Game 12: Mortville Manor - Final Rating

This is not going to be pretty! I thought I might come up against a bit of opposition after my previous negative comments around Mortville Manor, but the responses have mostly been apologetic and accepting of my criticisms. I'm ready to apply the PISSED rating to the game, and I have a feeling it might just surpass Uninvited into the bottom of the pile by the time I'm done.

Puzzles and Solvability
When it really comes down to it, Mortville Manor has less than ten puzzles to solve, and the majority of those can actually be ignored and the game still completed. As though to make up for the lack of much to do, the game throws a huge amount of red herrings at the player. So many curious things come out of the dialogue with manor residents and from the various documents hidden around the manor, but very few of them actually play any part in the plot whatsoever. This in itself makes progress extremely slow, but when you add an extremely cumbersome interface with far too many actions (yet strangely never the ones you need) and very confusing cryptic clues, you’ve got yourself one frustrating and difficult game. What really drives home how confounding the game can be is that it can be completed in around five minutes once you know how! Basically it took me eleven and a half hours to achieve something that really takes five minutes, and I still don’t feel like I actually “solved” much at all. I thought Uninvited would get the only 1 I’d ever give to this category, but Mortville Manor thoroughly deserves that rating.
Rating: 1

Letters like this one merely cause the player to bark up the wrong trees for hours on end

Interface and Inventory

Oh my...this is not going to go well. Let’s start with inventory, because that will be quick. There are two majorly annoying things about the inventory. Firstly, it’s limited to around six items. That’s extremely low when you consider the game is filled with over a hundred items to investigate spread throughout the house. Secondly, and this has as much to do with the interface as it does the inventory system, using an item is next to impossible. You can very easily select an item in the inventory, but knowing how to use it comes down to guess work and in many cases seems impossible. Let’s take the gun as an example. You start with the gun, so you’d expect to be able to use it at some point. But there’s no shoot action or anything that could remotely be used to shoot a gun. The best option I can come up with is to select the ammunition that you find later and to then use the Attach action to neatly place the bullets on someone (this is all ignoring the fact that you never see anyone in the graphical display that you could shoot).

At least the items are well represented. A shame the majority of them are entirely useless!

Now for the interface! I’ve already spent a fair amount of time going over the fact that there are way too many options in each menu, so I won’t bang on about it any longer. The only thing I’ll mention about that now is that I was not once required to use the eat, enter, force, scratch, smell and sound actions, so why are they there!? But that’s not the only problem here. I completely blame the interface for quite a few things that I missed at different points in the game. Occasionally I was required to “attach” an item to something, other times I needed to “put” something somewhere, but then there were other times again where I needed to “place” something somewhere. This resulted in numerous times where I tried to put something somewhere, only for the game to respond with ???, so I simply moved on and forgot about it. If I’d attached it or perhaps placed it instead, it would have worked, as I would find out later when I revisited and tried again. I can certainly see the potential for a detective / mystery game like this one to have dialogue screens and extensive dropdown action menus, but it’s implemented very poorly in Mortville Manor.
Rating: 2

"Attaching" the wooden peg to the cabinet didn't work. Neither did "placing" it there. I had to "put" it there.

Story and Setting

Setting a murder mystery in a grand manor out in the middle of nowhere has been done a million times, but I guess there’s a reason for that. As they say, a cliché is a cliché for a reason! It’s a solid setting for Mortville Manor, but unfortunately the story is bewildering. Of course, I can’t really say that I understand the story at all, so maybe someone who totally gets it might think it’s great. There are stacks of questions that are never answered. Stacks of things that the game tells you that you know and yet they were never revealed prior. Residents act in ways that no sane person ever would and your involvement there doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. The parchments were certainly intriguing (possibly the most interesting thing in the game), but they were stupidly cryptic, which I assume was made a lot worse through the translation process from French to English. Overall, it’s possible that my stupidity is causing me to judge this too harshly, so I won’t give it a 1, but I have to give Mortville Manor the worst story rating of the games I’ve played so far, so it’s a 2.

Rating: 2

The parchment that explains everything! Well...sort of!

Sound and Graphics

I’ve spent about thirty minutes playing the PC version in French, just to get a feel for it (as that’s technically the version I’m rating here). It’s pretty much identical, with the sole difference being the graphics are not quite as nice as the Amiga version. This is most apparent when looking at the menus and the conversation screens, where there’s a real lack of colour, but almost every screen has less definition and clarity (see examples below) than on the Amiga. As for where the games graphics stand in the scheme of things, they’re not too bad at all, albeit entirely static (apart from extremely primitive facial movements in the dialogue screen). It’s actually the first game using the first person perspective on the list that has EGA graphics after the likes of Uninvited and Tass Times in Tonetown hit the PC in CGA. Every item is nicely illustrated and with good detail and plenty of time was spent on every room to make them distinctive and easy on the eyes. The sound is just an annoyance really. Every time you enter a room or location, you are subjected to a small snippet of either eerie effects (such as owls hooting) or highly inappropriate rock music. While the music is playing, you have no cursor, so it becomes annoying pretty quickly.

