This house is full of secrets...
When we last left off, I was stuck in a burning house full of dead ends. The most obvious place to get unstuck was, of course, the burning carpet; and after some trial and error it turned out that POUR WATER was the appropriate command to douse off the fire.
This is where my main issue with the game comes into show. I had figured out that water went in the pitcher, and that I should use that to douse the fire; but because of the strict logic and limited vocabulary of the game, I ended up trying a couple of dozen combinations, like USE PITCHER, USE WATER, DOUSE FIRE, etc to try and figure out what the game wanted me to write to let me get rid of the fire. This would've literally taken two seconds with a modern interface, or even an old verb interface à la SCUMM. This is not entirely the game's fault; it was a massive innovator, introducing a graphical representation of the action instead of relying on a written description only. At the same time, I can't help but feel like an interactive fiction game like Zork would have to be careful about mentioning every item you can interact with, so I wouldn't have gone absolutely insane trying to figure out that the correct word to grab the thing in the refrigerator was "pitcher" instead of "jug", "mug", or something else.
Anyways, having doused the fire, a hole in the carpet is left. Looking into it, we find a key.
This is clearly what we need to open the chest in the attic. When we do, we find a gun inside of it which makes us feel slightly better; after all, there is a serial killer locked in this house with us!
On our way down from the attic, we realize a major mistake we've made in mapping out the mansion. You will remember that climbing the stairs leads us to the intersection of a north/south and east/west hallway. If you go east, you find this doorway:
If you go east again, this is the screen you see:
Same exact screen right? And yet, what if I told you those are two distinct doorways? Indeed, if you try going east one more, you get a different message, saying you can't go that way, which implies that the two previous screens were actually different doorways. I only realized this because I hit the wrong direction key a couple of times, which was a very lucky mistake. The fact that the two doorways are identical is a bad design decision in a game that is otherwise very reasonable with its presentation.
Entering the "new" doorway, we find yet another body, with a mysterious blonde hair left on the corpse.
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| Sally the seamstress with a lump on her head |
Doing the same thing with the other side of the hallway leads us to a different room, with a new note for us to read, which doesn't really add anything to our experience.
At this point, I was stuck again, and kept going back and forth between the various rooms in the house, or trying to navigate the forest and getting desperately lost in it. Finally, inspiration struck when looking for the umpteenth time at the bedroom on the upper floor
See that painting on the wall? I tried getting it before, but nothing came out of it. That's because it's not a painting, it's a PICTURE, and trying to remove it tells you it is screwed in the wall. We don't have a screwdriver with us, but we are in possession of a BUTTERKNIFE, and that's basically the same thing. After getting the screws off we can remove the painting (excuse me, PICTURE) from the wall and see a button left on the wall.
Pressing the button reveals a secret passage in the wall, which ultimately leads us down to the basement, where we are met with yet another body. By my count (and including the dead gravedigger) this is the last one. It is Tom, the plumber, and he's holding a Daisy in his hand. At this point, even Dr. Watson would figure out who the serial killer is, but I won't spoil it for you just yet.
Together with the body we also find a large key, which is clearly for the front door. However, we are unable to leave the premises until we've gotten the jewels and taken care of the serial killer, so we keep exploring. Going through the door and up the stairs leads us to a dead end; it looks like a pantry, but the hole leading out of it is blocked.
Going back to the room with the dead body and going through the hole, we stumble upon a tall tree. Climbing it reveals a telescope, and looking down the telescope shows that there is a secret trapdoor in the attic, which somehow we had missed in our previous visit (in that it was literally hidden, and couldn't be opened until you looked down the telescope).
Now comes my biggest beef with the game, and the main obstacle in completing it: being able to navigate the forest. I spent a good half-hour trying to figure out what to do in this phase, but came up empty, and more and more frustrated; I ultimately couldn't take it and looked up a walkthrough. It turns out, the forest near the house is not a real or realistic place, but is instead made up of 8 or so different screens, which look identical unless (and here's the key) you drop an item in the location to distinguish it from the other 7 identical screens. The four cardinal directions cycle between different screens independently, so going east and then west won't land you back in the screen you started from. Worst of all, to re-enter the house from the forest you have to go UP, despite there being no mention of stairs when exiting the kitchen. I ultimately learned that going east would eventually get me back to the screen adjacent to the house, so I got in the habit of typing E. -> U -> E -> U -> etc until I enter the kitchen (or get the message that the kitchen door is closed). The only reason to navigate the forest is to go from the telescope tree back to the house anyways, so while it's not the most thorough mapping of the area it gets the job done.
The nightmarish forest having been tamed, we're back in the house, and naturally go straight to the attic, where we open the trapdoor and climb the ladder
In the small area (the attic of the attic?) we finally confront the serial killer, who turns out to be none other than.......... DAISY! (Shocking reveal, I know). But Daisy isn't here to mess around, and stares at you with murder in her eyes. There is a note on the floor, but Daisy won't let you grab it.
We decide to try and stab her with the dagger that she threw at us some time ago, but it turns out she is more skilled with CQC than we are, and we wind up dead.
