The Hobbit

PC Gamer
The world is condensed down to hilarious levels, especially if you’ve seen the sweeping vistas of the movie, to the point that Bilbo’s house is essentially next door to Rivendell, the Lonely Mountain, and probably close enough to Mount Doom to use it as a garbage incinerator. The actual plot points though are surprisingly close in a different way, including duelling with Gollum and persuading Bard to kill Smaug the dragon, meeting up with Elrond and finally making it back alive with a chest of gold and some vaguely nifty magic ring.

The main catch is that all the random elements really get in the way – they’re cool, on a technical level, but a real bloody nuisance in practice. Characters routinely disappear when you need them, or take endless cajoling to do what you need, and a world where Bilbo can beat up Thorin is a world that has no problem beating up Bilbo at a moment’s notice.
-- Richard Cobbett
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SPAG
Overall I can't really recommend The Hobbit except for historical interest. It requires a lot of patience and random inspiration to solve (even with a walkthrough!) and doesn't offer much in reward. None of the puzzles have any outstanding "Aha!" moments; one of the puzzles might have were it not for the fact that it's in the book. None of the situations are interesting or inspiring.
-- David Jones
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50 Years of Text Games, by Aaron A. Reed
Thinking back on Adventure with the prospect of designing her own game now at hand, she realized the root of her boredom was its static, unchanging structure: “It played the same way every time. Each Non-Player Character (NPC) was tied to a single location, and always did the same thing.” She decided her game would be different.
[...]
the result was a simulated world at turns frustrating and fascinating: no two games would be exactly alike. In one, Gandalf might have wandered off and gotten killed by a warg; in another Elrond’s secret directions might change, or he might refuse to give them at all; a carefully made map of the goblin dungeons on one playthrough would be altered by the next; and the sword you were counting on for defense might have shattered because you used it to break down a locked door.
[...]
It proved to be a landmark event in early British computing, leaving an indelible impression on players and reviewers who found it sometimes compelling, and sometimes maddeningly frustrating.
[...]
Despite its quirks or because of them, the game would become a massive bestseller, even priced at three times the typical £5 for a Spectrum adventure. It was ported to nearly every other platform that could run it, and is often credited for helping to jump-start the British home computing market.
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