Rating: 4

The PC version's graphics are just a bit dull in comparison to the Amiga...

...and the menus in particular are far less attractive.

Environment and Atmosphere

I have to admit that Mortville Manor does have decent atmosphere throughout. You can probably tell from my posts that I was struggling to make any progress through the game, but I desperately wanted to! I can only put this will to continue, despite all the frustrations I was facing, down to this foreboding atmosphere. The game promised me a dark mystery that would require not only investigatory skill to solve, but would also necessitate stringent attention to my own safety. Having the surroundings covered in snow adds to the claustrophobia that being stuck in a house with a potential murderer already produces. Unfortunately, Mortville Manor failed to live up to this promise, which is why the game’s resolution was so horribly disappointing. I’ve not played many detective / murder mystery type games, but if nothing else, Mortville Manor convinces me that this theme could work really well in an adventure game format. It just doesn’t here! Still, this is undoubtedly the category I will be most lenient with.

Rating: 5

There's no escape in any direction!

Dialogue and Acting

I won’t make the mistake of considering Mortville Manor the first adventure game to require the “acting” to be taken into consideration. After all, the audible speech is entirely synthesised. This aspect does make the Dialogue and Acting category a tough one to rate mind you, as the developers should get a little reward for taking this brave and otherwise untested approach. The idea wasn’t flawed in itself, and I think if they’d included subtitles as well as the speech I might have had better things to say about it. As it is though, it’s extremely difficult to understand what the characters are saying, and the French accent didn’t help matters at all. I had to replay many of their answers numerous times until I finally had enough to figure out what they were trying to tell me. Admittedly, I got used to it within a couple of days, and by the end I was replaying earlier comments and picking up a lot more than I did the first time around. As for the dialogue itself, it’s very poorly translated from French to English. So much so that at times I had trouble figuring out whether what I was reading was supposed to be cryptic or just badly written. The humour in the game was also very odd, and probably another example of where the translation didn’t quite do the game justice.

Rating: 2

There's just nothing funny about this well!

I thought this might be the first LeChuck award, but it scrapes in as a Voodoo Lady. I seriously hope I never have to pull that angry old pirate out! It's time to move onto something more enjoyable. I imagine Police Quest might just be the game to cleanse my palette. Anyone want to put the uniform on and join me out in the field?

Game 12: Mortville Manor - Won!

Jérôme Lange Journal Entry 4: “I have finally followed the clues to a terrible resolution! Unbeknownst to me, Julia wasn’t requesting my help because her own life was in danger, at least not through the threat of any of the manor residents. She did indeed die of natural causes and it was another’s death I was really investigating. I young woman named Murielle had once lived in the manor and while she was liked by everyone, she disappeared just over a year ago. I only found out about her presence when I came across a photo of her in the attic and started asking questions. Of course, knowing of her existence and disappearance didn’t unveil any further secrets, but the third parchment I discovered in Julia’s room did. It spoke of opening the way of darkness “like young Arthur”, and while Arthur removed the sword from the stone, the slot in the stone in the cellar suggested the opposite might do the trick in this instance. It did, and I finally made my way into the secret passageway beneath the manor, only to be confronted by the “sad virgin” that the parchment also spoke of. Noticing another slot on this statue and following the clue of “offer her the circle of the man with three faces”, I inserted and turned the golden ring I’d retrieved from Guy’s room. Another success and another secret passage, with this one leading me to a horrifying sight! The body of Murielle was there, and when I confronted Leo about it, he admitted to leaving her there, but not to being the cause of her death. He says she died accidentally while they were searching the manor and that he’d decided to cover it up rather than drawing the attention of the police.”

I apologise in advance to those of you that have a nostalgic place for Mortville Manor in their hearts, for what I’m about to say might not align with the evocative memories you have for it. Mortville Manor is an exceptionally poorly executed adventure game, and was possibly more frustrating than any other game I’ve ever played through to completion. I can safely say that I wouldn’t have dedicated the eleven and a half hours it took to complete the game if it weren’t for the purposes of this blog, and probably would have stopped after around three. There were certain parts of Uninvited that annoyed the crap out of me, but at least in that game I had some idea about what was going on and what actually happened in the end. The same can’t be said for Mortville Manor, and I’ve astoundingly ended the game with more unanswered questions than answered ones. Now it could very well be that all of this is merely the result of a poor translation from French to English, or that my intelligence level just wasn’t up to the genius behind the game, but I can only describe and rate the game based on my own experience. Here’s a rundown of how I floundered my way to the finish line...

There were times where I felt like using one of these while playing Mortville Manor

When I last left you guys, I’d found the third parchment and figured my next destination should be the chapel. Well, I spent a good half an hour in that chapel, and couldn’t find anything of interest whatsoever. I thought I might have been onto something when I read “bring the sun to his knees” and assumed something would happen if I waited until night time, but no, nothing happened. Feeling more disgruntled than ever, particularly after Daubeur predicted I’d finish the game before my next post, I determinedly explored the rest of the house again, hoping to find something that would trigger a eureka moment. While doing this, I came across a room I’d never seen before! How could that happen I hear you ask?! Well, let me tell you. At the end of the landing in the manor (see below) are stairs going down and stairs going up. From this point, you can click the Move menu and then Choice on Screen, and then click where you'd like to go. If you click on one of the doors, you are positioned in front of that door, where you can knock, open the door, listen or talk to whoever is standing next to you. Now, during my very first session with the game, I clicked Choice on Screen and then clicked the stairs going down. The game popped up with a big green message saying “Then use the MOV menu”, which caused me to think that the stairs led to one of the other options in the Move menu, such as the kitchen, or the cellar, and that in all likelihood, the stairs going up would result in the same message. Wrong!

