Haunt: Hollow Victory

Well, I'm done with Haunt.  I didn't beat it on my own.  I didn't even come close to beating it on my own.  I've played through games with difficult puzzles before, but wow.  As you're going to see below, this one takes it to a whole different level.

Before I get into the things I needed help with, I'll deal with the one thing that I did figure out on my own: getting down from the balcony.  In previous games, I'd found a balcony at the back of the mansion, which can be reached by climbing some ivy.  Unfortunately, the ivy isn't all that sturdy, and climbing back down safely isn't possible.  The balcony leads to a bedroom and a bathroom, where some treasures (a piece of jade and a gem) can be found.  There's a boarded up door that I assumed would eventually connect me to the rest of the house, but that ended up being irrelevant.  The item I'd been missing here was the bed itself, the mattress to be specific.  On a whim I tried taking it, and was surprised that it worked.  I was able to drag the mattress to the balcony, throw it to the ground, and use it to jump safely down.

This also allowed me to solve the puzzle of the dry garden bed.  Using the empty turpentine bottle, I was able to gather some water from the bathroom, and pour it on the garden.  An orchid grew there, but that was as far as I got on my own.  Figuring out what the orchid was for required a lot of "outside the box" knowledge, knowledge that was well beyond my areas of expertise.  Actually, it's adjacent to one of my areas of expertise, but I'll get into that later.

And now for the things I needed help with.  I'll tackle them in order of reverse difficulty, at least as I see it, and finish up with the two puzzles that allow you to escape from the mansion.

Following the Wire

I've mentioned before that when you enter the house there's an Alice Cooper record playing in a room upstairs.  You can silence it by going to that room and pulling a wire.  I thought that was all there was to it, but there's quite a bit more.

Before I get there, I should mention the cube of LSD that can be found in the fridge.  If you eat it, you get a vision of a moose that says the words "Fa lowe, why her?"  It's nonsense written down, but when you say it out loud it sounds like an instruction to... yep, FOLLOW WIRE.

The wire that you pull to silence Alice first leads to a secret room, where you find some marijuana.  At that point you might think the puzzle is done, but if you keep following the wire it leads down to the ground floor and into another secret alcove where you find the stereo that was playing the music.

The stereo, the marijuana and the LSD are all treasures, but you need to be careful about the latter two; if they're stashed with your other treasures at the end of the game, you get carted away to prison for possession of drugs.  To get full points, you need to take both of these to the lawn outside, then eat the LSD and smoke the marijuana.  Just remember to smoke the marijuana away from your other items, or you'll get the munchies and consume a bunch of them.

The Chest at the Bottom of the Ocean

There's a treasure chest at the bottom of the ocean, guarded by an octopus.  Wrestling will defeat the octopus, but it turns out that the chest is too heavy to get back to the surface.  You need to tie a rope to it, swim back up to the bathysphere, and pull the chest inside using the rope.  It's simple and logical, but I sure never thought if it.

Defeating Dracula

Dracula is sleeping in a casket in a dark room on the upper floor.  If you open the casket he gets out and approaches you, but he's easy enough to escape from because he won't leave the room.  A book in the library gives you some hints about killing vampires, but it doesn't say anything that isn't just common vampire-killing knowledge.

The first part of this puzzle is one of those things that I'd have no hesitation in trying in a tabletop RPG, but would never expect to work in a text adventure.  When Dracula approaches, you need to CROSS CANDLESTICKS.  This forms a cross, which causes Dracula to turn into a bat and fly up to the upstairs lab, the highest room in the building.

In the lab, you need to find some way to break the roof and let the sunlight in.  The answer is to... KICK FOOTBALL? Look, don't ask me where the football came from.  At some point during this adventure, an NFL football appears in your inventory, seemingly out of nowhere.  Kicking it busts a hole in the roof, and the sunlight kills Dracula and allows you to claim his diamond ring.

The Safe

This one's a doozy.  There's a safe in a hallway on the mansion's ground floor, and it requires three digits to open.  If you put the wrong combination in, you get the following message: "The safe must be a new version."  This is a clue to the combination, which just happens to be the date of the version of the game you're playing; this can be discovered by using the NEWS command to check out the latest developments in the game.  Inside the safe is some money.  Kudos to redhighlander, who wrote this invaluable walkthrough, for solving this puzzle, because I have no idea how you would ever get there.  I admire the ingenuity of it, but I'm also annoyed at just how far beyond my capabilities it is.  At least this one is solvable just using information from the game...

The Giant Eel

In the underground sea there's a dark tunnel.  It leads to a couple of different areas, one of which has a giant eel guarding some pearls.  This eel is decidedly hostile, and strangles you to death one move after you enter the room.  You need help to defeat it, but finding that help isn't so easy.

The first step involves digging up a conch on the beach, and blowing on it.  This summons a sea serpent, whose name is Cecil.  The game doesn't tell you this; you have to figure it out from a cryptic note that's in an underwater cave: the relevant part reads "Take care of _ec_l and he will take care of you".  Typing PET CECIL endears the sea serpent to you, and he calls you Beanie and tells you that "if you ever need help, you know what to say".  No Cecil, no I do not know what to say.

Other readers will be aware of the significance of the names Beanie and Cecil, but this is a pop culture reference that's completely lost on me.  Apparently they were cartoon characters from the 1960s, but if that cartoon ever aired in Australia it was certainly out of rotation by the time I was watching TV.

