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Puzzle-galore escape game, February 27, 2024Le Manoir Abandonné is a multi-episode escape game based on the LucasArt game Maniac Mansion, imitating with its images the point-n-click feel. This review continues on the one in the first part.
In the first part, you found yourself stuck inside a manor, and was able to explore the "front" part of the building, with a hallway and a few rooms. During that time, you gets bits and pieces of the former owner of the manor, with hints of a tragic event. This game continues where the previous part left off ((un?)surprisingly you are locked inside this new part), and allows you throughout the game to piece out what happened.
Spoiler for the mystery: (Spoiler - click to show)A brilliant surgeon/doctor loses his wife in a tragic accident. Ridden with grief, he gets in his head that he must find a way to revive her. After many trials and errors, he unearth the body of another young woman who recently died, resembling his wife in some ways, and manages to fulfil his wish... for a few minutes. The revived wife soon turns on her husband and kills him. Still her ghost remains.
This part continues in the same vein as the previous on, in that it is choke-full of puzzles, and different variety at that (as much as a choice-based format allows you). There are many more ways of succumbing to your wrong choices, but the game sends you right back to your previous action (unless this is the last escape bit, when you run out of time, but I'm sure that is a bug). Out of the puzzles included, I liked the putting the torn paper back together, the books in the library, and the unlocking the doors without a key, the most.
Unlike the first part, this game has fewer hints for some of its most important puzzles, forcing you to interact with all of its elements, even if it means dying in the process. It is at times tedious, having to go back and forth between the many rooms because you needed to examine an item multiple times in a row even if it told you there was nothing in the drawer, or finding a key in one section for a door on the opposite side. The frustrating aspect of the game feels very much similar to the old point-n-click games.
It does, however, include a video walkthrough on Youtube.
The horror aspect in this game is cranked up higher, as you start in a hallway with bloody arrows on the many doors and on walls, meet some spectres, have strange visions, and get a few more jump-scares. The ambient sound and sound effects does add to the creepy ambiance.
As for the prose, it follows the tone of the previous part, with its humour and wittiness, playing again on the tropes of the horror genre.
This was a good game and I enjoyed it quite a bit!