Mystery House (1980) thoughts

September 1, 2025September 1, 2025 ~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

Developer: On-Line Systems
Publisher: On-Line Systems
Year: 1980
Genre: Adventure
System: Apple II

I finally played one of the first graphic adventures (the first I know of but I thought “this”very first” was under debate?) and the first game by Roberta Williams and Sierra and: It’s cute.

Mystery House is a text adventure with very basic line graphics where you are locked in a house with other folks and must find some hidden jewels. You start seeing dead bodies showing up and need to figure out who the murderer is and stop them before it’s too late. The actual design of the game is very basic, as you would expect for an adventure on home computers at this time, and you type in commands to walk around the house, find clues and items, and use them to progress elsewhere. It’s a pretty short game where you restart a few times since it relies on learning through failure a little bit but it’s not as cruel about it as a lot of later adventure games. The biggest thing I actually fought with was the parser. Even though it’s incredibly early in the genre’s lifespan, other text adventures already had better parsers at the time. I also found that the graphics also make the game harder since pure text tells you everything you can interact with, this game needs you to guess what the correct object name is to interact with it. Sometimes it’s also just hard to see what you should be trying to use. The game also features a pretty annoying maze. So maybe not a game I would really recommend to folks for the plot but I still had a fun enough time playing something of historical importance. Renga in Blue has a very good writeup of the game and I definitely liked it more than him, but I agree with all of the criticisms of it.

a person laying on the floor that has been strangled with pantyhose

One of the weirdest parts of the game to me is that there is an optional person you may never see, a grave digger named Joe. You can walk to a graveyard outside of the house (so I guess you aren’t actually locked in?) with six graves dug in the yard. If you walk into one of the graves, he buries you alive. But you don’t actually need to see him or go into the grave to complete the game so I have no idea why this screen exists. You can also stab him and kill him, which seems a bit excessive. But he does try to kill you if given the opportunity so I guess he deserves it? It’s all really weird.

It also got a release in Japan a little bit later with some slightly better graphics. I don’t know how the rest of the game or its parser is.

Anyway, glad I played it. It’s dated and simplistic but it’s also short enough that I think if you’re a little generous with the walkthrough to deal with the clunky parser, you might have some fun with the novelty of playing the first Sierra game.

Mystery House is public domain and available for free to download such as the ScummVM website.

Dark Seed thoughts

August 23, 2025August 16, 2025 ~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

Developer: Cyberdreams
Publisher: Cyberdreams
Year: 1992
Genre: Adventure

pixel art of the darkseed box art, showing a cybernetic like face staring at you

Players control Mike Dawson (played by lead designer Mike Dawson) who has a nightmare, while living in his new mansion, of an alien embryo being shot into his head by a machine. While exploring his new house and the town he lives in, he learns of a parallel universe called the Dark World and must stop the aliens that plan on invading our world.

man with a mustache in a run down bedroom

The game features incredible artwork by H.R. Giger that makes it stand out from other adventure games at the time. Unfortunately, this is the only highlight because the actual design of the game is a mess. Mechanically the game is very dated and features an incredibly aggressive timer. If you aren’t doing the right thing at the right time at the right place, you are stuck and must restart the game. Many times you will have no idea that you missed an important step and the game never informs you, leaving you to flail around until you decide to look up what to do in a walkthrough. I am endlessly amused that the game’s main character is played by the lead designer and has the same name as well, but that is not enough to recommend this game. The art of Giger is a wonderful fit for a horror game, but the horror in this game is undercut by Mike Dawson’s performance and his line readings.

pixel art of a man with mustache in a bedroom — Did you know there is also a bootleg NES version of the game?

The lead designer left the industry after this game, deciding to focus on writing for television. Dark Seed was enough of a success that the developers made a sequel without him, leading to the odd situation of Dark Seed 2 being about a man named Mike Dawson, who looks like Mike Dawson from the first game, but is played by someone else.

Dark Seed is unavailable today and will probably be for a while because of the licensing situation with the H.R. Giger estate. My understanding is that Night Dive came very close to working something out with H.R. Giger and then he unfortunately passed away. If you are interested in playing it today, it’s not too hard to find it online using ScummVM or DOSBox.

Dark Seed is available on your favorite abandonware site.

