Eric the Unready is a humorous text adventure with graphics, similar in concept to Legend's own Spellcasting series. Like in those games, the player can select combinations of verbs and objects from a list to interact with the environment, but is encouraged and sometimes required to type commands as well. Some scenes display full-screen character portraits with pre-set dialogue choices. The game often makes verbose humorous comments on the player's actions, including many completely optional and arbitrary ones. It contains many segments that parody various aspects of contemporary pop culture as well as other video games.