External Links

Download from itch.io
Windows Application (Windows XP and later)

Have you played this game?

You can rate this game, record that you've played it, or put it on your wish list after you log in.

Playlists and Wishlists

RSS Feeds

New member reviews
Updates to external links
All updates to this page

The Arkham Abomination

by catventure

2021

Web Site

(based on 5 ratings)
3 reviews

About the Story

"THE ARKHAM ABOMINATION" (aka: "The Vileness Under The Henge")

An interactive 'Lovecraftian' horror fanfic story.

Author: catventure ©2021.

A free, short, offline, downloadable, parser-based text adventure for PC Windows Only. (XP and above; 32/64bit) - English language.

Written using the "Thinbasic Adventure Builder" (TAB)

This adventure game is text only and of the traditional sort. It is similar to the old Infocom/Magnetic Scrolls/Level 9 type which were popular in the mid 1980`s.

There are no graphics, sfx, or animations in this adventure game. However, there is a background music which can be turned on or off. Music credit: courtesy of Eric Matyas

This adventure game is my submission to the ParserComp 2021 game jam

[I didn't manage to expand on this fanfiction game as much as I wanted to before the deadline - so still a work in progress and not meant to be an official release - but it is quite playable and solvable]

You play Stu Troughton, a retired enquiry agent from Dunwich. You arrive in Arkham because of your concern for a great friend, Clark Ashton, a journalist from the "Arkham Advertiser". Clark suddenly up and disappeared about a week ago. Passing strange! The local police have been unable to trace him and have reached a dead end with their investigation. Seems there's an ongoing public health crisis here; a strange epidemic that has left dozens of tumour-ridden and mutated patients in hospital and an unusual number of Arkhamites ill with symptoms of nausea, vomiting and bleeding.

Can you find your missing friend, put an end to epidemic caused by dark forces that have infiltrated the surrounding countryside and well... erm... simply survive!?

You score points for overcoming obstacles, solving problems or making progress. A perfect score is 50 points. You may find it helpful to make a map and keep notes.

The game understands the standard adventure commands.


Run the "arkham.exe" application and the adventure will load.

**Special Note: When starting the program it is possible that some virus checkers may produce a "false-positive" warning. You may need to tell your antivirus software to create an 'exception' for the game app in order to allow it to run**

HOW TO PLAY
You give instructions and communicate with the program by typing in commands at an input prompt in the lower textbox in response to a prompt such as: "What now?" A flashing cursor indicates that the game is waiting for you to type a valid command in and then press <RETURN> or <ENTER> to confirm your input . You can type in upper or lower case or a mixture of both.

The locations in the game also list the exit directions you can move to. (unless its dark) To move about in the game world simply type in a compass direction or its equivalent abbreviation eg:

>go north

>west

>se

You may also be able to travel in or out and up or down too.

To see what objects you own or may be carrying or wearing check your inventory whenever necessary by typing in eg:

>inventory

Input commands usually consist of a verb and a noun eg:

>get rope

although longer phrases will sometimes also be accepted and may need to be typed eg:

>tie the rope to the tree

It's essential to examine (or x) things you see or encounter such as objects, characters or even game scenery to get further information or perhaps a hint or clue eg:

>examine trees

>x fisherman

The parser is fairly sophisticated and will accept multiple commands so you can type things like:

>get rope, tie rope to tree. up then examine the knife and then go down

as a single input and the game will process each command one at a time consecutively if it can do.

Multiple Input commands are separated by "and", "then", "and then", a comma (,) or a full stop (.) as shown above.

The parser also understands "it" and "them" which works on the last noun typed eg:

>get rope, examine it then drop it

or perhaps:

>get rope

>examine it

The parser understands ALL or EVERYTHING but this only works with the verbs get, drop, wear, remove or examine on portable objects eg:

>get all

>examine everything

The parser understands ALL EXCEPT or ALL BUT but this only works with the verbs get, drop, wear, remove or examine on portable objects eg:

>get all except the rope and knife

>drop all but the box

You may be able to get objects from or put objects in a container type of object eg:

>put rope in rucksack

>get knife out box

You may be able to see into a container object if it is open and its contents are viewable eg:

>look inside the rucksack

>look into box

>look in rucksack

You can examine/search objects you find, scenery items in a location or NPC's (Non Player Characters) you may meet eg:

