I needed to tweak your source code in order to play past the lab. I think you have a stray exit() on line 56. 

Once I took that out I could play the game. I agree with cmd16, it starts frustrating but you get into a groove. It's pretty random but that's the style of this game, strange and unexpected deaths from the obvious answers and success from the less obvious ones.

Nice work.

It's been a while since I've played a game where you were expected to die frequently! Nice little game about struggling as you search for something. I was really frustrated at first but eventually got into a groove.

It would have been good if you used a spellchecker, and also don't forget the spacing when you add in the item the player is looking for. Speaking of substitutions, it doesn't look like you used the player name anywhere?

The way the choices were presented was sometimes unintuitive. Maybe (n) would be listed before (y) or maybe the question wasn't properly worded as a yes/no question. The "do you stop" him for the thief was probably the worst case: (n) means you stop him, (y) means you don't stop him, but the last line is "Do you stop him? (y/n)", which is the exact opposite! Maybe this difficulty was intentional, but it was frustrating.

Items felt a bit shoehorned in there and not fully developed, but that's kind of inevitable with such a small game. Just including them at all was good!