Game 47: The Count (1979)

Remember at the end of my last post, when I said that I was taking a break for personal reasons? Well, those reasons haven't disappeared, but I'm making my return to blogging much sooner than I anticipated.  I'm currently not working (for at least a few more weeks, until Melbourne exits Stage 4 lockdown), so I have plenty of time on my hands.  I was planning on using that time free from work and blogging to play some games, but when I asked myself what games I wanted to play, the answers I was giving myself were Ultima I and Wizardry I, games that are coming up on my blog schedule fairly shortly.  And every time I thought about playing those games without blogging them, I felt guilty about it.  So, I'm back.  It turns out that I have nothing better to do right now, and I ended up missing this more than I expected.

I am making one change to my schedule though: I'm upping the rate at which I play games on the priority list.  Previously, I'd had four games from 1979 between those on the priority list, but I'm shortening that to two.  It means that things will be jumping around the timeline a bit more than I'd like, but it also means I'll be playing more games that I know I actually want to play.  I considered having only one game between priority list games, but decided against it.  I want to play the classics, but I also want to make progress through the timeline, however slowly.

That brings us to The Count, by Scott Adams.  This is the fifth game released by Adams, whose previous efforts have ranged from decent (Mission Impossible, Pirate Adventure, Voodoo Castle) to pretty good (Adventureland), at least by the standards of the time.  I've heard that The Count is one of his strongest games, so I've been looking forward to digging into it.

The original version was released for the TRS-80, first through the Software Exchange (the game publishing arm of Softside magazine) and then through Adams' own company Adventure International.  I'm playing a later version of the TRS-80 release, shown on the title screen as v1.15.  It might differ from the original, but it's the earliest version that I could find.

Dracula has his own face on the front of his castle.

With Adams' games, it's always worth checking out the front cover as released by Adventure International (I don't believe the Software Exchange version had any images on the packaging).  The explanation is pretty vague: apparently I'm going to be waking up in a bed in Transylvania with a mysterious package.  Said package is shown in the image, addressed to "The Count" from someone called Yorga, with a note saying that it shouldn't be opened until Halloween.  The rest of the imagery - the title written in dripping blood, the bat, the hammer and stake, and the huge D on the gate - point to this being a game where I'm going up against Dracula.  Subtle it ain't.

Alvin Files will go on to wrote Pyramid of Doom, the 8th Scott Adams
Adventure, and the only one not written or co-written by Scott himself.

As the cover indicated, I began the game lying in bed, with little idea of what I was doing there.  I typed SCORE, which the game didn't understand, so presumably there aren't any points to accumulate.  I typed INVENTORY, and found that I was carrying a tent stake, which I assume is wooden.  Typing HELP gave me a helpful hint to GET UP, which I probably could have figured out on my own, but I appreciated the parser guidance anyway.

I was in a bedroom, with a closed window and an exit to the north.  I'd been expecting the mysterious package from the front cover, but it wasn't there; I even tried looking under the bed, but no luck.  Looking through the window, I saw Voodoo Castle in the distance (nice plug, Scott), as well as a ledge I could stand on.  Opening the window and stepping out, I found nothing but a flagpole, so I decided to explore inside.

Outside of the bedroom was a hall with exits in all four directions.  West was a kitchen with an oven and a dumb-waiter.  The dumb-waiter was empty, and the oven was radiating "a tremendous amount of HEAT & SUNLIGHT".  Sunlight seemed like a pretty weird and specific thing to be coming from an oven, and at first I wondered if maybe I could use it to kill Dracula.  The oven was too heavy to move though, and it was too hot to check inside, so I explored elsewhere.

