, got on GOG with a Gobliiins pack.
Pros:
- No more energy bar
- Nice challenging puzzles, with some interplay between the two characters
- Nice graphics and silly humor
Cons:
- Some annoying, illogical puzzles
- Some very annoying control issues

[PC] Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar (1985)

How:
Got it for free on GOG.
Notes:
I solved the game almost entirely on my own, except for the dungeon maps.
I never found and used the silver horn to bypass the 100 daemons guarding the shrine of humility. I instead fought all of them.
Pros:
- Heavily dialogue-based, makes exploration interesting and rewarding
- Some convenient interface changes, also easier and quicker fights
- You can ask people to join the party
- Very non-linear
- Battles take place in several different environments, allowing for some strategy
- Food depletes slowly, is shared within the party, and is not a hassle anymore
- Finally, enemies have no diagonal movement (still diagonal attack though)
Cons:
- No music in the original PC version
- Combat can be very slow when many characters are involved
- Getting a ship is still a pain in the ass
- Ships can be destroyed even when parked, forcing you to find another one
- Wind when sailing is still a HUGE pain in the ass

My final character stats.

Only 91,682 turns!

An Indiana Jones reference!

Encounters on bridges involve trolls. Nice touch!

Gazers - another type of beholders (strictly speaking these are all called "beholderkin").

[PC] Ultima III: Exodus (2012 VGA upgrade) (1983)

How:
Got with a Ultima I+II+III sale at GOG.
Pros:
- Finally with music!
- The tactical turn-based combat adds a new dimension to the series
- More items and weapons than the predecessors
- Magic is an important and fun part
- Not a grindfest for the most part
- Dungeon crawling is actually fun and useful
Cons:
- Still no diagonal movement / attack (although the enemies can)
- Wind in the world map is super annoying and makes you waste frigate turns for no reason at all
- The 5s timer for turns is very stressful, especially during combat
- Monsters are not visible in the dungeons, they just attack out of nowhere
- Food is a real pain, and can be drained (unfairly) by invisible gremlins in the dungeons
- Boats spawn very infrequently
- Still a lot to grind

I managed to teleport without boat into the water.

The disappointing ending with my final party.

[PC] Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress (2001 EGA upgrade) (1982)

How:
Got it with a Ultima I+II+III sale at GOG.
Pros:
- Exploring the world across time and space can be fun
- Better monster sprites in the dungeons
Cons:
- No diagonal movement (while monsters can)
- Progress is achieved by randomly talking to all characters and slaying innocents (e.g. prison guards) in order to access otherwise unreachable areas. This kills role playing completely.
- The game is basically a long, unrewarding, extremely tedious grinding fest.
- Everything must be obtained with money, which is obtained by grinding, or by random drops by killing thieves. I did not visit other planets because the fuel drop was too rare.
- Overworld monsters are too rare
- Still no music
- Planets are useless
- Too many ingame jokes

My final character.

That L-shaped piece of land is Italy. I am passing Gibraltar strait with my frigate.

I made a bridge with boats.

[PC] Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness (1986 remake) (1981)

How:
Got it on GOG during a winter sale.
Pros:
- Nice and odd mixture of first-person dungeon crawler, classical fantasy rpg, and space fighting sim
- Easy to get in and strangely addictive
- Big world
- Nice little side quests
Cons:
- Not always clear what must be done in order to proceed with the story
- The world has no memory, you can kill the king and go back and he'll be there again
- No music
- Being a magician is practically useless, and you must purchase a spell for each use
- Monsters (like the skeletons) tend to be goofy
- Experience levels are useless

My final character. I got two red gems simply by repeating a quest twice.
Also, I had 88 INT at some point, but went down to 36 for no reason.

"Wandering eyes" is basically a beholder.