(Now that I think of it, I wasn't completely unaware of Beany and Cecil.  One of my areas of expertise is X-Men comics, and there's a very minor villain called Warstar, who is actually a small robot named B'Nee riding on the shoulders of a big robot named C'cil.  At one point I'd read about these character's being named after Beany and Cecil, but it took researching this post to dredge that knowledge back up.)

Anyway, to get the sea serpent to help you against the giant eel, you need to type HELP CECIL HELP, which I gather is a catchphrase from the show.  That's the only command that works, and when you use it Cecil shows up and saves your life.

Avoiding Insanity

I'm not even sure where to begin with this.

I guess explaining the insanity would be a good start.  If you play this game long enough, the stress of exploring the house gets to you, driving you insane and causing you to commit suicide.  It's framed as a family disease, and a note from your father mentions that there's a crop that could cure it.  I should show a screenshot of that whole note, because it's important.

He addresses you as "Bas", and mentions a red-headed wife; these details are relevant to the solution, but you're not going to get the answer unless your familiar with the long-running comic strip, Brenda Starr, Reporter.  Unfortunately for me, while I am extremely familiar with comic books, comic strips are a bit of a blind spot for me.  Brenda Starr ran for about 70 years, and her love interest was a man named Basil St. John.  Wikipedia mentions that St. John had a black orchid serum, and he did marry the red-headed Brenda during the strip, so the details all match up to the protagonist of Haunt.

To cure the insanity you need to eat the orchid, but for most players that's not going to work.  Only Basil St. John can eat the orchid and win the game, but playing as him is not a given.  The only way to do that is to give Basil St. John as your name when prompted at the start of the game.  It's insanely devious to put a puzzle like that in a place that a player would never expect a puzzle, it's just a shame that the reference is so obscure.  Well, it's obscure to me, anyway; the strip was made into a movie starring Brooke Shields and Timothy Dalton, so it must have been pretty well known in its day.

Escaping the Mansion

Solving the puzzles above is all well and good, but it's of no use if you can't leave the house.  The front door is locked, and there are no windows to escape through, so a more creative means of escape is required.  It comes via the elevator.  The elevator has five buttons: B, P, H, HALT and OPEN DOOR.  B, P and H all lead to a different floor of the house (although the P button just opens to a wall that says it's under construction).  The trick is to press the HALT button, but it's hard to figure out when, as there are no opportunities to enter commands while the elevator is moving.

Doing this requires a five word command: PRESS P THEN PRESS HALT.  Apparently Haunt has a five-word parser, which was news to me when I read this in a walkthrough; the vast majority of the game can be solved with two word commands.  This one requires the full five, though, and entering the command causes the lift to stop between floors.  Then you can climb out and climb on top of the lift, where you'll find an alien device with two buttons on it: WAY OUT and NORMAL.  Pressing NORMAL causes the lift to break, but if you press WAY OUT and then get in the lift and use it, it transports you to the lawn outside the house.  You'll need to do this a couple of times, mostly because you need the empty bottle to collect the bathwater for the garden as well as the water from the fountain of youth.

Escaping the Mansion Grounds

The final puzzle is to get outside of the wall surrounding the mansion grounds, and compared to the previous ones it's pretty simple.  You might recall that there's a grave in the northeast corner, which you can dig up to find a bone.  This is a bone from the Missing Link, and one of the game's treasures.  If you keep digging there's a pipe and a lever, and flipping the lever causes the pipe to burst. Wait around long enough and a maintenance guy arrives to fix it.  You need to hide in his truck, and eventually he'll drive back out through the gate, which takes you to the endgame.

At the end of the game, you are met by James Watt (President Reagan's Secretary of the Interior at the time, and something of an anti-environmentalist).  He offers to buy the land for $10 million, promising that the government won't sell it, but might lease out some mineral rights.  Selling the land ends up being a bad idea...

The other option you're given is to donate the land, and keep it preserved in its current state.  Doing this results in a much more favourable ending, though perhaps not so great for James Watt.

I managed to finish with the full 440 points.  The walkthrough that I linked to earlier ends with 435, as it neglects to take the LSD cube out to the lawn.  Just remember to eat it after getting those 5 points, or you'll end up in prison.

The full list of treasures is below.  You get 15 points for finding each one, and a further 5 points for each one you drop on the lawn.

• Antique Chair
• Money
• Stereo
• Painting
• Marijuana
• Diamond Corkscrew
• LSD Cube
• Unicorn Horn
• Silver Candlesticks
• Water from the Fountain of Youth
• Gem
• Jade
• Coins
• Treasure Chest
• Conch
• Pearls
• Diamonds
• Gold
• Diamond Ring
• Football
• Bone

So I'm finally done with Haunt, which never would have happened if I hadn't looked up the answers.  The game is an odd mix of perfectly logical puzzles, puzzles that are very clever, and puzzles that are very clever but require knowledge of incredibly specific pop culture.  I enjoyed a lot of the writing and the humour, and I was certainly impressed by the ideas behind the puzzles once I looked up the answers, but I'm not sure I liked it much as a game after my first few sessions.  Lets's run it through the RADNESS Index and see how it fares.