North of the hall was a bathroom, with a mirror, a pocket watch, and a toilet.  The toilet was usable, but served no other purpose.  Looking in the mirror showed me that I looked healthy today.  The mirror can be used to check your appearance and state of health, pretty much telling you how many days you have left to beat the game.  In another game I broke the mirror and was told that it was seven years of bad luck, but I have no idea if this affects gameplay at all.  The watch tells time, but in a very game-specific way: it tells you how many moves you have until sunset.  I took these with me at this point, but in later games I ended up leaving them in the bathroom. They're handy, but the map is small enough that you can easily go back there and check them when you want to.

East of the hall leads to a courtyard outside the castle, where I found a bell-pull and a coat of arms that bore the family crest of Dracula: my first concrete sign as to where I was.  Pulling the bell caused it to ring, but had no other effect, so I continued to the main gate.  An angry mob was gathered outside, but before engaging with them I took the time to look up at the castle.  I noticed another window under the ledge of my bedroom window, and determined to check that out as soon as possible.  First, though, I went out through the gate to see what the mob would do.  I was little surprised to find that I was torn apart and killed.  Apparently I'd been sent to the castle to kill Dracula, and chickening out wasn't an option.  My mission was finally clear, but what wasn't clear  is why I'd be sleeping in a bed inside the castle if I'm on a vampire hunt.  That's not a question that the game ever deigns to answer.

After rebooting I decided to check out the window underneath my bedroom window.  I reached it by tying the bedsheets to the flagpole and climbing down.  The window had some daisies on the ledge, and the room beyond was empty except for a portrait of Dracula.  Moving the portrait, I found a dark passage beyond, but with no light source I was unable to explore it without falling over and killing myself.  I restored my game, and discovered that I would have died regardless, because the flagpole broke when I tried to climb back up the bedsheet.  It's an obvious solution to accessing the window below, but it's also a deadly red herring.  The real solution is to tie the sheet to your bed, which allows you to climb down and back up again.  I didn't figure this out until much later though.

At that point, I was pretty much stuck.  The map is very small, even by 1979 standards, and I only had two obvious places to go: the dark passage and the dumb-waiter.  For the former I was lacking a light source, and for the latter I couldn't figure out the right commands to go up or down.  To be honest, I wasn't even certain that it could go up and down.  I've never seen a dumb-waiter in real life, and pretty much my entire knowledge of them is that Wolverine uses one to get around the Hellfire Club in Uncanny X-Men #133.  (Sorry folks, comic books are my only frame of reference.)

With nothing else to do I tooled around the map trying various things, until I heard a bell sound.  I went to check the front door, and saw that someone had left a postcard.  The postcard was actually an "eating and ghouling" bill from a local mortuary.  (Is this meant to be a pun? If so, I'm missing it.)  Paperclipped to the postcard was a note saying that the postmaster would deliver a package tomorrow.

Not long after that, the sun set and I started to get tired.  Then something happened (it was too dark for me to see) and I woke up in bed the next day with two holes in my neck.  The game told me that I had a hunch I'd been robbed, so I checked my inventory: the tent stake was gone.  Looks like Dracula was taking away the things I could use to kill him.

Later that day (in which I made no other progress), the postmaster delivered a package as promised.  It had a note from Count Yorga, as shown on the cover above.  Ignoring Yorga's instructions to leave the package unopened until Halloween, I found two items inside: a bottle of Type V blood, and a pack of Transylvanian cigarettes.

Presumably Adams took the name from the early 70s vampire movies
Count Yorga, Vampire and The Return of Count Yorga.

That night, Dracula attacked again, but he didn't drink my blood this time. Instead, he drank the blood from the bottle.  He also stole the pack of cigarettes.  Possibly he just wants to smoke them himself, but I suspect that they must be somehow vital to my mission.

With no light source, and seemingly no other way forward, I spent the next two game days accomplishing very little.  On the third night Dracula drained my blood again, and on the fourth he turned me into a vampire.  Obviously, that was a game over.  The postman made no other deliveries during that time, so it looked like I'd have to make do with the items I had.  It also looked like I had three days to defeat Dracula, with the bottle of blood giving me an extra day.

