Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Mansion of Doom marks our third game from PAL Creations, who we previously saw with Eno and Stalag.

November 1983 ad from The Rainbow.

It also is the last game listed with the CASA Solution Archive from the pair of Leroy C. Smith and Paul Austin. I’d love to thus dump a lot more historical knowledge, but alas, I haven’t turned up much since the letter to the editor last time. I did find out that PAL Creations had an Australian distributor, as seen in this ad from the Australian version of the Rainbow, March 1986:

I found that Jarb Software in Florida (later California) distributed a version of Eno, but only Eno (suggesting that it was PAL’s first adventure). Jarb Software was otherwise an early contributor to the magazine The Rainbow (see September 1981) and they published something in 1983 called The Adventure Creator (not by PAL).

I found that all the Dragon Data games (that is, Eno, Stalag, and this one) were later published by the company Eurohard, translated into Spanish.

I also checked the address PAL used and it is residential San Diego, not in a business location, but other than that, the games are all we have to work from. I don’t know how a relatively obscure company got distribution by Australia, the UK, and Spain.

From World of Dragon.

So let’s turn to Mansion of Doom, which at least makes a solid end to the “trilogy”. We are here to rescue a princess from a vampire.

Just like the other Smith/Austin jams, this game gives a specific list of verbs and mostly sticks to it. (The “mostly” turns out to be a problem, but we’ll get to that.)

This displays whenever you type a not-understood verb.

The style is a bit different here. Rather than many objects jammed into a small set of locations, the map is much more spread out, with some rooms serving as mere connective tissue.

There’s no exit here to go back to town. This becomes a problem.

However, it works out because the game sticks to a rigorous map: three floors aboveground plus an attic, and two floors belowground, where each floor is a 5 by 3 grid with stairs in the middle. The sense you are filling in a map lends a sense of continuity many adventures of this era lack, and the game is able to add anticipation with “gaps” also do a couple “fake-out” moments where it looks like an exit exists which doesn’t work. For example, on the map below showing the first floor, the “rancid room” has a stuck door on the east wall which simply won’t open; you’re supposed to get to the southeast room via passing a snake from the north instead.

The snake we’ll need to pass by later, for reference:

Early on you find a lit candle…

…but when you get to the stairs, the candle gets blown out. There are dark rooms (mostly downstairs, one upstairs in a secret room) and they get lit by a different method, so the “light source” idea is a fake out.

You need to go down a floor to find a power switch. Normally you’d PULL SWITCH or the like but keep in mind the extreme parser limits (GET, DROP, LOOK, READ, QUIT, HELP, OPEN, CLOSE, SHOOT, EXAMINE, INVENTORY). You need to CLOSE SWITCH.

As far as what’s with the funky text there (that’s “lights”), this reflects one of the other game’s canny moves. The game is filled with cryptogram-text which turns out to be “Transylvanian”. For example, here’s a map from the first floor; the text says “sub basement”:

I originally thought the game might be going full cryptogram-solving, but I was able to put together two pieces of information, one from the second floor and one from the third floor.

On the west side of the second floor is a bookcase. LOOK BOOKCASE reveals a math text, but also a secret passage behind the bookcase, leading to a room with a “large mallet”.

To actually read you need to OPEN TEXT first before typing READ TEXT, which reveals Z=0.

On the southeast side of the third floor, there is another bookcase with an almanac and a dictionary. The almanac gives a time for sunset (7:39 PM) which I assume is a time limit, although I never hit it in my gameplay. (Time passes 2 minutes per turn, and there’s a watch on the second floor if you need to keep track.) The dictionary is more complicated, and gives the mappings from A through Z for a full set of 26 symbols.

The math text clue confirms the end symbol is Z.

Now you can start translating cryptograms. For example, just to the north there’s a desk with a “note”.

This is oddly the one that gave me the most trouble, because it starts with a nonsense word (“yorel”) and then there’s two slash symbols (“/”) not in the original code (“w” is the slash the other direction, “\”). The “/” ends up being a space, so the text reads

YOREL CONFINEMENT MAGIC

This is for a moment later (which doesn’t have to happen if you’re already protected!) where Dracula can scoop you up and drop you in confinement, and the word YOREL helps you escape.

Other important messages: on a cross you can find “this plus garlic equals safety”; the garlic is just laying around on the second floor, and indeed if you are carrying both items the vampire won’t snag you, making YOREL not needed.

A sign near where you find the watch says “time backwards”. What this is referring to is a magic potion elsewhere that is marked as “EMIT”, and if you drop it time will reverse back to noon. This gives you extra turns in case you’re short and sunset is approaching (again, I ended up not having to use this in my final run; the main time save is that information given doesn’t change, so you don’t have to re-locate the clue messages on a repeat playthrough).

Consider, now, the first basement level…

…and note the room marked with a “werewolf” and “key”. When you first enter the room it seems like there’s an exit going down, and if you refer back to the map (which talks about the sub-basement, that is, the floor below this one) that makes it seems like all you need to do to reach the goal is to get by the werewolf.