>examine the jar

>exam boat

>x farmer

>look at the tree

You might need to converse with a Character in the game eg:

>talk farmer

>talk to guardian

>ask farmer about <thing/person>

You might want to give or offer something you possess to a particular character eg:

>give the knife to the professor

There are other useful verbs which the game recognizes, but it is left to the player to discover these by himself/herself.

look/l/r - redescribes current location, exits, objects visible etc.

examine/x/look at - inspect, examine a thing or person

search <thing> - same as examine

get/take/pick up <obj> - pick up an object

drop/put down <obj> - place an object down in the current room

wear <object> - wear something if it is a wearable item

remove <object> - remove an already 'worn' item

i/inv/inventory

inven/list - list objects being carried and worn

exits - show visible exits available (unless it's dark)

again/g - repeat previous command

quit/q/stop - asks if you are sure you want to quit

restart - start adventure from beginning

replay - restart adventure without intro

help - help commands summary

info - system command summary

wait or z - let a turn pass

undo - go back one move

load/restore - file requester to load a previously saved game position

save /store - file requester to save current game position

quicksave/qsave/qs - save without file requester (temporary)

quickload/qload/ql - load in a previous qsave'd file position

score - show points scored so far out of 50

sound off - halt music playing

sound on - resume playing music

transcript on - create a text file to log the game

transcript off - stop logging game to text file

I have tried to make the game user friendly and respond to various player commands and also to be helpful should the player type in wrong, incorrect or nonsensical input. It is not really a big game and there aren't too many puzzles to solve in it but you may have to *think* a little to finish the quest successfully. I sincerely hope you have fun playing it and I am happy to receive comments, feedback, bug reports etc.

Credits:
Thanks for permission to base this adventure on a scenario by Jo Kreil at: http://cthulhureborn.com

Thanks in advance to all playtesters of the game.

A special thank you to Jason Nicholls (Elven Adventurers) for coding ideas.

This game is a private entry for competition purposes as part of the parsercomp2021 game jam so please don't spread into public domain generally. If time permits, and there is sufficient interest, I hope to release a more robust final version available after the jam ends - Thank you.


Game Details


Awards

14th place - ParserComp 2021

Tags

- View the most common tags (What's a tag?)

(Log in to add your own tags)
Tags you added are shown below with checkmarks. To remove one of your tags, simply un-check it.

Enter new tags here (use commas to separate tags):

Member Reviews

5 star:
(0)
4 star:
(3)
3 star:
(1)
2 star:
(1)
1 star:
(0)
Average Rating:
Number of Reviews: 3
Write a review


3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Abominably fun, July 9, 2021
by Mike Russo (Los Angeles)
Related reviews: ParserComp 2021

Arkham Abomination doesn’t put its best foot forward – a custom-parser game with no testers listed and a readme that’s actually titled “for testers” is spookier than any eldritch horror, and the fuzzy icons and garishly-colored text that greet you on booting up left me quaking in dread. Happily, it quickly shakes this negative first impression and serves up a quality bit of Lovecraftiana. If you’re burned out on the subgenre, it’s not doing anything novel enough to shake you out of your ennui, but it’s a well-crafted, well-written romp through the dark woods of Arkham Country with only a few flies in the ointment (or rather, mi-go in the slimy remnant of some nameless horror?)

Much of this is down to how it nails the Lovecraft style – and not in a “anyone with a skin tone slightly darker than ecru is a degenerate villain” way, thankfully, but by offering up prose that’s dizzyingly dense with recondite adjectives and ominously-overdescribed landscape. Here’s the opening location, for example:

"I am on a twisty trail west of old Arkham town. Looking around I see the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep, dark woods. I turn and see dark narrow glens where trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight. On the gentler slopes I spot a few deserted farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages dilapidated and vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs."

Some of this is word-for-word Lovecraft (“…the hills rise wild”) but the rest of it could easily be. Or take this description of the not-at-all-suspicious monoliths at the edge of town:

"Occasionally, through gaps in the trees, the sky silhouettes with especial clearness a queer circle of tall stone pillars upon which a large grassy hill in the distance is crowned."

It’s awkward sometimes, but sure, that’s the point. And all of this excessively-detailed scenery is implemented, every gambrel roof and narrow glen of it. In a sea of Lovecraft-alikes that nick the fish-men but present their stories in the same flat prose you’d use to recount a trip to the supermarket, Arkham Abomination stands out by adopting the style as well as the substance.

