Decades ago, it was common for tech magazines to include free CDs loaded with free apps or games. One such CD—if I remember correctly—had fifty games, both demos and shareware (several from Apogee). One of these was Hugo 3: Jungle of Doom.
This may have been my introduction into text-parser puzzle games. Though I never played either of the first two games, it appeared they were self-contained episodes.
Soft-locking was, unfortunately, very easy. Players could lose if they missed inspecting the right detail or grabbing the right items at the precise moment. One example happens at the very beginning of the game. Some items were nearly impossible to find without a blind guess, and some puzzles required vocabulary most young gamers probably lacked at the time.
Overall, Hugo was short, difficult, and not very enjoyable.
Unlike Hugo, which my websites now run on. Thanks to renderorange for his help with the migration out of Blogger.