RADNESS INDEX

Story & Setting: In terms of background, and the way that background feeds into the puzzles, I feel like this one is ahead of its time.  Most games of this era use the story setup as a simple framing device that has very little bearing on the game-play, but in Haunt the background is important, as asre the other details introduced via notes scattered through the mansion.  It didn't quite come together as a narrative in the way that I hoped for, but it's streaks ahead of its contemporaries.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Characters & Monsters: There aren't a lot of characters to interact with, and those are generally there just for a single interaction, but at least there is some humour to be had from them.  The monsters are a weird mix of haunted house staples (a Dracula, a Frankenstein, a ghost) and hostile sea creatures.  It's not bad in this area, but adventure games aren't going to score high here until some proper opportunities for conversation and interaction come up.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Aesthetics: It's a text adventure, but it's a well-written one.  There's a definite style to the prose, and some of the gags made me smile.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Puzzles: This is a tough one.  The game has a bunch of standard adventure game puzzles that are quite well executed.  It also has some puzzles that are extremely clever, and some that require knowledge from outside of the game.  I frown on the latter somewhat, although I'm not completely opposed to it.  I do think the references should generally err on the side of common knowledge, and Haunt's references are far from that.  I think I'll be generous here, and give it the points for being clever.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Mechanics: The game ran very smoothly, and I had little in the way of parser trouble.  That said, I did get through a lot of the game using a walkthrough, so I had the answers and required commands in front of me.  I'll have to split the difference here. Rating: 4 out of 7.

Challenge: This might be vying with Acheton as the hardest adventure game I've played.  It probably doesn't beat that one, because Acheton is not just hard but also absurdly long.  But like Acheton, there are puzzles that I would never have figured out no matter how long I thought about them.  Partly because I'm not smart enough, but also because I just didn't know the pop cultural references.  It's obviously not impossible, as other players have figured it out, but it's well beyond the difficulty level that I'd consider enjoyable. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Fun: Most of the enjoyment I got from this game came from the writing.  The actual gameplay and puzzle solving came achingly slowly, and I never found myself looking forward to playing.  I enjoyed going through the walkthrough much more than playing the game itself. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 0.

The above scores total 19, which doubled gives Haunt a RADNESS Index of 38.  That's very respectable indeed: it's up near the top of the adventure game rankings with Acheton, Battlestar, and Colossal Cave Adventure.  That seems about right; it's quite a solid adventure game if you play it straight without worrying about scoring full points.

NEXT: It's back to the safe, straightforward arms of Scott Adams, as I take on The Count.

Haunt: Uncomfortably Dumb

Once again, my progress in Haunt has been painstakingly slow.  I mentioned early on that I've become trepidatious about mainframe text adventures, and I thought it was because they were longer than the games on home computers.  That could still be part of it, but they're also harder.  The prime audience for these things would have been college students with an interest in computers, and back in 1979 that meant you were smart.  I, on the other hand, am dumb, at least in comparison.  (On the subject of my own intelligence, I like to say that I'm either the dumbest smart guy in the room, or the smartest dumb guy.)  Games like Acheton, Zork and Haunt make me feel very stupid, and I DO NOT LIKE IT.  Perhaps that's why I prefer CRPGs - most of the time if you're bad at a game you can still brute force your way to victory.  With difficult text adventures, if you're not smart enough then you're just outta luck.  Go play Space Invaders, dummy!

That said, I did manage to make some progress.  Not a lot, but enough that the last fortnight wasn't a total loss.

The first thing I figured out was how to get to the unicorn head mounted on the dining room wall, which was too high for me to reach.  As I suspected, I was able to climb on the stool from the bar.  The head was too firmly attached to the wall to take, but the horn came away easily enough.  Taking it gave me some points, which means it's one of the treasures I need to find.  Whether it has any further use, I have no idea.

I also fully explored the underwater sea.  The sea measures 6 rooms by 6 rooms, and when I first explored it I didn't find anything.  I soon figured out that going up took me to the surface, where I killed a sea monster and found a beach with a fountain of youth.  What took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out is that I could also go down: the 6 x 6 ocean was also 6 rooms deep.  I didn't even figure this out, really.  I actually went into the water with something heavy in my inventory, and got dragged to the bottom.

On the bottom I found an octopus guarding a treasure chest.  My first instinct was to kill it with my speargun, but I'd already used that to kill the sea monster on the surface.  I tried FIGHT OCTOPUS, just on the off chance. It didn't work, but the message it returned said that I'd be "just the sort to wrestle an octopus".  I took the hint, and tried WRESTLE OCTOPUS, which worked.  The dragon puzzle in Colossal Cave Adventure had primed me for this one.  Unfortunately, the chest was too heavy for me to take up the the surface, so I need to come back to this one.

In the cliff to the east I found a tunnel, which led to two areas of note.  One featured a giant eel, which knocked the speargun out of my hand before squeezing me to death.  I had the chance to enter one command before dying, but my choice of PLEASE LET GO was not the right one.

Glad this is a text adventure, because I've had nightmares about
video game eels in the past.

The other area was a cave, where I found some diamonds and a dead body with a note.

Impressive that John Laird predicted 1998 Aussie drama Seachange sixteen
years early.

I have no idea what relevance Diver Dan may have, not to mention B___ie and _ec_l.  The first one could be Bennie, or Bertie, or Bessie, but none of those is helpful.

