Chrono Review #2 - Mystery House (1980)

The facts

The intro screen of Mystery House (1980)

• Game title: Akalabeth: World of Doom
• Master List entry: Adventure #1, in the 1980 timeline
• Original release date and info: 05/05/1980
• Platforms: Apple II (1980)
• Available for purchase: Nowhere; best bet to play to is to get it from the Internet Archive
• How long to beat: 52 minutes (though I'm not sure how they got that number...)

The game

Mystery house is a game for the Apple II developed by Ken and Roberta Williams, of future King's Quest fame (hence the post tag). The game is a stepping stone between the old-time interactive fiction games (think Zork) and the future point-and-click adventures. The gameplay is pretty straightforward: you are locked inside a house with seven other people, one of which is a serial killer, and some jewels are hidden in the house; you are trying to find the jewels, take care of the serial killer, and get out.

You can see the instructions included in the game below

When you hit return, the game starts outside our mystery house.

The first screen of the game

This screen is pretty representative of the game at large: A picture of the situation takes up most of the screen, and you have four lines of text describing the situation and giving you a command prompt. You interact with the game by giving it a noun and a verb (not necessarily in that order), like "up stairs" or "open door". As we enter, the door closes behind us and we meet our unfortunate victims

One of these people is a killer! But who...

After we pick up the note on the ground, we read it and get a secondary objective: find some hidden jewels.

We need to drop this note to avoid carrying it with me (as instructed), or the game freaks out and doesn't know which note to read/drop. We then move to a nearby room and find yet another note, a little more ominous...

I keep exploring and start getting a message before the description of every room: "It is getting dark". If I keep moving, after a while the game screen goes fully dark and you get no more descriptions. Welp, that's a restart I guess.

This clearly gives us an early objective: I need to find a way to get some light. Poking around in the rooms on the first floor we find a candle and a set of matches. After some trial and error, I realize that "light candle" will result in me getting a source of light. It also has its downsides: if I go back to the room where I found the candle, the rug catches on fire. I get one action to do something about it; so far I haven't figured out what, and I just die.

I've then proceeded to map some more of the manor. I decided a mindmap was the best way to do so, and you can see my current progress below:

What I've achieved so far, before getting stuck

I'll summarize the other few discoveries I've made below:

• I found a pitcher in the fridge, and filled it with water, but I am unable to douse the fire with it. I might just be missing the right combination of noun+verb. Shout out to my lovely wife for suggesting "pitcher" as a keyword; I had tried "mug", "jug", "cup", but "pitcher" is what the game expected.

• I enter the upstairs bedroom, and a dagger gets wildly thrown at me. Thankfully it misses and I grab it

  

  Nice try, killer!

• As I move around the house, I start finding dead bodies. What's interesting is that each of them seems to have been killed in a slightly different way.

  

  Sam was hit in the head by a blunt object

  

  Dr Green was stabbed

  

  Weirdest of all, Bill the Butcher was strangled with a pair of pantyhose! Kinky...

• I am also responsible for a murder. Joe the gravedigger doesn't want to give me his shovel. I accidentally happen to have a dagger in my hand at that time, and that dagger accidentally ended in Joe's stomach. Ooops!

  

  You'll give me that shovel Joe, if it's the last thing you do!

  
  
• The attic contains a locked chest (the jewels?), but none of my items seem to open it. I can't figure out if I'm supposed to bash it with a hammer, use the shovel to break the lock, or if I just need the key (which I don't have yet).
• Last but not least, going out of the east side of the first floor lands me in a forest. However there is nothing for me to do, and I cannot go back to the house from the forest screen. I suspect a lost woods situation: there is a specific path I must follow to be able to find the path.

I am at this point fundamentally stuck: there are some items I can interact with but not move (the beds in rooms, a ladder in the attic), I can't seem to figure out how to douse the fire on the carpet (which I think is required), and the meaning of the forest escapes me. My inventory consists of the following at this time:

• matches
• a pitcher full of water
• a butterknife
• a lit candle
• a shovel
• a towel
• a sledgehammer
• a dagger

I'll give it some more time to try and figure out what to do, and then I might look at the list of retroachievements for the game, as there might just be something I'm missing that I wouldn't otherwise figure out. I'm hoping next time I post I'll have beaten the game and potentially mastered the retroachievements, at which point it might be time for the RELATIVE.