The plot itself is also cannily chosen, as it’s riffing off a specific Lovecraft story, but not one of the over-used ones like Dunwich Horror or Shadow Over Innsmouth (Spoiler - click to show)(we’re looking at the Colour Out of Space, here). The classic setup has you visiting a threatening village, looking for a missing friend who was trying to get to the bottom of a strange wave of sickness that’s laid many of Arkham’s citizens low. The shape of what’s happened is pretty obvious from early on, at least if you’ve got much familiarity with HPL’s oeuvre, but going through the steps of the investigation is a pleasure, with clues that logically connect one to another and a detailed but not overly-large game world. The readme implies this is an adaptation of a pen-and-paper Call of Cthulhu scenario, and if that’s right it does a good job of translating an RPG story into IF form.

There are only a few puzzles, most of which are pretty well prompted and pleasing to work through – light sources to use to illuminate darkened areas, makeshift ropes to discover, mazes to explore, and so on – and appropriately enough for a CoC scenario, it all ends in fire and explosions. The last major puzzle of the game was occasionally frustrating, though – it requires stealing some items from a half-crazed, randomly-wandering farmer, and avoiding the death-by-shotgun he visits upon you if he notices your thefts requires a lot of reloading, as UNDO won’t take you past the barrier of death. The puzzle is also a little fiddlier than it should be, due to some commands that work in earlier scenes not behaving quite the way you’d expect them to in this sequence – it’s not awful by any means, but in a game without hints or a walkthrough, it’d be unfortunate if these niggles put players off from finishing (if you are feeling stuck, this thread might get you going again).

To close with a word about implementation, Arkham Abomination is yet another example of a well-made custom parser that’s made me reconsider my previous negative feelings about such things. Modulo that UNDO inconvenience mentioned above, it has all the features a modern player would expect, and it understands basic actions in a completely transparent way. Besides a few small bugs (sometimes X FOO would result in “I X the foo…” before printing the description instead of the usual “I examine the foo…”), the only real complaint I had is that much like in Somewhere, Somewhen, it’s hard to look at or interact with objects in containers, even open ones, without first retrieving them (is there something in the water making custom-parser authors think players want to fiddle about with containers in this anal-retentive way?)

Does the world need another Cthulhu scenario, or another custom text-adventure engine? Probably not, but Arkham Abomination demonstrates that you can have a lot of fun with such things nevertheless, so long as the craft is there.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A windows parser Lovecraftian game with compact story, August 1, 2021
by MathBrush
Related reviews: about 1 hour

This game is an interesting mix of skill and rough edges. I'm going to review it on my five-criteria scale:

-Polish: The game could use a bit more polish, especially in the area of synonyms and responses. A lot of art is in error responses, to guide you towards the correct phrasing. I was told repeatedly I couldn't (Spoiler - click to show)tie a vine to different things, only later to find that I had to call it (Spoiler - click to show)a creeper, not a vine. That's not so odd, but the error messages all implied that the problem was the action, not the noun. There are similar issues later on, with a lot of people having trouble with the final actions of the game.
+Descriptiveness: The game is lushly descriptive. I could quite clearly picture everything in the game outside of the mazes.
-Interactivity: The frustrations of the parser took this one down for me. Otherwise it's honestly not bad. There are mazes and combinations but they're all solved easily for you. The better parts of the interactivity are all the little hidden details that reward your actions. The worse parts are instant deaths with no undo :(
+Emotional impact: Despite the many frustrations, I'm a fan of Lovecraftian horror, and I thought the core of this was well done.
-Would I play again? Not until it's souped up a bit more.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Spooky, July 3, 2021

It's a spooky Lovecraftian game, a bit overwritten. ("The vacant church is in a state of great decrepitude" could be "is decrepit.")

Once you find the first body, it's not clear why you'd hang around town rather than fleeing.

The game has mazes, but they're combination locks, where you find directions from point to point; they're not meant to be solved in the traditional way by dropping items. I still don't love that; I'd prefer a "go to happy cow farm" command, where you can only go there once you have directions.

It's a pity that it only works on Windows; I don't see anything about this game that wouldn't work just as well (or better) in Inform.

The music only 45 seconds long, and looping, which gets annoying pretty quickly.

No rating; I haven't finished yet.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 




This is version 4 of this page, edited by kaemi on 3 August 2021 at 9:03pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page