Ingrid Bottomlow stands out from her family of gnomes - she's a gifted student, with a degree from the Institute of Gnome Economics. As a result, they exile her using a teleporting spell, leaving her lost in the forest. It is your job to keep her safe in this interactive fiction game. The game is split into three tasks, broadly relating to animal, vegetable and mineral in that order. The first involves defeating an evil witch, the second is the Riddle of the Shrinking Teapot, and the third involves precious stones. Commands such as FOLLOW, FIND and GO TO make travelling the game world much easier, and put an emphasis on object-manipulation and character interaction, rather than map-making. Instructions can be issued to other characters, with words like THEN, FIND and GIVE to join them. This co-operation is essential to solve many puzzles, and takes place in a world where characters have their own aims and motives. There are BRIEF and VERBOSE modes of text. A running joke in the game is that the screen display adds a 'g' to the start of all words beginning with n - 'gnorth' and 'gnugget' for example.
Graphics are included in the disk versions of the game, except in the ports for Atari 8-bit and Apple II, which are text-only on every media.