McMurphy's Mansion

A Scottish fly lands on your nose.....a Scottish bug lands on your left ear....and your right ear....and your chin....and your adam's apple....and well, you get the general idea.

I have always liked the "search a mansion to claim your inheritance" style of text adventure encompassing the whole gamut from Hollywood Hijinx to The Mulldoon Legacy and I had meant to try this DOS and C64 effort for some time. This well-trodden premise has you hunting for twelve gold bars and consequently triggering the end game to claim your $10,000,000 dollar inheritance.

I wish now that I had essayed the C64 version as the DOS effort (played via DOSBox-X) elicits a number of bugs, both harmless and game crashing.

There are no self-inflicted fatal mistakes in the game (beyond the bugs) as any potentially life ending moves merely earn a rebuke regarding your lack of adroitness and a continuation from your current position with your inventory still in your possession. The game ending faux pas are all in the coding, dear boy. It is worth paying attention however to the text dumps during your many quasi demises as clues can be hidden therein.

I arrived at the mysterious Durham Airport in Scotland (erm, Durham isn't in Scotland and doesn't have an airport but we'll gloss over that) and was greeted by the butler. I also encountered a winsome french maid called Gisele who promised to meet me afterwards but never did. At the beginning of the game you are asked if you are a laddie or a lassie; I imagine if you choose lassie then the unreliable french maid is replaced by an unreliable valet or similar. Perhaps he/she planned to abscond with the mcmurphy.dat file, the incorrectly reported absence of which causes the game to crash on a random basis. Some exits also loop to wrong locations and mystifyingly the command "TURN CUBE" occasionally elicits, "There is no bathroom in the mansion," or the even more Daliesque, "Everything has now turned yellow."

Other bugs do however crash the game.

Dorothy Millard's solution doesn't work for the puzzle in the kitchen although whether this is another bug or not I am unsure.

I gave up in the end as too many of the little critters made the game unplayable but if the untried Commodore 64 trope plays more smoothly then the DOS version (it could hardly do otherwise) then the game is worth a play as there is a very good game in here trying to get out, albeit one clad in khaki shorts, pith helmet and clutching a can of insect repellent. Some of the puzzle solutions are very clever and the descriptions are rather evocative.

One of these days I'll have to publish A Wanderer's Guide to the Mansions of TextAdventureLand. I will have to wade through this towering stack of notes and edit them down to a manageable volume though.
Haunted mansions, Alchemist's mansions, Vampire's mansions, mansions left to you in the will of your late (and pleasantly unhinged) uncle,...

McMurphy's Mansion falls in that last category. A pressing telegram urges you to Scotland, where you shall inherit your Uncle McMurphy's estate and 10.000.000 pounds. On one condition...

Find the twelve gold bars scattered around the grounds and solve the final puzzle...

Copyrighted in 1984, McMurphy's Mansion is magnificently old-school.

(EDIT: The original version for C64 was released in '84 or '85. The game was ported to DOS in 1987 and 1989. I played the 1989 version.)

IF conventions were not as firmly established, and this game has its own idiosyncracies regarding commands anyhow.
AGAIN is shortened to R (repeat) instead of G. DROP ALL works, but you have to TAKE FEE, TAKE FI, TAKE FO, TAKE FUM instead of TAKE ALL.
X is short for EXAMINE, as usual. Large objects can be examined immediately, but the game refuses to let you examine take-able items unless you are carrying them.
I works for INVENTORY (no messing with INV), MAP shows you the room layout of the mansion (no map for the outdoors), XMAP turns off the layout and snorts that real adventures make a paper map anyway.

It took a while before I fully put my trust in the game. Opening and looking in cabinets, for example, give responses so dry (contrary to the vividness of the rest of the world) that I was unsure if anything had changed in the underlying world model. It was not necessary to be mistrusting. The game and its engine under the hood are indeed solid.

Uncle McMurphy's will of course is just the pretext to drop the player in an unabashed puzzlefest.
There are a number of code-breaking tasks. These are probably the most logical of the batch. A few puzzles present a surprising application of common sense and everyday physics. A lot more rely on mental associations and not-so-straightforward intuitive leaps.
However, because the game is set in our normal (for an undefined value of the term) non-magical world, even the least logical puzzles have handholds in real life experience.

Most of the progress through the game, finding necessary items, comes from thoroughly exploring and investigating the game-world. And yes, this means copious amounts of LOOKing IN, UNDER and BEHIND stuff. Fortunately, there is no need for lawnmowering every location with these commands. Either it's clear that any curious investigator would look in, under or behind a certain piece of scenery, or a clue found elsewhere will explicitly tell you to do it.

The map itself is a joy to explore. Almost all of it is open from the get-go, allowing you to roam freely around the gardens and the house, noting interesting or questionable features and remembering where the various locations are in relation to each other. (Yes, this will be important.)
Another joyous idiosyncratic implementation feature is the use of L N (or any direction) in a room with a window to get a detailed description of the view. This knits the world together and joins the inside of the house and the outdoors lawns and trees into one continuous space. (It also provides clues. Read carefully, they may appear only once...)
From boldly exploring the edges of the map, it becomes apparent that the author was no big fan of death in adventures. Upon falling from great height (or some other accident), there is a humorous paragraph detailing your injuries and you are brought back to the house. In the original game, the player also got a 1-minute penalty where no commands would be accepted by the game, effectively freezing the protagonist out.

McMurphy's Mansion stands out among its mansionate peers by the liveliness of its world. You repeatedly bump into the butler, whom you also see walking around the yard through the windows. The many trees and flowers provide the pleasant distraction of nature's beauty, and you can even get a glimpse of the nearby moors on the other side of the estate wall, if you look out the right window.

A splendid old school treasure hunt.