North of the sea is a beach, and the fountain of youth.  I did some digging in the sand, and found a conch.  I also gathered up some of the water in an empty bottle.  Earlier I had found a dry garden bed, and my intention was to pour this water over it.  The problem is, I still haven't figured out how to get back outside of the house, so I'm a bit stymied.

The only other thing I did was eat the LSD cube from the fridge.  Previously this had made me act erratically and at seeming random, but this time it gave me a vision where a moose said "Fa Lowe, why her?"  Once again, I'm stumped.  It seems like every little bit of progress I make just gives me something even more baffling.

Haunt hasn't exactly done wonders for my productivity on the blog, and when you pair it with Rogue (which I guess is the exception to my "brute force" strategy that I mentioned above) it feels like I've accomplished very little of late.  With that in mind, I'm going to try to make next weekend's post my final one for Haunt.  I've no doubt that I'll be hitting some walkthroughs, so expect me to be extra guilty and ashamed of myself next time around.

Haunt: Underground and Underwater

I've opened a bunch of my posts lately with an apology, and that's how I'm going to start again today: sorry for the lack of updates around here lately.  Unfortunately, I haven't made much progress in Haunt or Rogue (not for lack of trying in regard to the latter).  I figure today I'll write about what I've done in Haunt, and list out the various problems I'm having to see if doing that jump-starts my brain.

Last time I mentioned that I had possibly had a sleep-deprivation-based hallucination where I ended up on the bottom of the ocean in Haunt.  I'm happy to report that I was not hallucinating, and that the game does feature a subterranean ocean.  Unlike the protagonist of the game, I'm holding on to my sanity for the moment.

I also solved the mystery of how I got down there.  There's a maze of ducts in the game that is deceptively simple; at first glance, it looks like a 9x9 grid.  The trick is that it has three levels, and there are two places where you can go up and down cycling through those three levels endlessly.  I couldn't find any exits on what I designated as the "upper" level, but on the "lower" level I found a duct that exited on top of a fridge in a kitchen.

The kitchen was empty except for the fridge and an exit to the west.  I opened the fridge and found a white cube, which was otherwise undescribed.  I figured that it was probably a block of ice, or maybe some tofu, so I popped it in my mouth.  This turned out to be a bad idea; I had just eaten a cube of acid, and my character proceeded to take a whole bunch of actions that ended up with me dying on the ocean floor.  Definitely something to avoid, although I do wonder if there's somewhere safer for me to take it.

West of the kitchen (after a quick reload) was a back hall, with a closed elevator.  I ignored that for now and continued west, into a dining room, where I found some silver candlesticks and a unicorn head mounted on the wall.  The candlesticks were treasure (marked with exclamation points).  As for the unicorn head, it was too high on the wall for me to reach, so I left it for now.

The elevator back in the hall opened with the press of a button, and I stepped inside.  It had a bunch of graffiti, all of which I'm sure is relevant.  "Homer turns my head" is obviously a reference to turning the bust of Homer to open the secret door in the library.  "Homer kisses dead goats" is a mystery to me, as is "L__t g_e_ _ere!".  I thought the last one might be "loot goes here", but I didn't get any extra points for dropping treasure in the elevator.

The elevator had five buttons.  "Open Door" was self-explanatory.  "Halt" apparently only works when the lift is in motion, but I've yet to find a situation where I could press it while the lift is moving.  "H" refers to the floor that I was already on.  Pressing "P" took me to a floor where the doors opened onto a brick wall with a sign that said "under construction".  I'm hoping that this is a gag, or a puzzle to solve, and not a sign that the game is incomplete.

The only button that got me anywhere was "B", which opened into the airlock of a bathysphere.  Inside the airlock were some coins (a treasure) and a loaded speargun.  I took the speargun and, after messing around with some buttons, was able to open the airlock and make my way out onto the ocean floor.  It ended up being a 6x6 area with impassable boundaries on each side: seaweed to the south, a rocky cliff to the east, an ice wall to the west, and a sandy cliff to the north.  This seemed suspiciously pointless.  Surely there had to be more to it than that?

Eventually, I figured out that I should try swimming up.  Sure enough, I found myself on the surface of an underground lake, and I was immediately under threat by a giant sea monster.  Not much of a threat, it turns out, because it died instantly when shot with the speargun.  Sometimes the most obvious solution is the best one.  You can also avoid the monster by surfacing near the ice wall.

This guy must have rolled terribly for hit points.

After swimming around for a bit I discovered that the sandy cliff to the north was actually a beach.  All I found there was a pool of water, with the following message: "unta  o  out".  I've got no idea what this could mean.  I tried drinking the water, and for some reason the game mocked me for being a baby and killed me.  Is drinking water something people were ever mocked for?  I mean, it wouldn't surprise me in 2020 to be honest, but it is a weird one.

One of the odder game deaths I've encountered.

