Braminar

The Overlord has enforced unjust laws throughout the kingdom of Braminar —
raising taxes, enslaving villages, and, worst of all, outlawing hamburgers.
You are the stalwart adventurer bold enough to emerge from the ranks,
accumulating through exploration the skills, experience, artifacts and
followers necessary to undo his burger-hating rule and usher the realm of
Braminar into a new golden age.

The author has followed up the earlier Fantasia and concocted what he
describes as “boolean interactive fiction” — a game consisting of purely
textual input and output occasionally prompting the player for confirmation of
likely, valid actions in the style of many a BBS door game (“`you may (S)teal
food, (T)ake from trunk, or (L)eave`”), mostly in answering Yes/No questions
(“`You come up to a hollow tree with a door. Enter?`”) or plugging in numbers
for inventory management of a sort (“`2 male and 8 female slaves have come
down with: Turkey Pox. How many males to cure?`”)

The game chugs along pretty much on its own — combat, for instance, being a
do-or-die affair of pressing any key to proceed to the next round, the
computer taking care of both parties’ tactics and strategies (or lack thereof:
it will quite happily run you straight into the ground against a stronger
opponent). It dishes up a varied but randomized assortment of standard
adventure environments (sylvan glades, abandoned shacks, villages, inclement
weather, Gypsy gambling dens, the Dark Castle of the Mad King) to be explored
at your discretion, though it’s up to the player and tough lessons learned in
their past experience with the game to determine for themselves if they’re
tough enough to deal with (or desperate enough to risk dealing with) what
they’re likely to find in each area, which is sometimes beneficial (“the gnome
greets you and gives you 3 food”), sometimes negative (“You release a Rune
Guardian which comes out and burns you”), and sometimes neither (“As you
enter, a centurion says to you: ‘Have you driven a Ford lately?'”).

As with Legend of the Red Dragon and Kingdom of Loathing, the stock fantasy
tropes of fighting orcs and ogres with swords are mixed with jarring glimpses
of surreal preoccupations — here with giant hamburgers, Duncin’ [sic]
Doughnuts, and Hellen Reddy [sic].

Once the player has achieved the 20th level or beyond and accumulated both the
Staff and the prime command, it is possible to enter the endgame, in which
your total assets (largely, perhaps in a nod to Gor, consisting of male and
female slaves) are converted into an army, one which automatically engages the
Overlord’s legions… their conflict depicted as two Progress Questian bars in
a chart diminishing each other. Overwhelming forces will be needed to make
even a dent in his waves of cannon fodder, but should you triumph over them,
you then get to engage the Overlord in single combat.

Braminar