Why hate on that game? It had both great puzzles (challenging yet approachable) AND was pushing the envelope of CD-ROM as a new technology, specifically the use of video + celebrities.
I hate on it because I personally didn't like it. I found the puzzles trivial, the butchering of canon painful (worse than Zork Zero), and the graphics comically awful. 7th Guest, Myst, and even Gadget were better in the GFX department for 1993.
There was a lot to love about Return to Zork, but it was made in the Sierra model of suddenly killing you whenever you made a mistake that, in most cases, couldn't even have been foreseen to be a mistake.
Oddly, the text adventures were nowhere near as punishing.
Infocom wasn't that punishing, but back in the day a lot of other IF was. It was very common for a while to have some random "guard" who would kill you - this was entirely a random number generator that you would be killed when walking into the room. Players hated it: the only thing you could do is save often and restore and try again, which was a big waste of time (really bad if you were loading from floppy on an 8 bit computer and so had to insert disk A again).
demondemidi|2 years ago
thaumasiotes|2 years ago
Oddly, the text adventures were nowhere near as punishing.
bluGill|2 years ago