The 7th Guest thoughts

August 21, 2025August 13, 2025 ~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

Developer: Trilobyte
Publisher: Virgin Interactive Entertainment
Year: 1993
Genre: Adventure

pixel art of the box for the 7th guest, showing a house on a hill with lightning in teh background

The 7th Guest was an early cd-rom game that became such a massive hit that it helped lead the cd-rom drive to becoming a common feature of PCs. It’s a first-person adventure game where you play “Ego,” a faceless character who explores a haunted mansion and figures out what has happened by solving puzzles that will reveal cutscenes of ghosts showing what they did when they were alive. Even early on in development the developer and publisher knew they were making something big. The game was originally proposed to the CEO of Virgin Games, Martin Alper, by Rob Landeros and Graeme Devine. Martin was impressed and “fired” them so they could found their own company, Trilobyte Games, and focus completely on the game instead of letting company politics get in the way. The game was technologically groundbreaking in many ways and was being talked about by others in the industry at conventions and pitch meetings. Sierra On-Line talked to the developers about publishing the game at one point and when Myst was being pitched around, the developers were asked if they could make something that would look as good as The 7th Guest. The GROOVIE game engine allowed continuous streaming of data from CD-ROM and it was the first adventure game to have 640×320 graphics with 256 colors.

inside of a dark mansion with stairs going up to a second floor

While the game was ahead of its time when it was released, it’s a little hard to recommend now. Conceptually the game isn’t a bad idea, you wander around a haunted house and do puzzles, and successfully completing a puzzle means being rewarded with some fun FMV. Unfortunately many of the puzzles you are required to do require lots of trial and error, or they’re just not fun to do. I don’t think the maze puzzle in the basement is quite as poorly designed as its reputation says it is, but even once you figure out how to get the solution it’s still incredibly tedious to solve because of the slow walking animations between each scene transition. The slider puzzles in the game aren’t too difficult either but are also an incredibly boring puzzle style. I think that’s the main issue with the puzzle design, not all of them are incredibly difficult but even a lot of the ones that are solvable are just boring. There’s still a few gems in the game, such as the famous cake puzzle where you need to divide a cake into equal sizes with the same number of pieces. Many of the puzzles were pre-existing ones from previous sources like puzzle books, explaining why they’re almost all standalone. I don’t think this is necessarily an issue though. Both the Puzzle Agent and Professor Layton series have self-contained puzzles and are a lot of fun. So the idea works, it just needed some better puzzles in places and snappier movement for the other puzzles that relied more on trial and error.

The parts of the game outside the puzzles are very charming though. When the FMV was being created, it resulted in video with a blueish aura around everyone and at a lower fidelity than expected, but this resulted in choices being made for the game’s design that I think ended up benefitting it. The developers had to pivot fully to it being a ghost story and the lower quality video meant the actors had to do bigger performances that give the game a camp appeal. The cutscenes are there to advance a story, but it’s a pretty thin story and really just an excuse to see awful people doing bad things to each other. It’s technically a horror game but the cutscenes are schlocky enough that it keeps the game from being scary, which I’m fine with. Robert Hirschboeck is a lot of fun to watch in his over the top performance as the evil Stauf and his scenes in this game are the highlight of the franchise. The soundtrack by George “The Fat Man” Sanger remains a classic and probably what he is still known best for, which is impressive considering that he also contributed the soundtracks to games like Wing Commander and Putt Putt Saves the Zoo.

a ghost wearing a green dress in a bedroom

The game was a massive success when it was released, both critically and commercially, and was responsible for many cd-rom drives being sold. The success kicked off a franchise that is still going today with various ups and downs and even survived the developer Trilobyte going under. Even though the game is a little hit or miss for me in the design department, I would still maybe recommend it if you’re ok with having a walkthrough next to you to get through some of the more annoying puzzles. There’s still some really fun puzzles in here, the soundtrack is great, and the FMV is entertaining too. I would probably recommend going with the original version of the game, which is supported by ScummVM. There’s a remastered version but reviews seem to have various minor issues with it. Fans should also look up the Philips CD-i version of the game. It features higher quality video of the transition animations but also seems to be missing music in some spots.

A few years ago there was a VR-only remake of The 7th Guest which reimagined the entire game with new puzzles, mansion design, and FMV. I haven’t played it yet but it seems to have received positive reviews and it’s lovely to see that the game is being kept alive by interesting new takes on the idea.