[PC] King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow (1992)

How:
Often heard of it as one of the best adventure games ever, got on Gog.com with the King's Quest 4+5+6 pack.
Points:
I managed to finish the game with 228/231 points without using a walkthrough (I actually needed a walkthrough just to open the ink bottle...). The only puzzle I missed was feigning death in front of the black cloaked man, since I got the correct lamp by trial & error. Still got the best ending possible.
Pros:
- Some memorable and diversified music
- Generally good voiceovers
- You get to ride a black winged horse to the realm of the dead!
- Direct references to previous episodes of the series
- Rather lengthy, with a great amount of optional content
- The second half of the game is amazing (realm of the dead + castle)
- Very nice and logical puzzles
- Great graphics and cool cutscenes
- The possibility to die or get dead ends makes gameplay more exciting
Cons:
- Some super-fast animation glitches
- Some audio glitches (sometimes the music volume covers the narrator's voice)
- Using an item or using an item on the main character give different results only with some items (e.g. the ink bottle must be used directly on Alexander to open it)
- The Isle of Wonder seems more like the deus-ex-machina of missing inventory items
- Once again a final love ballad
- Some tedious backtracking required
- Trial & error required to solve certain puzzles
- Dead ends (usually quite clear though)

[PC] Dragonsphere (1994)

How:
Promoted on Gog.com as a freeware game, got it without knowing anything about it. Played it after reading hg101 review.
Additional comment:
Not quite as short as most reviews mention (I think I needed around 10-11 hours from start to finish). The slow movements might have contributed.
Pros:
- Very good graphics and excellent in-game animations
- Very good (sometimes creepy) music
- The game has a very immersing, serious atmosphere differentiating it from most other adventures in similar fantasy settings
- Great dialogues and overall very likable characters
- A very deep and intriguing story with cool ideas thrown everywhere and a dramatic turn of events
- There are some rather challenging (but fair) puzzles
- Some puzzles can be solved in multiple ways
- Death is automatically undone, with no need to reload
- Lots of interactive elements, with long text descriptions
Cons:
- Movements are rather slow and unskippable (e.g. when climbing the mountain)
- Mediocre voice acting, thankfully it can be turned off
- Perhaps too many red herrings (both useless inventory items and misleading puzzle solutions, e.g. the poems)
- The story can be "broken" in a couple of ways (e.g. by going to the Spirit Plane without knowing about the Soul Egg)
- The interface can be confusing as some objects have item-specific default actions, e.g. a hidden button on the wall has "Activate" as default action, and "directions" can also be examined (this is especially important towards the end of the game when a door must be examined to reveal the symbol of a crown)

[PC] Abner the Amazing (2011)

How:
Got with the AGS Bake Sale.
Pros:
- Fun dialogues
- Nice story idea
Cons:
- Music style is out of place
- Very poor to no animations at all
- Some very simplistic puzzles
- Very unpolished graphics

[PC] King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder (1990)

How:
Bought the King's Quest 4+5+6 collection from GOG after playing King's Quest II.
Additional comment:
Not nearly as unbeatable as it is usually depicted.
Pros:
- Excellent graphics and animations
- Very nice music all throughout
- A cool adventure with lots of travel and a compelling story
- Nice, challenging puzzles
- Some puzzles are solvable in more than one way
- Connections with previous games of the series (e.g. Manannan cat) is rewarding for fans
- Fun and slick gameplay
- Nice graphical choice for the windowed interiors
Cons:
- Packed full of dead ends
- Cedric the owl has no use except at the very end
- Voice acting is generally mediocre
- The final part is very frustrating
- Must resort to save scumming in order to finish the game
- A couple of illogical puzzles (e.g. the moldy cheese to activate the machine)
- Some graphical and sound glitches
- The game annoyingly interrupts with a warning message every time a cutscene is going to start
- The desert maze is uncalled for

[Amiga] Dungeon Master (Psygnosis release) (1992)

How:
Had the game on Amiga as a kid but never figured out how to play it. Finally decided to give it a go after reading CRPGAddict's posts on the game.
Pros:
- Favors exploration and discovery
- Immersive and suspenseful
- Nice balance between strategic and real-time elements
- Concocting potions is a cool idea
- Excellent pacing near the end
- Combat can be challenging and rewarding
- Cool magic system, memorizing and using spells makes the difference between a good wizard player and a bad one
- Some cool spells (e.g. see through walls, invisibility)
Cons:
- Throwable weapons (arrows, shurikens) must be picked back up one by one after usage, and the space allotted for them in the inventory is limited to 5
- No music, few sound effects
- Very repetitive graphics
- Slow movements due to overloaded inventories are a real pain
- Items, weapons and armor do not have any description, except for their name and weight
- No NPCs whatsoever. Would have been nice to meet somebody at some point
- The game gets very repetitive after a while, the elements added in each dungeon are not enough to motivate progress
- Probably one or two dungeon levels too many