The result of trying to bypass the werewolf, or take the key.

There’s a silver bullet that seemed promising — it worked in Transylvania, anyway — but in Transylvania, where I started with a firearm and had trouble finding a bullet, here the game does the reverse. I scoured everywhere for a gun, and the only reason I didn’t resort to weird and improbable actions is that the game only understands a handful of verbs. I finally gave up and loaded the binary file, to see if there was any plaintext that would help, and my eye caught one about the attic.

I hadn’t mucked with the attic much, since OPEN CHEST gives the response the chest is locked, so I figured I just needed to wait until I obtained the key, which meant finding the gun before messing with the chest. However, if you try to GET CHEST a trapdoor opens up.

I’m not sure how to feel about this. It’s certainly an arbitrary action, but it isn’t an improbable one, and it isn’t like sudden trapdoors aren’t thematic.

I tried E in the mirror room and made it to a “gun room” which had the long-needed gun. The game loaded it up automatically, once I picked up a bullet.

I checked source code later and the down-exit disappearance is quite clearly intentional; I suppose the author intended it as a mirage. I could at least get the key back up to the chest — where opening the chest does not open the trapdoor, weird — and found a sack of baking soda.

The translation element added just the right amount of friction to make the action of finding a text substantial.

Now I was seriously stumped, although once I confirmed the down-exit-poof was truly a fake-out, I knew the snake had to be the way to go. Elsewhere there was a mongoose, and I just needed to get one to the other as it kept evading my attempts to take it.

There’s a cage elsewhere and I thought holding it or dropping it would help, but no dice, I was getting the same “RUNS AWAY FROM YOU” message. There’s a rat nearby (which I thought I could use to attract the mongoose) but it eluded my efforts too, so I went even further down the food chain and tried to grab some worms (the game just doesn’t let you).

Tried to take these maggots over to some frozen meat in another room to see if I could get some meat chunks somehow, but you can’t take the maggots.

Finally — finally — I came across the fact the cage was not open when I dropped it:

This is proof a parser can have bad moments even when the verblist is restricted. There should have been some transparency as to the reason why the cage was failing; it’s not obvious at all to visualize with the “RUNS” message that the cage being closed is the issue.

The mongoose quickly took care of the snake:

The sack of baking soda takes care of the next obstacle:

A brief moment of “oh, the game wants it open to be able to work”.

With acid defeated, I looped back to where I knew there were a hammer and stake (in rooms right next to each other), clung onto my cross and garlic still, and went for the finale:

SLAY is not a verb given on the list, but another cryptic message says TO SLAY VAMPIRE SAY IT so I guessed what the game was getting at.

This is probably the worst lack-of-information response I’ve seen in a while. Why did the staking fail? I realized way back at where the math text was I had left a “mallet” which is sort of like a hammer, so I put that in my inventory and tried it instead.

I realized, after the fact, that the hammer is described as 10 ounces and mallet is described as 15 pounds. So clearly, the hammer wasn’t heavy enough, and you’re just weakly poking at the vampire with just the mere hammer and stake. Ugh.

If you try to get the princess before killing the vampire she turns to ash.

With princess in tow, I went out to the front door and … nothing happened. I assumed there was just some sort of automatic “travel home” sequence — how’d our main character get here otherwise? Deeply puzzled, I had to plunge into the source code, and found that in the “mirror maze” area, one of the exits mysteriously takes you back to the Town Square. Not exactly where I’d be looking for the path home!

One last trick to point out is that there are two women you can rescue. Remember me not needing to use YOREL? You get this scene if you do use it:

You can cart this woman with you, but she’s not the princess.

THE TOWNSPEOPLE SAY ‘THAT IS NOT PRINCESS MARLENA!! WHERE IS SHE? GO BACK AND SAVE HER!!!

Yes, that’s right. Our princess is in another castle mansion the same mansion, but a different part.

OK, fine: I appreciate the various fake-out moments were a general theme (wrong exit down to the vampire, wrong hammer, wrong victim) so it made the story feel more dense than normal. As whole this held up much better than I’d expect from such absolutely minimal parts. Mansion of Doom built good atmosphere with just single-word room descriptions.

Also a random quicksand trap you can’t escape, but at least I didn’t waste much time trying.

So I’d normally sign off with some sadness we will not see any more of the Smith/Austin games (like Stone of Rokan), as they’ve had heavy constraints yet managed to go in creative directions. However, I said the trilogy we’ve played (Eno, Stalag, Mansion of Doom) was all that was listed at CASA Solution Archive. They occasionally miss things!

From the AtariAge forums.

Remember that Australian distributor, Computer Hut Software? Somehow, one of the 1983 adventure games from PAL Creations, Space Escape, has survived to us through them. So we’ll be visiting PAL Creations at least one more time when we reach the halcyon halls of 1983.