The 7th Guest is available on DOS, CD-i, Mac OS, Windows, iOS, Android, OS X, Linux, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5

Phoenix Springs

August 20, 2025August 9, 2025 ~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

Developer: Calligram Studio
Publisher: Calligram Studio
Year: 2024
Genre: Adventure

pixel art of a statue bust for the phoenix springs box art

Phoenix Springs is a neo-noir point-and-click adventure game where you play as a woman in search of your missing estranged brother. I knew very little about this game going into it, other than it being developed over a long period of time, but picked it up based on really liking the art and it ended up being one of my favorite adventure games from 2024. It’s hard to explain more about the story, partially to avoid spoilers but also because it’s a very surreal story told in a non-traditional way, but I actually liked that a lot. I was talking about the game on Mastodon and Andrew Plotkin (who liked the game) described the game as “Philip K. Dick took the good acid,” which I think is a good description of the game’s story. Some people on Steam were critical of not full understanding the story but I liked that.

Since the game is a detective story, the game has a really interesting mechanic where you are basically using ideas and memories as inventory items. I loved that you’re using these “items” in a way that you would like an inventory item. There’s a lot of interesting side investigations as well that don’t advance the main plot but do reveal more about the world. There’s also a lot of red herring thoughts that aren’t used and get crossed out once you’re out of an area that is no longer relevant.

If I do have any criticisms, I do thing the last section of the game is too big and aimless. I had felt like I was doing the adventure game thing where I just try every item on everything and repeating that a bit. It was a little frustrating since the rest of the game moves as a pretty fast pace. The game even includes a builtiin walkthrough which I think is nice.

I think the voice acting also deserves a shoutout. It’s all narrated by the same woman and it has kind of a more deadpan or monotone delivery, but it works really well. Even the dialog from other characters is voice acted from the viewpoint of the main character.

I just think it’s a really solid mystery and think it’s worth a look if you want an adventure game that is willing to experiment a bit more.

Phoenix Springs is available on Steam, GOG, and Fireflower Games.

Morph Girl

August 12, 2025 ~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

Developer: Autumn Knight
Publisher: Autumn Knight
Year: 2017
Genre: Adventure

pixel art for the cover of morph girl, showing a hand reaching out of a bath tub

Morph Girl is an FMV game inspired by 90/00’s Japanese horror movies such as Ringu. You play as Elana, a widow who is unable to move on following the loss of her wife to cancer one year ago. A supernatural being resembling her wife begins to force itself into her daily life and the decisions you make during the game determine if she embraces or rejects the creature. It’s the first game by Autumn Knight, who later worked on D’Avekki’s game Dark Nights with Poe and Monroe as an editor and game tester.

photo of a room with a woman in it and a messy bed with a menu of things to look at on the left side

It maybe lacks the production values that a FMV game by a larger studio would have but it’s an interesting game and I enjoyed the writing. Sadly it’s rare for queer relationships to be depicted in FMV games so it was nice to see a game entirely about one. I was confused by how some of the choices led to various endings. I did get a little frustrated by the inability to skip previously seen scenes too, especially in a game that needs multiple playthroughs to see all the endings, but I appreciated that the playthroughs were only 30 minutes long so it was easy to see it all and repeat scenes weren’t a big deal. Despite my criticisms, I had a good time with the game and appreciate that it explores themes that are unfortunately rarely seen in adventure games.

Morph Girl is available on Itch.io and Steam.

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch

August 7, 2025August 4, 2025 ~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

Developer: House of Tomorrow
Publisher: Netflix
Year: 2018
Genre: Interactive Movie

bandersnatch box art pixel art cover of a guy and a spiral laid over his head

Bandersnatch is an interactive episode of Black Mirror where viewers make decisions at key points to determine the outcome of the story. The episode is about a young man who is developing an adaptation of a novel but feels he is starting to lose his grip on reality as he develops the game. Through various points in the story you are offered a choice between two options and each one will lead you down a different branch. I wasn’t very impressed with the options offered and felt very railroaded during the whole thing. That’s probably part of the point of this thing and the story it’s telling, but it also just kinda meant I became bored with the idea of it all pretty quickly. Often when people criticize Black Mirror, it’s for making really basic statements like “what if technology was bad?” I don’t think this is always the case but it certainly felt like it with this episode, while feeling very smug at the same time. I’m not a fan of Black Mirror in general though so this may have been something I was never going to enjoy. There are many other games that do a much better job having meta commentary about choice in games that you can play instead. However, it does get some points for the Jeff Minter cameo.

I guess it doesn’t really matter that much about how I felt about this game. It was delisted earlier this year and as of this writing, I don’t believe any of Netflix’s interactive movies are available anymore. It’s a big shame because I’m not opposed to the idea of them and I heard some of them were good, but Netflix will dip its toes into games and then get distracted and decide it’s not really worth the focus. It feels like they’re going through something similar with their mobile games offering and dropping a bunch of games from their service on there as well. I can’t imagine it helps that no one knows Netflix even offers their games.

