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Where do I begin? I've written a review for Eric the Unready back in 2014 as can be seen here before I decided on a consistent tone for this website (contains language) and inexplicably initialed it as ETR (should be EtU). While I did complete it (the "Rejected" tag, the worst rating here, is for games that don't make it that far), it is...not good and would rate it as "two stars" at best (the fact that I completed it merits some credit, not accounting for taste). As I mentioned in the "Games of December 2020" list, it was one of the earlier burns from HardcoreGaming101.net, though I did enjoy the "Swamp Trek" theme, a royalty-free variation of the Star Trek theme. From what I remember of it, there was nothing that the game did particularly well that really redeemed it from a sea of mediocrity. It often had (im)mature humor, including a reference to the 1992 election season (because American politics references always age well...), no sense of real exploration (divided into chapters), and generally bad gameplay (including unfun deaths, that harsh beeping, and look-up-in-the-manual copy protection).

It's perplexing how a game like EtU got made as late as it did (1993), with its antiquated interface, unforgiving difficulty, and writing that often falls flat. Any excuses how it's a comedy just makes comparisons to LucasArts games that more telling. Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge had comedy and silly anachronisms like what Eric the Unready had, but overall cleaner and with a consistent storyline...along with improving literally everything else that EtU tried to achieve...two years earlier, in 1991. As this is a "retrofitted" review, the box art is from Wikipedia...and, honestly I haven't played in like a decade but I'm going to leave what I thought of it then and not get soured by it.

FINAL RATING :   

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