Who is "I" in this scenario, and who is "you"? Why are they both in trouble?
Is the vampire protagonist of this game coming to get me for realsies?

I got very stuck at this point, but I was pretty sure that the dumb-waiter must lead somewhere.  Eventually I hit on the correct commands: RAISE DUMBWAITER and LOWER DUMBWAITER.  (I just checked, and the HELP command tells you this straight out. That would have saved me a lot of angst.)  The dumb-waiter went one level up, and one level down.

The room above the kitchen was a pantry, where I found some matches and a clove of garlic.  Below was a workroom, where I found a rubber mallet, a vent in the wall, and a locked door.  The mallet I assumed would be useful for staking Dracula.  The vent, I was told, was about the right size for a bat to enter or exit.  The locked door had a memo stuck to it, which was simply a thank-you note from Scott Adams, expressing his appreciation to the audience for making him a success.  (I feel tentatively safe in saying that, of the famous Scott Adamses, this one is the nice one.)

I didn't have a key for the locked door, but I did have a paperclip, and with that I was able to pick the lock.  It led to a dusty closet where I found a vial containing three No-Doz tablets.  My character had been getting tired as sunset approached, so I figured I could use these to stay up later.

Down from the workroom was a dungeon, with iron rings in the wall and a pit in the floor.  The bottom of the pit was dark, but a lit match revealed a torch, which I took.  I had a light source, but I had no way out of the pit except to wait for Dracula to come and get me after sunset.  (Later on I figured out that you can tie the bedsheet to the iron ring above and use that to escape.)

With a light source I could now explore the dark passage through the window below my bedroom.  It led to a crypt, where I found another vent (also bat-sized), a pile of used cigarettes, and a sign that said "POSITIVELY NO SMOKING ALLOWED HERE!"  Signs in adventure games are made to be ignored, so I lit up, and was treated to a discovery and an awful pun.

Maybe the other Scott Adams is the nice one after all.

The coffin was closed, and locked from the inside.  My initial thought was to break the coffin, but neither my fists nor a rubber mallet were sufficient to break the stone lid.  After that I suspected that Dracula might open it from the inside, so waited around until sunset and ate a tablet to stay awake.  Now that I had a light I could see after sunset.  Dracula attacked me in bat form, but was repelled by the garlic I was carrying.  I was able to get inside his coffin, but all I found there was a slide bolt.  I was pretty sure that I needed a way to break it so I could open the coffin during the day, but nothing I had on me did the trick.  Besides, this was the second day, and Dracula had already stolen my stake.

Obviously, the problem of Dracula stealing my stake and cigarettes was one I'd have to deal with.  My first thought was to hide them in the oven, but I wasn't able to figure out how to put them in there.  My second thought was to put them in the dumb-waiter, but Dracula found them there.  Next I tried the dusty closet, but I didn't lock it behind me, and that didn't work.  Finally, I tried the closet and locked the door, and that did the trick.  I had a hiding-place for my arsenal.

That whole process reminded me that the oven was something I should check out, and the fact that it was radiating sunlight still seemed odd to me.  I thought that maybe I'd be able to get a look inside after dark, and with the aid of a No-Doz tablet I was proven right.  Climbing inside the oven, I saw a lens (because this was a solar oven) and a nail-file.  The lens was stuck in place, but I was able to take the nail-file.  It seemed a little dubious that it could break a metal slide bolt with any great speed, but it worked.  I had the final piece of the puzzle, and now all I needed to do was sort out the right sequence of events.

That didn't take long.  Day one was for gathering items, hiding the stake, and getting the nail file from the oven.  There's no avoiding getting bitten by Dracula after dark, unfortunately.  I tried hiding in the closet, but the door on;y exists as an object on the outside.  The next day involved waiting for the package to arrive, heading down to the crypt, and disabling the lock on Dracula's coffin with the nail-file.  There's also the matter of hiding the pack of cigarettes, but you can get around that by taking a single cigarette from the pack; Dracula won't steal that one when he attacks that night.  On the third day, it was time to grab my stake and mallet, and head to the crypt to kill Dracula.