It’s not all doom though. People have figured out how to preserve these interactive movies and with some searching online, you can find the preservation efforts pretty easily. Even though I didn’t enjoy Bandersnatch very much, I’m glad it was preserved and will be available for people to check out for years to come.

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is no longer available on Netflix but is easy to find through your favorite search engine.

Indie Game Roundup (August 1, 2025)

August 1, 2025August 1, 2025 ~ mpklamerus ~ 1 Comment

Since I skipped doing this last week, this is going to be an entry that is both huge and also missing a lot of stuff so apologies in advance for that. I’m probably not going to talk about a lot of bigger things like the new Ninja Gaidan because I don’t even know if those things qualify, but feel free to reply with whatever things you’re excited about. If you have time, help fight against the delistings of games by calling in to payment processors. You can also play this Game Boy game on Itch for more information.

The Video Games

person in a dungeon and text saying "you feel afraid"

The Chambers Beneath is now available! I think I mentioned this one in a previous blog update but I’ll mention it here too. It’s a new roguelike for DOS that I got to beta test and I think it’s very good. The game is available as Pay-What-You-Want on Itch.io and the developer’s site. I’m not good at it (I’m always awful at roguelikes) but it was very easy for me to pick up and get going in this one.

INSERT/DATE/HERE is a short browser game about the genocide in Gaza on Itch.io and the amount of deaths that have happened so far.

Draw a Fish is a browser game where you draw a fish, see how accurate of a fish it is, and then have it swim with other fish people have drawn.

a view of an empty room with a table, dartboard, and bottles on a shelf

No Signal (Itch.io/Steam) is a first person adventure game about exploring an abandoned space station and learning about what happened to the crew.

Dead Take is a new horror adventure game on Steam. I know nothing about it other than it has FMV so it automatically goes in this post.

a little robot saying to another "I love how you can fly a little bit"

Mishina (Steam) is a digging game by the folks that made Judero and it’s filled with tons of great stop-motion animation.

Heartworm (Steam) is a horror game inspired by classic games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill with optional tank controls.

Sunken Stones (Steam) is a turn based puzzle-strategy game about pirates and cursed treasure. If you want to try the game out first, there’s a demo on Itch.io.

drawing of a rabbit in a chair saying "Go away! I'm having tea! I'm British!!"

The Manhole from Memory (Glorious Trainwrecks link) is an attempt to recreate the classic Cyan game The Manhole entirely from memory inside of Decker.

Co-op Kaiju Horror Cooking (Steam) is the newest game by Strange Scaffold, folks I’m always excited to see new games by. It’s a co-op horror game you are medieval monks and must feed giant monsters, so I guess it’s what it says on the tin, as British people would say. I refuse to call this friendslop because slop is supposed to have chunks of things in it.

Time Flies (Steam) is an adventure game where you have a limited amount of time as a fly to do a variety of goals and features some great looking 1-bit art.

The Tabletop RPGs

Playlist Dungeon is a dungeon crawling ttrpg that is designed to be quick to pick up and play for 1-4 adventurers and one DJ, with the character creation process being based on playing songs. It’s available as Pay-What-You-Want on Itch.io

Underneath (Itch.io) is a solo cave mapping game of the unexpected things you encounter underground using a map, journal, and dice. Just got this one from backing the kickstarter and I’m so excited to play it.

Devil’s Hideout

July 21, 2025July 12, 2025 ~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

Developer: Cosmic Void
Publisher: Cosmic Void
Year: 2024
Genre: Adventure

a man and a woman talking at night outside of a hospital and the man saying "this hospital is strangely silent for a medical facility"

Devil’s Hideout is a short horror point-and-click adventure by Cosmic Void about a woman searching for her missing sister, after discovering that cultists faked her death. While it’s in the horror genre, I feel like it’s going for more of a schlocky 80’s horror film that you would find on VHS at your local video store. That probably sounds like a criticism of the game but I absolutely loved that it had that feel. It never scared me but the vibes are very good and fun. I think the excellent pixel art and the colors used in the art help contribute to this mood and if you’ve played Cosmic Void’s games before, you won’t be surprised that the art in this is good.

If anything, I wish it had pulled away even more from trying to be scary. There’s a few points where it tries to do jump scares but these didn’t work for me and the atmosphere in the game was already very good.

The plot in this is pretty straightforward but I didn’t have an issue with that at all. I wouldn’t have minded if it was longer and had more time to develop characters, but it’s a smaller budget game and I was perfectly fine with the length, which took me about three hours to complete. It has multiple endings too, which I don’t know if I’ve seen in a Cosmic Void game before, so it took some time to go through both of those as well.