My winning party:

Bad ending:

Good ending:

[Amiga] Arazok's Tomb (1987)

How:
Found while randomly browsing my Gamebase Amiga collection.
Pros:
- Very good graphics
- Moderately challenging puzzles with lots of red herrings and limited inventory
- Cool fantasy/sci-fi hybrid setting
Cons:
- Rather short
- Many showstopping bugs (crashes, glitches)
- Many typos
- No dialogue
- The few speaking characters can be heard only via the optional synthesized speech, otherwise what they say is not reported on screen
- Confusing descriptions
- Weak parser
- Some annoying time-based puzzles (eating, drinking, fighting)
- Very weak and abrupt ending

[PC] King's Quest III Redux: To Heir is Human (AGDI remake) (2011)

How:
Found it on the AGDI website after finishing the previous remake.
Pros:
- Excellent hand drawn graphics and animations
- Very good, fitting music and excellent voice-overs
- Nice puzzles, many of them with multiple solutions
- Enthralling story providing a neat connection with the previous two games and characters
- You get to play as a fly and an eagle as well as using magic
Cons:
- Having to bring a meal to the wizard every single time is rather annoying. More variety (such as, doing more house chores, which I only got to do once) would have benefited the overall enjoyment
- Some dead-ends (e.g., saving when the mage is about to return)
- The final song is embarrassing

[PC] Azada: In Libro (2011)

Pros:
- Neat graphics, good variety of music
- Nice settings
- The crying unicorn!
Cons:
- Sometimes the graphics don't match (e.g. the notary at the beginning)
- Some events are foretold in the diary, in general there are problems with continuity
- Ending is underwhelming and anti-climatic
- A very small world
- Extremely light (not challenging and no hidden object sequences)

[FC] Final Fantasy II (1988)

Pros:
- The game opens right into the action!

- An emotional story shyly appears, we start to create bonds with characters
- Very nice music
- Nice graphics, animations improve on FF a little bit
- Many mysterious items, weapons, magic spells, armors
- A huge world, completely explorable since the beginning
- Many characters and monster types
- There is a dungeon in the belly of a Leviathan
Cons:
- The skill/leveling system is so much wrong, annoying, frustrating, deteriorating, and so much wrong
- The chocobo makes its appearance but is not much usable in practice (too distant, runs away after every ride)
- Quests are of the "chase the wild goose" type
- Random encounters are way too frequent
- The leveling system is so wrong
- Can't get rid of key inventory items once you've used them
- Too many trap doors
- Did I mention how wrong is the leveling system?

[NES] Shadowgate (1989)

Pros:
- Immersive scenario, faithful to its theme
- A decent variety of music
- Not so easy
Cons:
- The light torch thing is so much annoying and useless, it makes the game play like a pain
- Too much trial & error
- The "Leave" and "Close" actions are of no use
- Slow movements and actions due to the control via cursor
- Some illogical puzzles (e.g. cannot kill the wolf with a sword, must use the arrow)

[PC] A Woman for all Seasons (2010)

Pro:
- Simpatico passatempo ambientato in una sola room
Contro:
- Trial & error
- Non è sentimentale come vorrebbe essere
- No enigmi

[PC] Next to Evil (2010)

Pro:
- Grafica minimale simpatica
- L'idea dello split è interessante
Contro:
- Ha qualche bug
- Troppo semplice e immediato

[Amiga] Simon the Sorcerer (1994)

Pro:
- Storia, personaggi, dialoghi e sketch simpatici e scanzonati
- Enigmi difficili al punto giusto, favoriscono la già ottima longevità
- Il protagonista fa le magie!
- Grafica e animazioni di ottima fattura
- Ambientazioni fantasy ottimamente dettagliate
- Colonna sonora ottima e appropriata al tono fantasy-comico
Contro:
- Alcune (poche) sessioni di pixel-hunting
- Un paio di enigmi sono davvero astrusi
- Anche se c'è la mappa si perde tempo con gli spostamenti