Moonmist

The actual game is divided into several quests depending on the player's answer to the question "what is your favorite color?" As such, the game contains green (the easiest), blue, red, and yellow (the most difficult) quests, each with a separate criminal and treasure to locate. Interaction is made through the standard text commands typical of the genre.

The game must be completed by 6:59 am the following day or the game ends without a resolution. It is also possible to die in a few rare instances, though the focus of the game remains on exploration and deduction.

The player's character is a young detective, asked by friend Tamara Lynd to investigate her new home of Tresyllian Castle in Cornwall, England. Tamara has recently become engaged to the castle's lord, Jack Tresyllian. She was very happy until she began seeing what appeared to be The White Lady, a ghost who has allegedly haunted the castle for centuries. As if seeing a ghost wasn't nerve-racking enough, she's also begun to fear for her life.

Is Tamara's imagination just overly excited from living in a large old castle, or is someone really trying to kill her? And if her life is in danger, is it from a ghost or someone using it as a disguise?

COMPUTE! wrote that Moonmist was a good introduction to Infocom adventures for newcomers, and an example for veterans of how their storytelling had improved from older games. However, Atari User expressed disappointment in the game's lack of depth and originality. While acknowledging that Moonmist had "deliberately been made simpler than the usual run of Infocom products", it noted that their earlier Wishbringer "was also a beginner's adventure but [..] offered yards more variety, entertainment, humour and challenge".

Macworld reviewed the Macintosh version of Moonmist, calling it "an excellent [example] of text-only interactive fiction." Macworld praises the gameplay, stating that "Moonmist succeeds in emulating the classic youth mystery novels. Its puzzles and challenges are inventive and playful, and they complement the story without requiring advanced leaps and bounds of logic ... There are four variations of Moonmist, each different enough so that repeated plays will still be enjoyable."

In 1992, about six years after the original Moonmist, a remake of the game was developed and published by Japanese software development company SystemSoft for the NEC PC-9801, entitled Moonmist: Shiroki Kifujin no Nazo (MoonMist(ムーンミスト) ～白き貴夫人の謎～, MūnMisuto ～Shiroki Kifujin no Nazo～; lit. "Moonmist: The Mystery of the Noble White Lady"). There are differences in this enhanced remake: the game recognizes verb commands typed in kana (Japanese syllable system) or Latin alphabet. For convenience, some of the most common verb commands (Look, Take, etc.)

can be accessed by pressing a corresponding button, but the player still has to type the name of an object. This remake also helps the player to interact with the environment by displaying a list of objects after the player has typed a command. Also, unlike the original, the remake contains enhanced graphics; every location has a unique background picture, on which the text is super-imposed, like in the PC-9801 version of Enchanter.