Thankfully we had saved not that long ago, so we make our way back up and face her again. To avoid having this close-combat master get close, we shoot at her with the gun (which, if you looked inside, contained only one bullet in the chamber!). Daisy's dead, and we can finally get the note, showing us the final clue we needed to find the jewels
We rush to the basement and take a closer look at the algae wall. We are now able to use the towel we grabbed from the bathroom to wipe the algae off the wall, revealing a loose brick. Behind the brick, the jewels!
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| At last, the jewels are MINE! |
With a dead serial killer and a box of jewels in our pocket, we run back upstairs through the forest, unlock the entrance door, and win the game.
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| We are a guru wizard! .....cool, I guess |
Revisiting the puzzle box
Having successfully completed the game, I decided to run through it a second time to figure out which things were actually necessary and if there was any way to break the game. A glance at the retroachievements list showed that I only missed one achievement, related to a more convenient way of going in and out of the basement. It turns out that you can move the cabinet (why would you think of this I have no idea) and find a bricked wall behind it.
Using our sledgehammer to break the wall creates a hole that leads us back to the dead-end pantry in the basement we ran upon earlier, thus solving one last mystery.
Otherwise, the flow of the game is pretty straightforward: get the candle in the living room, get matches, pitcher, and water in the kitchen, burn the carpet to get the small key and go get the gun from the chest it opens, grab the sledgehammer to get access to the basement and get the front door key, climb the tree to look at the telescope and discover the existence of the trapdoor, make your way out of the forest, climb to the attic, kill Daisy and read the note, get the towel in the upstairs bathroom, then use it to wipe the algae in the basement; finally, get the jewels and GTHO.
An interesting consequence of the direct path is that it turns out we didn't have to kill the gravedigger to get his shovel. Ooops! I guess the shovel can be one more item to use to map the forest, but we definitely have some blood on our hands that was not required (except for one of the retroachivements)
The retroachievement corner
Speaking of which, it is time to discuss the retroachievements for the game. There is a set of progression achievements corresponding to the main path described above. Besides that, there's an achievement for getting the candle before it gets dark (as far as I know, you could play through the game in the dark, though clearly it's impossible if you don't know how to go about it), find the two passages to the basement, discover all five bodies, read all four notes, and kill the gravedigger. All in all a solid set, without any crazy challenges but that lets you see all the little nook and crannies of the game.
Time for the RELATIVE
Having fully explored the game, it is time to give it the rating it deserves on the RELATIVE scale
- Game setting: 1
- Your presence in the house is contextualized to a point, but the game otherwise takes place in a generic "current time, USA" time and place.
- Player's Avatar: 1
- You are a formless and nameless avatar; the category only gets a point because your presence is mentioned in the intro. Otherwise, you have no background and no life once you exit the house and the game. They don't even bother to give you a conclusion for your character, instead telling you (the player) that you are a "guru wizard"
- Interaction with the world: 4
- Mixed bag. Some rooms have plenty of stuff to do in them, some others are literally pointless dead ends. The game parser recognizes most things you input in them, but is sometimes very strict about what an item is called (see my issues with picking up the pitcher) or which verb/noun combination to use to make something happen, like dousing the fire. Points off for the inconsistent forest to blindly navigate
- Story: 4
- Surprisingly engaging for such a simple setup. The little nuggets of information they feed you keep you on your toes and make it so that you can guess the killer by the end. Shame the ending is a bit of a wet fart.
- Difficulty: 3
- The only real difficult bout of the game is the forest navigation. Besides that, the inventory is limited enough that it is easy enough to figure out what to use in which screen to obtained the desired result (as long as you're ok fighting with the verb parser a little bit)
- Inventory and Interface: 2
- Barely functional. The graphics take up so much space that you only have 4-5 lines left for text, and some room descriptions (terse as they are) are longer than that, so you have to switch between the text only mode to read the whole description and the visuals. Typing INVENTORY pulls out the whole inventory, and you can theoretically look at items in it, but besides the notes most descriptions are just "There is nothing special about it".
- Bartering and Economy: 0
- Graphics and sound: 2
- Sounds is absent. As impressive as the graphics are for the genre, they are not great to look at, and really just look like schoolboy scratches. I am also still upset about the screens that look identical despite being different (looking at you, upstairs hallways).
- Playing and replaying: 3
- Game can only be played in an emulator, since it was only released for Apple ][. Since the game has little humor or personality in it, once you figure out the main path puzzles, there is little interest in replaying it. The game is fun to play, and I've already discussed my annoyances with the text parser.
- The X factor: 10
- I don't know how you give less than full marks to this category. The game literally invented the graphic adventure genre, and would lead to the King's Quest series and everything that eventually comes out of Sierra. It is also surprisingly still fun to play today.
- Total: 30/100
- Worthy of a play for how short it is and how important it is in the history of adventures. Still reasonably fun, but by no means earth-shattering. Definitely not an all-timer.
That's a wrap on the second game of the project, and our first adventure game at that! Next up, we'll switch to the FPS category, and try out Battlezone. I suspect this will be a one-post game, since it was released in arcades, and likely doesn't have much depth to it. Until then, Let's Keep Retro-Playing Together.
