Among the point & click adventure games of the mid-1990s, Master Lu has become one of the most obscure ones. You'll be hard pressed to find records of its existence, let alone more current testimonials of any players from the time of its release or more recent experiences. All that in spite of having scored high marks all across the board when it was new. My personal experience with it wasn't all that far from that. I played it, but never very far. The very few, unspecific recollections I kept were all positive, so it became a bit of a mystery to myself why I never got further than the second major location. Is there anything to this game which makes it universally forgettable? Let's rediscover and test this hypothesis!
A fantasy world full of castles, palaces and forests attracts the evil forces like flies to filth. This was also the case in this long forgotten part of the world at a time when people still led a simple God-fearing life. The underworld has opened its gates and sent an evil demon whose dark aura covers the land like a grey veil and threatens to suffocate life. As they prepare for the end of time, the priestess Grimhild has a vision of the white wizard Taam, who, according to her afflatus, knows salvation. The immediately informed King Rohdhis immediately sends his messengers through the entire Middleworld in search of the sorcerer. The message reaches the next town and there the handsome son Siegurd of an old-established family, who wants to take the search into his own hands. To do so, he wants to enter the king's service and sets off for Siegelhorst to his place of residence.
For a long time I thought of Grim Fandango as the ‘LucasArts game with the skeletons’, whose appeal was a total mystery to me. Maybe it was because back then, when the game was released, I had been somewhat over-saturated (like many others) by countless adventure games. Also they started copying each other more and more and most of the time provided some awfully boring ideas. Still a game, in which you slip into the role of a bony man, seemed just too silly. In the meantime adventure games are returning again and LucasArts finally closed its gates. So after fifteen years I decided to fill a gap in my knowledge.