True, but mercury does not dissolve the iron of the lock. For that, the sulfuric acid is necessary.

If grog would contain both mercury and acid, they would not mix, but there will be a mercury layer at the bottom and the acid solution would stay at the top. So the mercury could dissolve the bottom of the mug, while pouring some acid from the top could dissolve the iron lock.

The fact that iron is among the few metals which are not dissolved by mercury had been widely used in the past, when the use of mercury was less restricted. For example, ignitrons and mercury arc rectifiers, which were used in high power converters before the invention of thyristors, contained a pool of liquid mercury, so for them iron vessels were preferred instead of fragile glass vessels, like those used in smaller vacuum tubes.

In the Roman and Greek Antiquity, the most important use of mercury was for the dissolution of gold and silver, which was used for their purification and in the fabrication of jewelry.

There's more out there in nerd-land https://what-if.xkcd.com/

The running gag for "what if" is that the Earth is destroyed and everybody dies along with the solar system in a cataclysmic disaster, in even the simplest of proposed scenarios

Uhh... How appropriate... you fight like a cow.

I agree! My friend and I have the fondest memories of that game in particular since we played it for months on the Amiga 500 at the time. Meathook was my hero. We both have this inner memory of 4k photorealistic graphics which doesn't match the reality of the 90s game.

I hadn't replayed it all the way through as an adult, not from start to finish.

So I sat down, had a couple beers and played it all the way from the beginning.

It's exquisite, but short. A lot of care went into that journey though.

I think this was true, but I'll be damned if I wouldn't say The Drifter has taken the crown. It raises the narrative bar so much it's just mind boggling you can even tell a story with that much momentum and tension in an adventure game.

Overall we've been eating very well the last few years when it comes to new adventure games. In most of the 2010s new adventure games tended to not really be very good, but the stuff we've seen the last few years from the likes of Wadjet Eye and Grundislav are absolutely on par if not better than the highlights of the '90s.

Grim Fandango is arguably in the running for the title too.

Yes the first 3 games are really good. But I also have a soft spot for Myst. Maybe it is nostalgia, but I really enjoyed replaying it from the original CD of the Mac release a few years ago (using my original iBook, which is slightly later vintage than the game of course).