Hampton Manor

Hampton Manor was the first of two DOS mysteries authored by Art LaFrana in the early nineties. The intriguing back story has you as a successful horror writer whose literary agent has found you a creepy old house to write your new novel in; the hope is that the environment will encourage your imagination into producing a new best-seller.

As with so many promising but flawed text adventures, the game is let down by a poor parser (home brewed in this case) and illogical puzzle solutions; the number of games made difficult by frustrating parsers must far outweigh those made difficult by clever constructs and "pencil and paper" posers. The game would benefit hugely from a re-write in Inform, for instance. Having said that, it is still worth persevering with as the plot develops (murders, curses and a parallel world become fleshed out as you read a journal and make some grisly discoveries. From the preamble you are made vaguely aware of the grim history contained in the manor; your agent has had a nervous breakdown and the local people won't talk about the place. No matter, the pen is mightier than the monster and what better environment could there be to dream up a thumping good chiller than this sprawling mansion? The first task awaiting you is to find your way in to the place, however...you park your sports car and walk up the pebble drive straight into an M.R. James style nightmare.

The vocabulary and parser are as insubstantial as the skeleton that awaits you somewhere in the house; Mr. LaFrana doesn't seem to go in much for listening to the entreaties of playtesters and adjusting the seasoning much. Any game which relies heavily on object manipulation and exploration yet eschews PULL, PUSH, TURN or EXAMINE is likely to fall well short of player friendliness. Likewise, I soon found myself wandering around with a rope and a shovel, wondering how I could possibly use them in a proactive way (or any way come to that) when the game doesn't parse TIE or DIG. Indeed, I can't think of many games this size (there are a hundred or so locations) with such a small vocabulary, both of verbs and nouns. TAKE ALL is missing and HELP merely provides an address. Even more annoying is the ever present response, "please rephrase that" which implies to me that the idea is good but the wording needs changing. In reality this is often not the case. Just attempting to move in a direction that is unavailable produces this response, as does nearly every other unsuccessful piece of player input. At one stage I was traversing the map kicking every room feature I could to see if it produced a positive result, and it did too often.

The atmosphere is certainly the game's strong suit. From the initial description of the decrepit porch swing which lies in front of the door, its chains rusted through, to the island cemetery where the locals become a bit restless the author builds a coherent and slowly mounting sense of evil and danger. I am usually a fan of games where certain incidents trigger the next part of the story (everything from Rick Hanson to Anchorhead via Andy Phillips' games have used this conceit well, and LaFrana succeeds here too.) An avoidance of games where you have a set number of moves to achieve your goal (something that ruined Infocom's Hollywood Hijinx for me) is to be welcomed. A diary entry from a certain Peter Gray in the game hints at cold being a sign of evil more than the fires of hell, which is an interesting subversion on most people's prejudices concerning the tangible features of the dark side. The manor and its grounds play with this conceit in a very atmospheric way. I also liked the portal to another world section of the game which introduces a science fictional element to the manor's history. Alongside the slow deciphering of the manor's dark history, there is the traditional "gather several objects of a similar nature to perform an obscure rite" feature which is rife in so many games. This part of the game seems too contrived alongside the nuanced plot but at least adds weight to the puzzle based side of the game. The puzzles are often non-intuitive; at least some of them were to me. I needed an object to cross a chasm and was correct in summising what the object was. Placating its guardian however still makes no sense to me, and there are other areas (such as a whining behind a wine rack) which seem to be there as an unmissable opportunity for a pun rather than as a vital area of the game, which it initially seemed to be. This kind of thing is not a good idea if you want to keep your player engaged. Too many puzzle solutions revolve around "KICK object x to find object Y." If I find a grass burial mound, my first (or indeed eighth) instinct would not be to put my kicking boots on.

I would never call this game user friendly; aside from the parser issues described above it is possible to lock yourself out of victory in quite a few ways, both obvious and not. I also managed to solve some of the resurrection sections of the game out of sequence, which meant that I missed some of the back story being fleshed out. In a well designed game of course, this should not happen. Suffice to say there are three set pieces revolving reincarnation and I did them out of sequence through no fault of mine that I can see. At least it wasn't game breaking. Refreshingly there is no inventory limit or lamp timer. There is no help or hint feature as an in game facility. You can break or misuse an item very easily. I also missed a secret passage because I hadn't tried the only verb that worked and had given the area up as not containing a puzzle as a consequence. Manipulate everything in this game. A major parser makeover would render this a rather good mood piece of haunted house horror; as it is the player unfriendliness and lack of vocabulary render it as principally irritating. I would be surprised if many younger players used to the soft conveniences of modern games would have the patience to see this through until the end. I almost didn't.