I’ve finished the game (prior posts here).
It turned out I had one bottleneck (the wolf) which opened up the rest of the game, and “puzzles” I was spending time on (like the ghost and the lift) were complete red herrings. I’m unclear if they’re “intentional” or not; we’ve certainly had games before where I suspect the author just kept writing, ran out of disk space / motivation, and stopped with loose ends still left in. At least they became intentional, and I’ll explain what that means when I get to the end.
Games Computing, July 1984. Haunted House was renamed The House on the Misty Hill and re-purposed as a type-in for ZX Spectrum. More on that at the end as well.
Matt W. suggested using the generic “food” rather than the crisps with the wolf. Doing anything with the wolf that’s wrong will kill you so I hadn’t thoroughly tested all the items yet.
(The coffin contains a dead body; I tried carting the coffin over to the ghost in case they matched, but nothing happened. I didn’t know yet the ghost was a total red herring. I took the coffin back to the starting point and dropped it. Even though the wolf had left, this annoyed the wolf who came back and killed me. Whoops.)
Getting by the wolf opens up the graveyard, the only other section of the game. Heading directly north leads to a “shovel” next to a “newly dug grave” (shovel is total red herring, and I did waste time trying USE SHOVEL across the map a few places, ugh) and farther north you fall in the grave itself and get stuck unless you have the right item.
Specifically, this is where the rope is handy, although I spent some time trying to THROW ROPE and the like before realizing the game just let me CLIMB while holding the rope and the action after was implicit. The game is not consistent about this (implicit action while holding an item); this comes to give me trouble later.
Heading east from where the wolf was leads to a crossroads but also a vase of flowers.
I rather grumpily realized what was going on here, and took the flowers over to the princess who didn’t want to be rescued. I then dropped the vase of flowers on the ground, the customary romantic gesture.
She now is willing to tag along to be carted over to the front step of the house and dropped off. The vase of flowers incidentally stays in place and is left behind. It’s like the world’s worst dating simulator.
North of the crossroads you get shut into a shrine.
Having prayed earlier, it seemed the appropriate place; it was used to solve a puzzle, not just be a joke!
You are informed if you try to take the statue that you are not Superman. That’ll be the last treasure I get.
With that resolved I could head farther north in the shrine to find “an old rusty handcart” and a small alcove with a treasure.
It immediately occurred to me to take the cart over to the giant statue and try to take it, but I was still getting the same Superman message. It seemed fair that it’d be impossible to take the statue even with a handcart.
Leaving that behind for now, I checked to the east of the crossroads…
Complete red herring.
…and to the south.
Here my running gag finally paid off.
Coventry Live has a 2021 story about a dog who loves Quavers Crisps and eats them out of the bag, with a picture.
This leads, straightforwardly, to an “eerie tomb” with a CRUCIFIX. I nearly had all my treasures!
I still thought, perhaps, either the ghost or man in the stocks would help with the statue situation. It was an odd scenario where the game requires all treasures at a particular spot (at the front of the house) but given how close the statue was to the location it seemed almost ridiculous to require moving it.
I warned earlier about implicit actions being done with held items; this time, the action is not done while holding an item. I tried to use a handcart, but you’re supposed to drop it first, then GET STATUE, and the game will automatically load the cart from there.
I don’t necessarily have immediate issues with red herrings; they can add texture and atmosphere to an environment that can seem all too “neat” and like living in a cryptic crossword. However, the parser was so janky it was very hard to tell if I was supposed to, say, keep trying to move the lift, or keep trying to scare the ghost with the uniform; when a book is visible in one room while held but can’t be examined in another, pretty much anything is possible. Red herrings need to come along with a parser that the player trusts is working like they are expecting.
I tried a little bit of House on Misty Hill and it really is almost exactly the same; some rooms have a little more description (“a dirty kitchen is full of pots which haven’t been washed in years”) but the red herrings are “enhanced”. The man in the stocks cries for help, and the magazine is now a “monster gazette” which seems more likely to be helpful / not a red herring than the old magazine. Thus, Lucas was clearly happy solidifying the red herrings; that doesn’t mean they were introduced intentionally at first, especially given my suspicion this was the first game he wrote. There’s parser jank in Journey of a Space Traveller, but not nearly to the same level.
I checked his later books (or book, the Amstrad and MSX books about adventure programming merely convert the code) to look for comments on his philosophy on red herrings, and found two notes:
Ardent adventurers don’t like games where they lose their lives too often, so don’t go overboard with traps like this one and do try to keep the responses humorous.
Beware, however, of writing too many red herrings into your game as they can waste an enormous amount of RAM.
Death can represent a punch line of sorts; the issue here is that there is no punch line, just hanging puzzles that seem like they are bugs.
In addition to Misty Hill, the game has yet another remix (somewhat) in The Monster’s Final Hour which gets remade yet again into The Monster Returns. I only say kind of because what seems to have happened is two distinct rip-offs, both off the same game: John R. Olsen’s Frankenstein Adventure.
In Frankenstein Adventure, you need to revive the monster (and then kill the monster in the grand finale). Haunted House / Misty Hill instead grabs a few characters from the game, similar to what Peter Smith’s Hitch-Hiker did with the Supersoft Hitchhiker game. The wolf is in both games (with the same death-message, even); the bog you can fall in without a map is in.
The house structure is vaguely similar and there is a secret passage opened essentially the same way. Haunted House then veers course and has the monster already awake (and distracted by some electrodes); it’s like Lucas grabbed a couple themes to start and then went free-form from there.
Monster’s Final Hour (1985, see above) is much more directly a remake of Olsen’s Frankenstein, where the main goal (revive the monster) is maintained. You’ll also notice the verb list is quite different. So while it seems like Monster’s Final Hour might come from Haunted House, it’s really just that Lucas went back to the original source. A diagram to help:
Absolutely staggering. I can see why the games have been so hard to sort out.
We still have many Lucas games in the future, but coming up: another type-in, this one from the United States, followed by an Apple II game involving real buried treasure.
Renga in Blue 
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