This time the vampire was asleep in his coffin.  It was a simple matter to kill him with my stake, and I was carried off by cheering townspeople.  I'd been a little worried that there might be more to it than that; I was particularly concerned that Dracula might be able to escape through the vent.  But nope, once you're in Drac's coffin with the right gear killing him is dead simple.

Staking the Count.

On the whole, this was a pretty satisfying game, and I fully understand why this has a reputation as Adams' best game.  I haven't played them all, but of those I have played I'd rate this one as the strongest.  The set-up is a welcome step away from treasure hunting, and the time-based mission is something that hasn't really been seen before.  A few games have had smaller sequences with timing-based puzzles (Acheton springs to mind here), but this is the first time that it's been so heavily featured, and it's definitely a milestone.  Aside from any historical significance, I just enjoyed the process of figuring things out.  It was frustrating - I think that's unavoidable in text adventures of this vintage - but satisfying to solve.

PORTS OF CALL

This games, like everything made by Scott Adams, was ported to an absolute buttload of different computers.  I'll try to stick to the more prominent ones, which would be the Apple II port from 1980, and the Atari 8-Bit and VIC-20 ports from 1981.  Unfortunately, I can't find a copy of the Apple II port anywhere.  All of Adams' other games are easily found, but not The Count.  As for the VIC-20, I found a cartridge version, but getting cartridges to work on the VICE emulator is a nightmare.  If anyone out there knows a VIC-20 emulator that's better at loading carts I'd appreciate you letting me know.

I did get the Atari 8-Bit version working.  It looks to be a UK version from 1984.  The text is mostly similar (a word here or there is changed), but it has two pretty big differences: the first is that I never saw Dracula fluttering about in bat form after sunset.  Possibly connected to this is that Dracula can be found in his coffin at any time.  It's actually possible to kill him on the second night, which means you don't have to bother finding the nail file and breaking the lock on his coffin.

The ending of the Atari 8-Bit version.

RADNESS INDEX

Story & Setting: The story is a hackneyed one in terms of general pop culture, but less so in video games at this point.  The time-based plot also deserves consideration here.  The setting of Dracula's castle is pretty small, and minimal in description.  The player's imagination, probably fueled by countless vampire novels and movies, does a lot of the heavy lifting here.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Characters & Monsters: It's literally just the angry mob and Dracula, and neither of them are exactly brimming with personality.  Dracula might be a great character in general, but in this game he's just a threat that knocks you out after sunset, and there's nothing you can do to interact with him.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Aesthetics: A Scott Adams text adventure is pretty much locked into the bottom of this ranking, I'm afraid.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Puzzles: The puzzles all make sense, the game has enough hints to help the player along, and the addition of timing-based puzzles adds an extra layer of interest.  I got stuck a few times, but never for long enough that I wanted to give up, and the solution was never something that made me upset.  It's hard to fault anything here, really.  Rating: 4 out of 7.

Mechanics: It's only a two word parser, but its awkward moments are few (mostly restricted to tying the rope to other objects).  The dumb-waiter was the only time I had trouble with the parser, but if I'd used the HELP command it wouldn't have been a problem.  Everything here works pretty well. Rating: 4 out of 7.

Challenge: The puzzles are just tough enough that I was occasionally stumped but never for too long.  Aside from my trouble with the dumb-waiter I was always able to make some form of forward progress, and for me that's always important with an adventure game.  Rating: 5 out of 7.

Fun: This is a quick, solidly enjoyable game, though it is perhaps a little too vague at the beginning.  Frustration is inevitable with this genre, but I found this among the least irritating of the text adventures I've played so far.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 1. I'm going to give The Count a bonus point for its innovations in story-telling,  It's not quite fully formed as a time-based game, but it's an important step along the way.

