The Addicott Manor

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Genre celebration full of random deaths, July 1, 2019

The Addicott Manor is a choice-based horror game in which you search for treasures in a haunted house. The author put in every standard element of the horror story: you’re breaking into an old, abandoned, isolated, vast building that was built by a merchant who got rich off of selling weapons; the neighbourhood has been troubled by mysterious strangers and missing locals; an incredible storm is about to engulf the area; and when you arrive, the supernatural starts intruding very quickly. Obviously, the game is more interested in revelling in the traditions of the genre than in breaking new ground, but that’s fine. Most of us can enjoy a good genre tale.

Unfortunately, the game’s prose is marred by a large number of spelling and other language errors. Here is a short, more or less random sample:

The feeling of dread is already wearing you down like a mantle. A long lonely howl pierce through the encroaching night.

I suppose you can wear down a mantle if you wear it frequently enough, but it is surely strange to suggest that a mantle wears the wearer down. (To feel the strangeness more acutely, put “coat” in place of “mantle”.) And a howl of course “pierces” rather than “pierce”. A few such errors are forgivable, but The Addicott Manor has rather too many of them.

Once we reach the manor, the game quickly pulls out all the stops. You can die a gruesome death in the first location and meet all kinds of ghosts and other monsters soon after. I’ll admit that I was rather put off by the fact that avoiding death seems to be a matter of pure luck. You will frequently be asked to make choices like this: “There are three identical corridors. Do you want to go left, right, or straight on?” But that’s not really a choice, is it? It’s a guess. But even when the choices are not identical, it does seem to be the case that life and death hinge on information you cannot have in advance – there’s a crazy guy in the building and a fearsome noise outside, do you go in or do you stay outside? (Spoiler - click to show)Turns out the crazy guy is more deadly, but you can only come to know this by, well, trying and dying. After a few deaths of this type, I decided to quit. Playing this game will involve patiently trying out all the possibilities one by one, and I have neither the patience not the inclination to do so. (I also couldn’t find a way to save/restore my games, though the game luckily allows you to undo a move after dying.)

Note: this review is of the original competition version.