That's where I'm at in Haunt, which is pretty scant progress.  I'll list the various mysteries that I've yet to solve below:

• The old garden outside of the mansion is described as dry.  I figure I need to water it (which might be something I can do with the subterranean pool, maybe).
• The safe with the three-number combination lock.  I haven't seen any clues to this.  I could always try to brute force it by going through every possible combination, but I don't fancy doing that.
• The maze in the wine cellar.  I found a trapdoor there that led me to the torture chamber (and a sexy encounter), but it's possible that there's more to find.
• Dracula.  He's in a casket in a dark room on the upper floor, and he won't leave that room.  I don't have anything I can kill him with, I'm pretty sure.  Though now that I think of it, that underground pool could be holy water.
• There's a dead end where the sweet sounds of Alice Cooper can be heard.  This can be silenced by pulling a cord on the floor, but I have no idea what purpose this serves.
• I need something I can stand on to reach the unicorn head in the dining room.
• What's the purpose of the cube of acid?
• What do I do with the underground pool?  What does "unta  o  out" mean?
• Can I get past the "under construction" brick wall?
• What does "Homer kisses dead goats" mean?
• What does "L__t g_e_ _ere" mean?
• How do I get down from the balcony after I've climbed the ivy at the back of the house?
• How do I get out of the house at all?
• How do I stop myself from going insane and committing suicide?

That seems like a fairly comprehensive list, though I'm sure I've missed some things.  Here's a list of the inventory items I've discovered so far.

• Two bus tokens.  These can be used to take the bus at the beginning of the game, or they can be eaten if you want to be quickly transported inside the mansion grounds.
• A watch.  You start with this in your inventory.
• A bone that once belonged to the Missing Link. A treasure.
• A bowl of candy.  This can be given to the monster upstairs to open a path to the bar.
• A wetsuit.  Required to explore the ocean floor.
• An antique chair.  It's a fragile treasure, which will break if you try to sit on it.
• A piece of modern art, which is revealed as a Rembrandt when you pour turpentine on it. A treasure.
• A book with hints about killing vampires.
• Some gold.  Treasure.
• Turpentine, which is used to reveal the Rembrandt.
• A stool in the bar.  I can't remember now if it can be taken, but it seems like a possible option for reaching the unicorn head.
• A diamond corkscrew.  Treasure.
• Some rope.
• Matches.
• A cube of acid.
• Some silver candlesticks. Treasure.
• A piece of jade.  Treasure.
• Soap.  Washing with this reveals a gem inside, which is another treasure.

So I've located eight treasures.  They're generally worth 15 points when you pick them up, and the instructions say that you get more points for dropping them on the lawn outside the mansion.  The game's top score is 440 points, so I could possibly be halfway there, depending on how many extra points that entails.  It's difficult to say.  I'm going to plug away at Haunt for a little bit longer, but I think I'm reaching the point now where I might need to look up some hints.

Haunt: Bathroom Ideas

This will be a pretty quick post, because A) it's late, and I'm tired; B) my internet has been playing funny buggers, which caused me to lose a lengthy post over on my D&D blog yesterday; and C) I have made very little progress in Haunt.

A lot of that lack of progress probably has to do with the fact that I'm not playing it very much.  It's not that it's a bad game; on the contrary, when I do play it I find it to be quite amusing.  It has a warped sense of humour that very much appeals to me.  But I'm just not that into video games right now, and what little time I did spend gaming this week, I spent playing The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past Randomizer, which takes that game and mixes up the contents of all the chests.  Look, when a way to make my favourite game of all time replayable comes up, I'm gonna be spending some time on that.  On top of all of the above, I've spent most of the last few days doomscrolling on Twitter, and blogging hasn't seemed all that high a priority with everything else going on.  I'll try to get things back on track from now on; I really did feel good about maintaining that regular schedule, and I'd like to get back to that kind of diligence.

Okay, Haunt.  When I left off at the end of my last post, I only had one obvious avenue of exploration: the rooms accessible by climbing the ivy at the back of the mansion.  I'd already been up there previously, and found a bedroom and a bathroom.  Before I could achieve anything of significance though, I'd tried flushing the toilet, only for it to spin around and knock me over.  This caused me to crack my head on the bath and die, which is a pretty ignoble way to go in a video game.

There had to be more to those rooms than that, so I made it my first target when I went back to the game.  Upon climbing the ivy, I recalled that you can't go back the same way; the ivy collapses under your weight and sends you crashing to the ground.  I thought I'd try jumping down, just to see if it worked, but unfortunately it did not, and I chalked up yet another death.  I'm pretty sure now that I'm not supposed to go back that way.  There's a boarded-up doorway from the bedroom that supposedly leads to the rest of the house, and I'd lay odds that I'm meant to find a way through there (or perhaps a way through from the other side).

The first room I investigated was the bathroom, which had a toilet, a bath, and a bar of soap.  The toilet spinning when flushed seemed suspicious to me, so I decided to see what would happen if I sat on it before pressing the button.  The toilet swiveled around into a secret room, where I found a piece of jade and was also treated to a good old masturbation joke.

I had to try it.

The jade was a treasure, but there was nothing else in the room, so I flushed the toilet again and was returned to the bathroom.

The only other thing of interest in the bathroom was the bathtub, so I did the obvious thing: I decided to get in and wash myself.  All I had to do was type TAKE BATH and my guy got in, ran the water, and washed himself with the soap: that's an efficient parser!  The soap wore away completely, leaving me with a gem, another treasure.

So is my character running around Chez Moose naked?

