With point-and-click games, I could just click on random pixels, and the game would eventually tell me what I was looking at. With true text adventures, I could just type "look" and the game would tell me the names of everything I could interact with. I'm a bit lost in SQ1 -- I have to use the names of things to interact with them, but the game rejects a general "look" command.

For example, early in the game, according to one online walkthrough, is a "translator gadget." There's no way I could guess from the collection of gray pixels that that is what I was looking at. Which command should I have used to get the game to identify them for me?

Instead of typing "look", you have to type "look around"