Willy's Manor

(This review is an edited version of one originally posted to my blog during IFComp 2025)

Willy's Manor is a good-natured puzzling-in-a-house parser adventure, no more and no less. The blurb's concept of the PC being a producer for a TV show called Celebrity Houses is the game-unimportant excuse to subject them to a test organised by novelty-manufacturing eccentric Willy in Willy's extravagant manor. In other words, you enter the manor and solve all the adventure game puzzles inside. Willy has a box which dispenses lightly riddly questions whose answers are objects. Put your object-answer in the box, pull the lever and see if you're right to get the next puzzle. It took me about fort-five minutes to complete the game using the in-game HINT command seven times. There are some typos, it lacks proofreading polish, and sports the odd non-critical bug, but it works.

The character of Willy is built up during play in his absence. There are lots of photos in his house showing moments from his life that either amused him or were important to him. These include shaking hands with the president of the USA and laying out whoopee cushions. Other notes and books and bits and pieces pay out anecdotes about the man. He comes across as a thoroughly nice and quite nostalgic chap, a simpler Willy Wonka without any dark bits. So while it's his house that's supposed to be the subject of the PC's interest, it's really Willy's life that the player seems to be analysing during the course of the puzzling. I don't recall the game specifying Willy's age, but it does all feel like an exercise in looking back in fondness. Ultimately it felt good in its emotion to me, if in danger of being a little cloying on the way.

The game is not technically a limited-parser one but it is one of those that lists all the commands you might need in its HELP section. It doesn't exploit a wide range of actions, sticking to the basics and adding a few custom ones. The in-game graded hints can be called on generally or in relation to specific items, and worked well for me. A couple of times, one of them in the case of a word riddle, I continued to enter HINT until I got the explicit answer.

I'm not sure the manor is as bizarre as the blurb suggests. There's definitely one fantastic section you'd not find in a house, but otherwise it's mostly traditional rooms and halls. It pays to EXAMINE everything. A lot of items don't appear until the PC first notices them. Most puzzles involve you observing the quality of some item and matching it to the riddle answer Willy's box is asking for at the time. A few puzzles in the fantastic section involve more elaborate work, and actually I kicked myself in this area for not being more observant of the environment. I felt I spoiled a good puzzle mechanism with the hints; I blame IFComp haste.

The very last puzzle exasperated me a little as it relies on the player having either a good memory of details of their game, long scrollback that they can review, or a transcript. After wracking my brain I was able to extract from it the needed data. There is a satisfaction in the last room in reviewing Willy's various nostalgic memories, this scene amplifying the overall theme of the game.

Willy's Manor is a little rough-edged and the prose isn't remarkable, but there are lots of puzzles and some good puzzles. The indirect focus on the character of Willy adds an angle to distinguish this arbitrary-puzzling-in-a-house game from the many similar ones out there.

This is a parser game set in an eccentric older man's joke-filled house using traditional parser game play (i.e. taking items and using them in places, unlocking doors with keys, etc.) and riddles.

The map itself is fairly small, but hides a lot of details. I had to use the hints at one point because I completely missed an important piece of furniture. I used it again a couple of times when I couldn't guess the solution to a puzzle involving a tree and a different one with books.

The main gameplay cycle is to go to a clue room, push a button to get a clue describing an item, find the item, put it in a box, and pull a lever. This gives you a new item like a key or a useful tool that allows you to progress to the next clue.

Most of the items seem kind of random, but the main themes that I saw were household items, puns, and the memories of Willy's life. I liked the way the very end pulled everything together.

There could be some improvements in the game. A lot of the items are listed in the room description and at the end as well; this can be avoided by either putting brackets around the item name in the room description (like 'you see a [cabinet] here') or by making the items 'scenery', or by adjusting their default description like:

A box is in the side room. "You see a strange box on the floor."

I didn't notice any bugs. It was a bit strange to have to (Spoiler - click to show)physically grab the ants and termites out of their jars and shoot them in a slingshot or put them in a box. I think in such a pun-filled house it could have been fun to have a little more description for some things. Overall, though, this is a solid game and I found it pleasant to play with little frustration (outside of running to the hints).

Last year, I was disappointed when the premise of this author’s previous game, Warm Reception, didn’t turn out to much survive the prologue: the idea of a medieval gossip columnist covering a royal wedding is all sorts of fun, so I couldn’t help pine for what might have been when the game quickly revealed itself as a puzzlefest where you romped across a wacky, uninhabited castle. But that means this year I was happy to see that the protagonist’s notional job as a reality-TV producer fell just as quickly by the wayside, as Willy’s Manor is similarly a puzzlefest where you romp across a wacky, uninhabited mansion.

Warm Reception wasn’t especially sophisticated but it had enthusiasm and charm, and that’s another thing it has in common with Willy’s Manor. Structurally, you need to solve a series of clues (notionally, this is a test a novelty-company magnate has set for you before he’ll agree to being featured on your show, which is at least a new one) by depositing the answer to a riddle into a box in order to get the next clue, and occasionally a key opening up a new area of the house. Most of the riddles are pretty straightforward, both because the game isn’t especially large, and because they tend to the hoary – the old “what do the poor have but the rich lack” one gets trotted out. And that final coat of polish is conspicuously absent: beyond a fair number of typos, items are sometimes still mentioned in descriptions after you take them, there are a lot of default responses that don’t fit the tone of the game, and some obvious synonyms remain unimplemented.

Still, I didn’t come across any flat-out bugs, and there is that charm I mentioned. The eponymous Willy is a devotee of slapstick and awful puns, and while none of them are laugh-out-loud funny, the corniness of the “full moon” you see above a skylight is easy to enjoy. It also turns out that there is an actual connection between the answers to all the riddles, one that’s surprisingly sweet – though of course that sweetness has only a few moments to linger before hitting a final silly joke. The game also gets a little less simple towards the end; the last major location you unlock has a reasonably sophisticated gimmick to it, and plays host to some more satisfying puzzles that take a little bit of thinking to solve (though admittedly one of these, involving (Spoiler - click to show)entering a pond with no indication that that’s possible or desirable, is under-clued). And the late-game “liebrary” is legitimately clever without being overly complicated.

Am I over-estimating the game’s virtues out of relief that I didn’t actually have to think about reality TV during its running time? Possibly, but while Willy’s Manor is doing things a million small comedy-parser games have done before, it does them with a sincere smile, and that’s worth something – and so too is the fact that it’s a clear improvement over its predecessor. Let’s see, maybe next time out the protagonist can be an investment banker, and we might be entering modern-classic territory.