It signified a notable departure from the standard format of Infocom's earlier games which relied purely on text and puzzle-solving: among other features, Beyond Zork incorporated a crude on-screen map, the use of character statistics and levels, and RPG combat elements.

The game, Infocom's twenty-ninth, was available on the Amiga, Apple II, Atari ST, Commodore 128, IBM PC compatibles, and Macintosh.

The Coconut of Quendor, a mighty artifact that embodies the whole of Magic, has fallen into the claws of an unspeakably foul beast: an Ur-grue.

The Ur-grue is shown to be a dungeon master of sorts, controlling huge parts of the Zork underground and having accumulated an enormous hoard of treasure, of which the Coconut is his crowning acquisition.

He has not only an army of grues at his disposal but also bizarre creatures of evil such as Lucksuckers, spirits who attack the player by draining his good fortune (reducing his Luck stat).

Almost since the company's beginning, Infocom's games included "extras" (called feelies) in the packages, often serving a dual purpose of entertainment and copy protection.

The game package contained: Beyond Zork combined procedural generation and character creation with a very plot-heavy story, as the player's scores affected not just numerical gameplay mechanics, but crucial puzzles as well.

Every playthrough of the game was different, due to procedural generation of maze-like dungeon areas, and many items that could actually unlock puzzles were semi-randomly placed.

Like Infocom's other games, Beyond Zork is platform independent and runs on a virtual computer architecture called the Z-machine.

A review in Computer Gaming World was pleased with some of Beyond Zork's features, particularly the ability to define macros and bind them to the function keys.

The review concluded by describing Beyond Zork as "a curious hybrid... mostly tough Infocom adventure with a patina of role-playing elements.

While approving of Undo and other user interface improvements, the magazine disliked the loss of "exactly what Infocom writers do best—lots of descriptive text with a loving eye for detail that adds a sense of realism to good adventures".

Macworld called the game "a triumphant return by the Infocom adventure series to its dungeon roots, with myriad improvements on the original.