The above categories total 20, which doubled gives a score of 40.  Add the bonus point, and The Count has a RADNESS Index of 41.  In overall terms, that puts it equal sixth, with Beneath Apple Manor.  For adventure games, it's placed third, below Zork  and MUD1, but above every other adventure game for home computers so far.  That's an incredible showing for such a small game, but deserved.  Its the best Scott Adams game, and at this point in time Scott Adams was the benchmark for quality adventure games on home computer.

NEXT: I technically have Futurewar sitting in my backlog, which I abandoned due to some problems with the game.  Those problems have been fixed, but I'm really not in the mood for a lengthy PLATO slog right now, so I'm going to push forward for a while.  That makes my next game The Wizard and the Princess, an early game from Roberta Williams and the second adventure game on my priority list.

Rogue: VICTORY!!!!

After six years of blogging, I've just caught up to the CRPG Addict's first post.

And so, after four months and 288 attempts, I have finally completed Rogue.  I wouldn't exactly say that I'm proud of it as an achievement - beating Rogue requires more persistence and luck than genuine skill, I'd say - but it is an achievement nonetheless.  The percentage of people that have played Rogue and beaten it would be pretty small, and the percentage that have beaten it without cheating would be smaller still.  Being able to say that I'm in that small percentage feels pretty good.

Getting "good" at Rogue is a weird process in terms of CRPGs.  For most CRPGs, that process involves improving your character statistically.  If your numbers aren't good enough for a certain fight, you can just go somewhere and kill easier enemies for a while until your numbers improve.  Even proto-roguelikes like The Game of Dungeons, which also featured perma-death, had this as an option.  And yes, even Rogue sort of has this as an option if you happen to find two rings of slow digestion (something that happened to me exactly once in close to 300 games).  But for the most part you're on a hunger timer in Rogue, and the need to find food keeps you from being able to stop and grind for experience.  With that as a limitation, there's no way to avoid death by improving your character, and the only method of advancement is through knowledge.  You learn what the different items do, how strong the various monsters are, and what tactics and items are needed to maximise your survival.  And above all, you learn the value of patience.  It's a rare CRPG where the player's improvement is vastly more important than that of the character.

For me, things didn't click until right near the end.  I spent months sending characters into the Dungeon of Doom, with very little to show for it in terms of improved performance.  For every game where I made it down to level 20, I'd have a dozen more where I didn't even make it to level 10, or died on level 1.  Up until a few days ago I hadn't even found the Amulet of Yendor, and I was starting to worry that I'd be playing this game forever.

Then, out of nowhere, I had a game where I made it to level 26 of the dungeon and found the Amulet.  I had no idea what it was going to look like, and it turned out that it was disguised as a comma, hidden among the full stops that represent an empty space.

I hadn't done anything different than usual during that game, but I did have a number of advantages over the average adventurer: good armour, a two-handed sword, a high Strength score, and loads of hit points.  Having a decent hit point total is crucial to beating the game, and unfortunately that's something that's almost completely out of the player's hands.

Once you find the Amulet of Yendor, you need to take it all the way back to the surface: that means traversing levels 26 through 1 all over again in reverse order.  They aren't the same levels, either; the level 25 you just beat won't have the same layout the second time you tackle it.  The amulet doesn't give you any extra offensive powers, but I think it does stop you from getting hungry.  At least, I don't recall having to eat any food while carrying it.

Anyway, the first time I found the amulet didn't go so well.  I made it back to the stairs and climbed to level 25, but then I walked right into a trapdoor that dumped me back to level 26.  Then I walked into another trapdoor and found myself on level 27.  Then after I found the stairs I stupidly went down instead of going up.  Eventually I fought my way back up from level 28 to level 25, only to get cornered by a pair of Umber Hulks, confused, and killed.  Umber Hulks are the worst.