The gameplay is what you would expect from a first-person point-and-click adventure. You go from room to room, grabbing items and using them elsewhere, etc. There’s some pixel hunting that I found frustrating until I realized the game has a hotspot finder, which I always appreciate seeing in adventure games. I don’t think finding the right pixel to hunt is challenging in an interesting way at all and I’d rather not have to go through that. The mouse cursor will also change to a different color when there’s nothing else to say or do with an object is very nice and helps eliminate some of the busy work too. There’s some little mini games in here too like a Blackjack game and variation on the Lights Out puzzle game and while it can be a little silly that have that stuff pop up in an adventure game, they’re easy and add some variety too. I think they were fun.

If I did have any real criticisms of the game, it would be that there’s a few moments where the game is really fussy about how you must interact with things in a certain order before some objects will give you the info you need. Like looking at a painting before clicking on a tv to get essential information from a report. It’s not a puzzle or anything you would really know to do and the only way around it is to just click on everything repeatedly. It’s one of my biggest pet peeves in adventure games so it was a little frustrating to see here.

That gripe aside, I liked the game quite a bit and would recommend it if you’re looking for something with an 80s horror vibe. Cosmic Void’s games have always been very enjoyable to me and this one is no exception.

Devil’s Hideout is available on Itch.io and Steam.

Tex Murphy: Mouselook Edition

July 20, 2025July 20, 2025 ~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

Someone has patched in mouselook controls to Under a Killing Moon! If you’ve ever played the original game, you know that it has kind of a goofy control scheme. I love the game but it takes some time to get used to and can sometimes make it tricky to recommend to people. The post below includes a video of what the patch does and it looks great, but also incredibly weird if you’ve played the original game. But again, probably also a big improvement on what it had before. Nice job!

Neon Hearts City

July 14, 2025July 14, 2025 ~ mpklamerus ~ Leave a comment

Developer: Cosmic Void
Publisher: Dionous Games
Year: 2025
Genre: Adventure

a guy sitting on a rooftop at night with buildings in the skyline all lit up

Neon Hearts City is a short point-and-click adventure game set in a cyberpunk future where you are a private investigator searching for a missing girl, and unfolds into a greater mystery involving androids. I’ve mentioned Cosmic Void’s games on this blog a few times before and how I’m a fan of their games, and I think this is another solid entry in their catalog. It’s just a solid and straightforward point-and-click adventure where you walk around different screens, pick up items, and use them elsewhere to make progress in your story. If you want another one of those in a cyberpunk setting, great, I think this is one worth checking out.

It has great art and music like I’ve come to expect from a Cosmic Void game. It’s what you would hope for in a cyberpunk game, with pixel art of a gritty city at night and the appropriate synth music to set the mood. The voice acting is very nice too and it was fun to see some names I recognize from other adventure games.

Without spoiling too much, I think the mystery itself was good too and even though it does unfold into something bigger, it’s still ultimately pretty low stakes and I always appreciate when games aren’t about you saving the world. The city is being watched by a fascist government that wipes the memories of people they deem criminals, sometimes picking off random people just to fill a quota. I think it’s good that it’s not really about overthrowing them and remains focused on people just trying to survive in that world, and the ending was very satisfying to me.

The game got some criticism in Steam reviews and elsewhere for being too short but I didn’t mind the length at all. It took me two hours to complete and I am perfectly fine with that. I will always support games being shorter if the developers think that is the appropriate length to tell their story. It would have been fun to see more of the world though, since I think the world building was the best part of the game, and maybe more interactivity with the world would have been nice so we could learn more about the setting as we click around and explore. It’s an interesting setting and I wanted to play around in the world a bit more, even if meant more interactions that don’t advance the plot. The game is at its best when it starts to engage more with the world and not just your standard adventure game puzzles. The world building starts to include some weirder stuff towards the end that you don’t see as often in cyberpunk stories, and I hope we’ll get more of this if there’s a sequel or another game set in this world.

If anything, if I did have any criticisms it would be about some of the puzzles. I think the inventory item focused puzzles were fine but you come across a couple riddles and other self contained puzzles that felt like they were there just for the sake of an adventure game needing more puzzles and didn’t really get excited about them.

That said, I enjoyed the game quite a bit and would recommend it to folks looking for a cyberpunk point-and-click adventure, especially if they want one on the shorter side. I don’t know if I need a direct sequel to this game but I’d love to see another game set in this world.

Neon Hearts City is available on Steam and Itch.io