The screen fills with a head shot and a column of icons for greeting, topics to discuss and interpersonal activities. The speech is well performed and the sound is high quality. The voices show neat characterization and I particularly enjoyed listening to Barth struggle with human language. As a reviewer I have an unusually broad range of hardware. Part of my set-up is a stereo mixer to control the output from my various sound devices.
Most people only have one sound device, however, even though an increasing number of games use two.
Infocom have handled this excellently with this game. The package includes a Life Size Sound Enhancer which runs off a printer port in the same way as the Disney Sound Source. The digitized sound from this is quite acceptable and enables one-card players to use their original card for the music. The music is the standard adventure implementation of a tune per room. The melodies are neither irritating nor remarkable, but they cut abruptly as the player moves from place to place.