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In addition to playing Sierra On-Line's The Dark Crystal, I also played the children's version of the game, Gelfling Adventure, released a year later. What I was surprised to find was its gameplay system: It's a menu-based adventure game! You get up to three choices at certain points, sometimes it can be one where there's obviously one right action and others where you are simply moving from screen to screen. It's still the same screens/story as the original game, but with less puzzles and text. I actually prefer this version over the original, mainly because the menu interface fits the game more than a parser. Since the game is quite linear, the parser introduces a wide range of input that isn't needed in this game (other than artificially increasing the playtime lol). With the menu interface there are still wrong choices, but it's much more manageable and keeps the game moving at a nice pace.

It's just surprising to see that a western menu-based adventure game existed in 1984(there could be some earlier that I'm unaware of), though its format feels less like what Japanese adventure games would move towards and instead like another 1984 adventure game I played, Koei's Corridor, just without the RPG aspects. Also it's interesting that this gameplay style was only seen as suited for children with parsers being the true way to play, which kind of shows why it didn't catch on here at the time.