I'd done pretty well in the bathroom, but the bedroom was another matter entirely.  I looked under the bed, and found nothing but dust.  Sleeping in the bed achieved nothing.  There was a mirror on the ceiling above the bed, which was out of reach.  I tried jumping on the bed, which caused me to break the mirror, but I wasn't able to take the broken glass.  Perhaps if I was wearing gloves I might be able to do it without being cut, but I've yet to find any.

I also had no way to get back to the rest of the game.  I wasn't able to get through the boarded-up doorway, and I had no way of getting down from the balcony without being killed.  I decided to restart, and try to find my way in from the other side.

I had some luck exploring the house from the front door, as I was able to find some areas that I hadn't been to before.  Don't ask me how I got there though, it's a complete mystery to me.  It was pretty late when I was playing, and I was drifting in and out of sleep.  I know that I found an elevator, and then I ended up on the bottom of the ocean somehow.  I died of madness pretty shortly after that, and I wasn't quite mentally aware enough to get any screenshots, so I'm not entirely sure that I didn't just dream the whole thing.  Hopefully when I next go back to the game I can figure out how to get back there (assuming that there's a there to find).

I need to devote more time to this game.  It's really quite a solid effort, and as I mentioned above it's funny enough to keep me entertained.  I also haven't gotten properly stuck at any point yet, which is always a bonus for me: the difficulty is pitched at around the right level so far.  If I can just muster the effort to finish it, I think it's going to score rather well.

Game 46: Haunt (1979)

Haunt doesn't have a title screen

Well, I had a week off.  I've been pretty good about keeping to a schedule of late, but ever since I started playing Rogue my desire to blog has somewhat dimmed.  The problem is, I don't want to play anything else, but the blog cannot survive on Rogue alone.  It's a great game, but after a while it's hard to find things to say about it.  On top of that, I'm really into Dungeons & Dragons right now.  My interests run in cycles.  Sometimes I'm obsessed with D&D, sometimes with comics, and sometimes with video games.  At the moment, video games is near the bottom of the cycle.  Never fear, it'll get to the top again.

What all of the above means is that I'm cutting my posts back to once a week, for the most part.  On Sundays(ish) I'll post about whatever game is next on my chronology.   On Wednesdays(ish), I'll post about Rogue, if I have something new to say about it.  Once I'm done with Rogue I might pick up the pace again, but I'm not sure about that.  We'll see what happens.

For today's post, I'm tackling Haunt, which is another mainframe-based text adventure.  (It's often written as HAUNT, all caps, and I don't know why.)  I'm not sure why I get so trepidatious about the mainframe adventure games.  Zork was one, and it's undoubtedly the best game I've played for the blog so far.  Colossal Cave Adventure, Acheton and Battlestar have all rated well.  The mainframe games do tend to be better on average than their home computer equivalents, but they also tend to be longer.  Perhaps that's it.  I like making progress on the blog, and short games are great for that.  I'm at the point where I'd almost rather play a short but terrible game than one that's long and pretty good.  I have no idea how big Haunt is, and that makes me nervous.

Haunt was created starting in 1979 by John E. Laird, who is currently a computer science professor at the University of Michigan.  He would have been studying for his Ph.D at the time.  Laird worked at Xerox PARC for a bit before getting into academia, and he's significant enough to merit his own Wikipedia page, but I don't think he did anything else in gaming beyond creating Haunt.  The game was developed from 1979 to 1982, but as usual I'm playing it in the year that the game's development started.

Getting the game running was a bit of a nightmare.  It requires TOPS-20 emulation; I gather that TOPS-20 was the operating system for the DEC-20 mainframe.  To play the game, I had to go to twenex.org and create a TOPS-20 login.  Then I needed to download a telnet client; I ended up going with PuTTY, which can be found here.  It was a lot of rigmarole, and not the sort of thing I'm used to, but I got there in the end.

The game kicks off with its backstory, and, well... it's weird.  Get a load of this.

This stuff is wild.

For those who don't want to squint at my screen caps, the gist is that there's a bloke whose wife got killed by a moose.  He bought the land where the incident happened, built a mansion called Chez Moose, and set about trying to return her to life.  He wasn't seen again for seven years, and was declared dead.

What also happened on the fateful day of that picnic was that the man's child was kidnapped by gypsies (which I'm aware isn't a word I should be using, but I'm going with what the game says. Apologies to any Romani people who may be reading.).  Only that child will apparently be able to enter the house and find the treasures inside without going mad and committing suicide.  So yes, it's a treasure hunt, but the story around it is bizarre enough that I can excuse it.

Also wrapped up in this story is an obscure hereditary disease called "Orkhisnoires sakioannes".  I've no idea what this is getting at.  Google just points back to articles about this game, so I gather that it's completely made up.  I guess it could be a pun or an anagram, but I'm not at the stage where I'm going to try and solve it just yet.

That's mighty nice of the government, who are always wonderful chaps.

The game began with me standing at a bus stop. My inventory contained a watch and a couple of bus tokens.  I tried moving off in various directions, but there's nowhere to go from the bus stop.  The only thing to do was to wait until a bus pulled up, get on board, and exit when it dropped me at the front gate of Chez Moose.

