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Horror-free amusement for old Eamon hands., September 17, 2011I find myself reviewing this game as a consequence of a series of somewhat stupid events.
There aren't a lot of horror games in the IFDB, and I had pulled up the meagre list of those that there are by searching for the word "horror". From there, I clicked on the link for the game The House of Horrors, thinking, "This will certainly be a horror game. Why, it even has the word 'horror' in its title." The game's homepage revealed it to be an Apple II Eamon Adventure (number 146) from 1987. I am well au fait with Eamon, so I downloaded the game and fired up my emulator, ready to take horror in the face.
I was bemused to discover that The House of Horrors is not a horror game, but actually a satiric sequel to the crappy but infamous (in Eamon circles) porn adventure called The House of Ill Repute, which was the thirty-second Eamon. Ill Repute was set in a brothel, but as per the majority of Eamon adventures, was otherwise about killing everything in sight and then returning to the Main Hall with the loot. The House of Horrors is not pornographic, and has the player re-entering the House of Ill Repute to recover funds stolen from the K.E.C. (Keep Eamon Clean) committee, clearing assorted bats and rats from the premises en route. In other words, your goal is to kill everything in sight and then return to the Main Hall with the loot.
The House of Horrors has a lot of poor spelling, grammar and punctuation, but is still written with gusto, and is also filled with in-jokes at the expense of dungeoncrawling in general and other Eamon adventures in particular. It even manages to demonstrate the nifty features of the Eamon parser by having a poem which appears to be part of a room description turn out to be a series of monsters, each one with the name of one line of the poem. In turn, the appearance of the four corpses (once you've killed the monsters) creates a new paragraph. There are a couple of neat trap surprises as well, and the overall mood is one of non-complex fun.
The House of Horrors didn't have any of the horror I was after, but playing it did turn out to be a happy accident. Still, I'm certainly not recommending that non-Eamonites contemplating visiting old Eamon for the first time start here. You should go with something more renowned or 'normal' first. And probably without all the weird spelling.