Kingsley's Mansion

This is a ghost story with an interesting premise, if not a particularly original one (house appears once a year containing a ghostly family murdered by the patriarch). It is unfortunately marred by sloppy coding, with umpteen misspellings and other grammatical howlers, combined with annoyingly idiosyncratic design choices. One look at the files will give you an idea of the "make do and mend" approach the author took. There was a mooted sequel which mercifully never saw the light of day. So there was a happy ending.

The parser is diabolical. For starters all player input must be in upper case; odd as the author's coding isn't. Many objects in a location cannot be referred to, or worse, only referred to by a different name to the one chosen by the author. Hence, a "book" lying on a bed cannot be procured by "get book" but only "get bible." Well, why not call it a bible then? "Take" and "drop" are not recognised and examining some objects also needs a different noun to the one the author primarily chose in the location description. A flagrant example is a "picture" which when examined gives a brief response. However "examine portrait" gives a much longer and important reply. This is unacceptable. I spent five minutes trying to pick up a piece of paper. The author describes lingerie and a maid's uniform with a 36C bra, then calls you a pervert for trying to examine it. You dreamed it up mate, not me. Also annoyingly, you find a sharp set of knives which you can't take "because you might cut yourself." Nanny statism is obviously alive and well here. There is a pot that you can't "get" without any apparent reason. You find a key. "Examine key" tells you that the action is illogical; indeed, the ubiquitous "that sounds pretty illogical to me!" response to perfectly valid input occurs so often that it becomes a tiresome mantra very quickly.. Why not something like, "yes, the parser is dreadful, isn't it? Sorry about that."

To be fair, some of the location descriptions are rather atmospheric and the story does unfold if you are masochistic enough to keep fighting against the parser. I do find it slightly odd that a maid's ghost (she has been frenziedly stabbed to death) would worry about you treading dirty footprints across the floor of the mansion's study. Presumably even Mrs. Beeton would have brought down the curtain on the necessity for domestic tidiness in the afterlife.

Many of the game's problems are, as in so many works of this ilk, caused by inflexible parsing, poor design choices and the lack of any evidence of beta or play testing. The author had the kernel of an interesting gothic piece here, but "there is many a slip 'twixt cup and lip." Death takes you back to a DOS prompt and there is no "back", "get all" and even "inventory" has to be typed in full. And in upper case, of course. There aren't even that many puzzles in the game, and they tend to be made harder by the game's structure rather than clever creation. As I say, there is an interesting back story, but there are many better examples of this kind of game out there. As it is thirty-four years old now I imagine the chances of a revised and improved edition are, like the mad doctor, dead.