I could see the mansion from the front gate; it was dark, but there were lights coming from the windows.  There was seemingly no way to open the gate, so I did a lap of the perimeter wall.  I found a gate with a buzzer on the east wall, but decided to ignore it for now.  The wall was surrounded with a forest, which I'm pretty sure is only there for show.  I tried to explore it, but it very quickly became impenetrable.  The road to the south was bordered by a similarly impenetrable forest, but I discovered that if I went far enough east or west I'd end up back at the bus stop.  I could wait and catch the bus again, but only once.  After that, I had no tokens left, and being unable to catch the bus I sat down on the corner and starved to death.  Going home and living the rest of my life was not an option, I suppose.

Another weird thing happened while I was exploring the wilderness.  At the stroke of midnight, a ghostly moose appeared and charged right through me.  It didn't seem to have any negative effect, but I'm a little concerned about it.  I wonder if there's a way to avoid it somehow, or if it's tied into the whole going mad and committing suicide thing?

Yep. It's a ghost moose alright.

There's also a weird area just off the south-west corner of the wall that has no description at all.  It's just a blank space.  I'm not sure if this is significant or not, but I've learned not to dismiss this kind of thing.  I'll have to remember it when I'm thinking of ways to earn extra points.

With nothing else to do I approached the east gate and pressed the button.  There was a buzz, but nothing else happened.  At this point, I got really stuck, and I almost searched for a walkthrough, which would have been pretty shameful at this early stage.  It turned out that all I had to do was press the button a couple more times.  The buzzing woke up the person on the other end, and after a series of questions he let me through the gate.  Some of those questions were simple (name, quest, etc.) and some of them were weird trivia.  The most common one I've gotten is "What was the first production system with more than 1500 productions?"  The answer to this is "Haunt", which apparently has something to do with the language it was coded in; I only knew the answer to this by looking at bluerenga.blog.  The other question I keep getting is "What is the capital of Assyria?"  I've tried Assur, and the alternate spelling Ashur, but it keeps telling me I'm wrong and I'm not sure why.  Google wouldn't lie to me.  (Actually, I've just realised that the answer is probably "A", which is the sort of dumb thing I would write on geography tests when I didn't know the answer.  I'll have to try that next time.)

After answering the questions I was let inside, and informed that I wouldn't be getting back out through the gate.  The mansion grounds were mostly areas of lawn, with the mansion at the centre and an empty garage to the north-east.  I also found a grave in the north-east corner, which I dug up.  Inside was a bone from the Missing Link, which I took with me.  Taking it increased my score, so I gather that it's one of the treasures I'm seeking.  There's also a dry garden bed, which I'm thinking I need to water, but at the moment I don't have anything appropriate.

The mansion has two entrances.  On the north side is some ivy, which I was able to climb up to a balcony.  Inside was a master bedroom, and a bathroom.  I tried flushing the toilet, and it spun around so rapidly that I was knocked over and cracked my head open on the bathtub.  A "10th level cleric" came by and resurrected me, and I found myself back outside the wall with an empty inventory.  I was able to buzz myself back into the mansion grounds, and I tried climbing the ivy again.  This time I tried to test climbing back down, which was also fatal.

There's something very undignified about being resurrected
by a bus driver.

I wonder if maybe I can jump down?  I dismissed it at the time, but it's worth a shot.

On my next try I gave up on the ivy, and decided to go through the front door.  The only way to open it was to knock, and the game gave me a very unusual greeting.  I hadn't mentioned that the guy on the other end of the buzzer asked me about my sexual preference.  I'm not sure if it factors in elsewhere in the game, but it does get a mention here.

I've been called worse.

Once I was inside the house, the door slammed behind me and couldn't be opened.  This game just loves cutting off the path back to the start...  In the foyer was a bowl of candy, which I took with me and resisted the urge to eat.  Exploring west, I found a closet containing a wet suit with fully functioning scuba gear.  I was pretty skeptical about finding a place where this would come in handy, but I put it on anyway.

North of the foyer was the main hall, with passages heading east and west, and stairs leading upwards.  The game mentioned that there was a horrible noise coming from upstairs.  There was also an old chair, which I took with me.  It had a plaque on the back that said it was made by Louis XIV, so I figured it was another treasure.

I explored west, finding a dark hall with a safe.  The safe was shut, and had a combination lock with three two-digit numbers.  The game gave 10-10-10 as an example, and I tried it.  I wasn't surprised that it didn't work, but I was a little surprised that the game acknowledged that I was being a bit of a smart-arse by trying it in the first place.  Haunt responds to quite a lot of things I wouldn't expect, and generally has something amusing to say.

West of the safe was an art room, with a modern art painting inside.  I tried to take it, only to be told that it was worthless.  I held on to it anyway.

East of the main hall was a library, with a bust of Homer and shelves full of books.  I tried to read a book, only to be told that all of the pages were "virtual", and that the book disappeared.  I tried again, and found a book about vampires, and how to kill them.  Just the usual methods, nothing too revelatory here.  Trying another book, I was told that the rest were all made out of wood, so I left the library and headed upstairs.  (The stairs creaked ominously, and I started to think that I'd only get a few shots at using them before they'd collapse or something.  I went up and down them about a dozen times, with no trouble, so it's probably just there for spooky ambience.)