After that game, though, things just fell into place for me.  I had 34 more game after that, and in 25 of them I made it past level 16 (which is where the game starts to get really hairy).  I'm not sure exactly what had changed, except perhaps that I was more engaged and "switched on".  Finding the amulet was a real shot in the arm, and I was playing with a lot more determination and patience, and also a better knowledge of what I needed to win.

I'd like to say that skill was the sole factor in my eventual victory, but to be honest I hit the absolute motherlode in terms of luck and item drops.  I found banded mail armour early on, and several scrolls of enchant armour.  I found a two-handed sword around the mid-levels, and was able to enchant that once as well.  With potions I enhanced my Strength score, and managed to keep a potion of restore strength in reserve so that I'd have that score when it was needed most.  My hit points were good.  And best of all, in defiance of all the odds, I found two scrolls of genocide.

Besides finding the Amulet of Yendor, there's little more exciting in Rogue than getting your hands on a scroll of genocide.  I don't think they're included in the later versions (correct me if I'm wrong).  When you read one, you get to completely wipe a monster from the game.  I never hesitated to wipe out Umber Hulks: their confusion gaze and the near-total lack of agency that resulted made them by far the deadliest monster near the end of the game.  With two of these scrolls, I genocided Umber Hulks and kept the second scroll in reserve.  That way, if any monster type ever looked like killing me I had a guaranteed ace up my sleeve.

As it turned out, I didn't need it.  Without Umber Hulks to worry about, I found that I was formidable enough in battle to survive most situations.  Of the monsters on the lower dungeon levels, only Xorns gave me much trouble.  Vampires aren't all that hard, and Mimics are easily killed after their initial surprise attack (they disguise themselves as other items in the game).  Dragons and Purple Worms are tough, but I never encountered any that were hostile; they just sat motionless while I skirted around them.  I did get level-drained by a Wraith (twice), but that was the extent of my difficulty.  Any other monster that I didn't fancy fighting hand-to-hand I bumped off with my wands of drain life (which drain half your current hit point total and deal that as damage to the target).  I descended to level 26, found the Amulet of Yendor, and got back up to the surface with only minor difficulties.

I have to say that on the way back, once I got to level 15 or so, I felt great.  By that point I'd left the really tough monster behind, and all that were left were things like Centaurs, Quasits, Orcs, Hobgoblins, etc.  Victory was assured, and it was kind of like taking an extended victory lap while I murdered a whole ton of monsters that had previously made my life hell.  There are other games that have given me this experience before: Half Life 2 springs to mind, as the souped-up gravity gun near the end of that game makes you pretty unstoppable, and the final battle in Super Metroid is another great gaming moment where it's just about impossible to lose.  More games could stand to go easy on the player in the final stretch, I find it to be a nice end-of-game reward.

Here's my winning character on the cusp of victory:

And this is the inventory I had at that moment:

Just before I left the dungeon, I ate all of my food and drank my last potion of healing. Then, with great deliberation, I unfurled my scroll of genocide and took great pleasure in wiping out every Xorn in the dungeon.  Vengeance is sweet, and unnecessary vengeance is all the sweeter.

So Rogue is done, and I have to say that it's been one of the best experiences I've had with a game on this blog.  Frustrating, yes, and far far too time-consuming.  But unlike other games that have eaten up far too much of the blog's time, I'd quite happily sit down and have another crack at the game right now.  It has problems, but I expect it to do very well on the RADNESS Index.

RADNESS INDEX

Story & Setting: This is one of the categories where this game will fall down the hardest, because the story is absolute nonsense.  The goal of the game is to find the Amulet of Yendor at the bottom of the dungeon, simply so that you can be admitted to the Guild of Fighters.  It's a reward that in no way befits the difficulty of the task in question, and really calls into question the sanity of the hundreds of adventurers I sent to their deaths.  As for the setting, the Dungeon of Doom is a random labyrinth whose rooms and tunnels are represented in ASCII.  Any atmosphere here comes from the game mechanics, and not much else. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Characters and Monsters: There aren't any characters to interact with as such, but it's not that kind of game.  What it does have is monsters - 26 in total - and each of those has its own abilities and behaviour.  From the weak bats that flit about at random to the tough Umber Hulks with their confusing gaze, from the Wraith that drains levels to the Troll that regenerates, this game might have the most well-realised line-up of monsters seen yet, and the most faithful to its Dungeons & Dragons-inspired roots.  Rating: 5 out of 7.

