Shadows in the Night

On my quest to play old text adventure games to discover lost gems, I have played several very frustrating games. This game was one of the less-frustrating C64 games that I have found so far. The game has a large vocabulary (by ancient IF standards) and has a parser that allows prepositions. The parser does still manage to be frustrating occasionally, but is much less so than most of its counterparts.

In this game, you are enjoined to spend the night in a supposedly haunted mansion. You arrive with your camera to take pictures of evidence of the haunting. The game has a large but logical map and is full of puzzles, mostly of the locked door variety. Although many of the puzzles were readily solvable, a few were obscure enough to send me scuttling to the internet to google a walkthrough (which I have added to the listing for the game). The game also suffers from a bit of logical trouble. For example, you are given an axe at one point in the game, but can only break one particular door. Thus, the player is forced to run around trying the axe against every available obstacle. Likewise, one puzzle is clearly one of balancing an object on a scale, but there seems to be no clue about what the correct object should be, forcing the player to run through the inventory trying objects. The game has a move limit (presented as a time limit) and does have a few instances of instant and unclued death.

That said, the game is more fair than many other old C64 games. Although there is little to recommend it to players other than the nostalgia of playing an old C64 game, it is one of the better games to turn to for a nostalgic game that won't make you tear your hair out in pure frustration.