The upper hall had passages heading north, west, and south.  The stairs also continued up, but I decided to save those for later.  First I went south, into a dark room with a casket.  I'd already been warned by the book to expect vampires, but I went and stupidly opened the casket anyway.  Sure enough, I found Dracula inside.  He got up to try and bite me, but I quickly left the room, and he didn't follow.  When I went back in he was back in his casket.  I didn't have anything I could obviously use to kill him, so I left him where he was.  (Dracula's been in quite a number of adventure games that I've played for the blog.  He'd have to be a front-runner for the most frequently recurring character or monster.)

Exploring east, I was getting closer to the "horrible noise" I'd heard from downstairs.  Eventually, at a dead end, I recognised it as an Alice Cooper record.  Seriously, when it comes time for me to give this game its RADNESS Index, can I knock it down a couple of points for this?  Alice Cooper rules, particularly in the 1970s.  He sings about getting it on with skeletons.  Anyway, there was a wire running along the floor, so I pulled it and the noise stopped.  I'm not sure if this affected anything.

North of the upper hall was a "dull room", with a closet to the west.  Inside the closet was some gold (another treasure) and a ventilation shaft leading south.  Of more interest, though, was a skeleton and a note scrawled on the wall.

All of our dads are skeletons, deep down.

Plot development?  In a game from the 1970s?  I'd come into this game expecting another treasure hunt with arbitrary puzzles.  For the most part that's what Haunt has given me, but there are hints that it has deeper mysteries to unravel.  Who is Bas?  Is it me?  What's the deal with the illness, and the crop?  I'm intrigued by all of this, and I really hope that it plays out further and isn't just a bit of story detail thrown in at the beginning.

I explored the ventilation shaft heading south, which led into a maze of ducts.  The maze was small though, and the areas easily differentiated by their exits.  It didn't take me long to navigate, and I soon found myself in a ventilation shaft over the torture chamber. I couldn't open the grill to get down though, so there was nothing to do but retrace my steps back to the upper hall.

I decided to go upstairs, and found myself in a laboratory.  There was something under a sheet, and a lever on the wall.  First I tried looking under the sheet, but either the game wouldn't let me or I couldn't find the right verb-noun combination.  So I threw the lever, and was not entirely surprised when a monster emerged from under the sheet.

I really want to know what he does for a trick.

The monster's "trick or treat" greeting was a little more unexpected.  Luckily I had a bowl of candy on me, and when I gave it to the monster he left, crashing through the west wall.  I followed through the hole, and found a bar.  There was no alcohol, but there was a bottle of turpentine (or "turps" as its known around these parts) which I took with me.

I had an instant brainstorm upon finding the turps, and decided to pour it on the modern art painting that I'd found.  The paint washed off to reveal a valuable Rembrandt underneath; I'd found another treasure.

I was somewhat stuck at this point, and did quite a bit of stumbling about achieving not much of anything.  Eventually I found myself back in the library, and on a whim I tried turning the bust of Homer.  This opened a secret door to the east.  I wasn't able to get through while wearing my wetsuit, so I took it off and slipped through the opening into a secret room with stairs leading down.

The stairs led down to a wine cellar, where I found a diamond corkscrew (another treasure, which brought my tally up to five, I think).  I went exploring among the empty wine racks, and was lost in a maze.  The racks apparently stretched on infinitely in all directions, and try as I might I couldn't find any way out.  Just as I was about to give up (and the game started mocking me) I found a trapdoor in the floor.  It was open, so I slipped through.

It led down into a room, where I found a drunk ghost.  Despite being drunk, the ghost blocked every single action I tried to make.  Even basic commands like INVENTORY and LOOK were unavailable to me.

This game has a lot of euphemisms for being drunk.

I figured that, whatever the solution was, it must be completely divorced from my inventory.  At least I hoped so, as I couldn't look to see what I had.  I tried all sorts of things, including various levels of invective and a quote from Thor: Ragnarok, before hitting on the amusingly simple solution: BOO.  The ghost disappeared, and I was able to continue on.

Beyond I found the torture chamber that I'd seen from the ventilation shaft earlier.  Someone rushed out and closed the door behind them.  Of more interest was the supposedly sexy female who was imprisoned there.  I set her free and, well, one thing led to another...

I am a female lover, after all.

I opened the duct and crawled my way back to the main house, but at that point I was really quite stuck as to what to do next.  I was also well overdue to write this post, so I decided to call it a day and switch off.  I don't think I have anywhere else left to explore inside the main area of the house, but I also don't know how to get back outside.  Well, I guess dying gets me back outside, but it also loses points, and dumps my inventory, so that's not a good solution.  And I'm pretty sure that I do need to get back outside to beat the game.

One thing I haven't mentioned is that while I was doing all of this exploring, my character was slowly going mad.  I'd occasionally get a message about how the house was getting to me.

On my next game I'm going to try STAY SANE or DON"T GO MAD.
You never know.

The messages gradually ramped up in intensity, until I went completely mad and killed myself.  (Oddly enough, this is the second game in a row that I've played with suicide as a theme; Space II had it as well.)  After I died I was resurrected by a passing cleric, and was able to continue playing, and had no more problems with going crazy.  I'm not sure what effect it has on the game, aside from a loss of points.

That's as far as I've gotten with Haunt.  It's quite fun so far, and has enough of its own style and quirks to stand out from a lot of its contemporaries.  If it actually follows through on its promise it could be a real stand-out, and a game that's well ahead of its time.  I suspect that it won't quite get there, but I'm still holding out hope.