Combat: The core combat here is basic: you simply exchange blows with your enemy until one of you has been killed.  But with the ability to maneuver, and the raft of items available, Rogue has what is probably the most tactical and enjoyable combat to date.  Why exchange blows when you can use a wand of drain life, or a healing potion, or a scroll that teleports you out of the battle entirely?  Like Akalabeth before it, the entire game engine is available during battle, and that opens up a lot of options, but Rogue has far more variables in play, and makes for a much more exciting experience.  My one complaint is that it can be a bit random at times, but that's true of most games of this vintage, and of D&D itself.  Rating: 4 out of 7.

Aesthetics: This is Rogue's weakest point, for sure: it has no sound, and its graphics are entirely represented by ASCII characters.  It's functional, and it does have a certain charm - enough so that the genre inspired by it still frequently uses the same style - but it's still a definite failing.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Mechanics: It's tempting to give this game a very high score here, because everything about it just works.  The monsters, the items, the combat, the exploration... it all melds together into an incredibly tense gaming experience.  It also controls really well.  There are a load of keyboard commands, and some keys do different things depending on whether they're capitalised or not, which you'd think would be terrible.  In practice it works, especially when you get to the point where you no longer need to consult a cheat sheet.  Even so, I feel like the randomisation lets it down.  There are some games where you just can't win, regardless of how well you play, and that's a let down.  Rating 5 out of 7.

Challenge: This is undoubtedly one of the most enjoyably challenging games I've ever played, but it is far too random to score highly here.  In some games, like the one where I beat it, all the items you need fall into your lap.  In others, you get nothing, and limp into the high levels with 30 hit points and not a prayer of victory.  Ideally, you'd stand a chance of winning in every game after mastering its tactics, but that's not the case here.  That's not cool, but at the same time, there's just something about Rogue that kept me coming back and trying again.  Rating: 4 out of 7.

Fun: Despite how futile, random and frustrating it can be, Rogue is a lot of fun.  I think that's because of how open it is: no two games are ever alike, and there's no end to the situations you can find yourself in.  Sure, it sucks to win a hard-fought battle against a Xorn, only to take one step into a trap door, fall down a pit, and get instantly killed by Quasit.  Yes, it sucks when you polymorph a Bat into a Purple Worm and get eaten on Level 1.  But what other games of this vintage allow such variety?  There are plenty of times playing Rogue where my death was inevitable, but I always felt like there was something I could try.  Plus, after nearly 300 games and four months I still feel like playing it. That has to count for something. Rating: 5 out of 7.

Bonus Points: I'm giving Rogue the full two bonus points, for inspiring an entire genre.

The above scores total 25; that score doubled, with the bonus points added, gives a RADNESS Index of 52.  That puts it on top of the CRPG pile, six points ahead of The Game of Dungeons v5.4.  It doesn't crack the top of the overall list though, as Zork is well ahead on 64 points.  At this early stage, though, I feel pretty good about two genuine classics like Rogue and Zork topping the charts on this blog.

NEXT: To be honest, I'm not sure what comes next.  This pandemic situation has me going through some bullshit, and as readers of my other blogs will know I'm currently taking a blogging hiatus.  I'll call it a hiatus for now, because I'm pretty sure that I just need a break, but it's entirely possible that I might not be back.  If that's the case, and this is my final post, I'd like to thank my regular readers, and I hope you've enjoyed what I've been doing here.  I'll still be reading comments on the blog, and I'll be on Twitter (@NPMahney) if you want to get in touch.

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.