What's behind door number 9?

Going up the stairs took me to the attic, where I found a photo of a young woman, along with a bunch of other seemingly useless stuff. What this achieved however, is that it opened up new dialogue options in the conversation tree, which caused me to spend the next period of time trying to catch all eight suspects to ask them about the girl and their relationship to her. It turned out that Murielle was the lady companion (whatever that means) of Julia and that she’d disappeared under strange circumstances over a year ago. Unfortunately, the excitement of finding this new room and having something to do dissipated and I was once again left without a clue. Deciding to focus my attention on the two areas I’d been so curious about previously, being the well and the cellar, I headed back to the well, this time with the rope I uncovered in the attic. Imagine my surprise when I attached that rope to the well and selected Move – In the Weel (yes, the game spells well “weel” throughout) and was confronted with a loading screen instead of the response “Too deep!” Now imagine my utter disdain when that loading screen was followed by the screen below:

Karate chop!

So let’s get this straight. The rope I’d previously attached to the well was too short!? The game didn’t give me a message to tell me this information, such as “This rope is too short. You might want to try a different one.” No, it just said “Too deep”, making me wonder what else I might need to do to use the rope. Attaching a different rope, which looks absolutely identical to the other one, suddenly allows me to climb to the bottom of the well, only for someone to cut the rope, trapping me there. The game doesn’t even allow me to at least see what’s down there before reloading, it just ends. There were no hints as to how I might go about climbing down without being trapped there either, leaving me feeling more than a little cranky. I spent some time looking through the parchments and items I’d come across in the entire game up until now, but could see nothing that might help. Surely the well isn’t there as a red herring?! Well no actually...I later came back to the well, connected up exactly the same rope as before and entered...you know...for shits and giggles, only this time I wasn’t killed! Why I was able to enter this time and not the times I’d tried before, I have absolutely no idea.

This rope is apparently longer than the other identical looking rope

Apparently the whole reason to climb down the well is not to get to the bottom at all, but to read the “strange horoscope” on the wall halfway down. I thought for sure that I’d finally come across an explanation for the symbols found throughout the game and how to apply them to the cryptic parchments, so I was pretty excited about it to say the least. Thankfully I saved my game and took a screenshot too as if you hang around for long the water rises and kills you (don’t you hate it when the water in the well just rises all by itself!). I’ve stared at that screenshot for quite a while now and I’m not sure I’ve ever felt more stupid in my life. Was this game created by aliens and sent here to drive us humans insane, therefore making their inevitable invasion a much easier proposition? If I was going to have a guess, I believe music has something to do with the solution to the puzzle. The second parchment says “The key to the melody is within your grasp. It suffices to find the note that clashes” and when you enter the well, you hear three distinctly different tones. Maybe it’s merely suggesting that I find the missing tone (i.e. the missing piece of wall), which might be the symbol in the cellar? If anyone can explain what the whole well thing is about, I’d love to understand. Regardless, as strange as it might seem, I managed to finish the game while having no idea.

I get it now! Satan is angry because Poseidon stole his chick before the sun came up?

Deciding to expend no further energy on the well, I entered the cellar once more, determined to figure out what the symbols are all about. Immediately I noticed something that had escaped my attention previously. An almost imperceptible slot just above the symbol on the centre pillar! For the first time since starting Mortville Manor, I had a eureka moment worth getting excited about! I’d been carrying around the dagger for a while (I collected all the items I could that were present on the coat of arms) and tried placing it in the slot. The secret door opened and I eagerly went through to see what dark secrets were held within. However...I was suddenly confronted with a question! “Julia: Did she commit suicide? Was she murdered? Did she die by accident? Did she die of natural causes?” My investigation had led me to believe she died of natural causes, so I selected that answer, only to be faced with another question. “Where did the money come from for the restoration of the manor?” The answers to choose from were blackmail, honest work, inheritance, races, rents, hold-up and other. Fortunately I’d recorded every possible dialogue question and answer throughout the game and was able to look back over it. When I’d asked some of the manor residents about Leo’s Occupation, they’d answered “He’s a fanatic of history and gambler. A year ago he won a great deal of money”. I could see no mention of any restoration, but the gambler comment made “Races” the most likely answer. Obviously it was correct, as the test continued...

This question implies that this story is involving. I beg to differ!

In total I was asked to answer ten questions before I was able to proceed. Since completing the game, I’ve read elsewhere that this test was added to certain versions of the game after it became apparent that the game could be finished in a matter of minutes if you have a bit of luck (or follow a walkthrough), therefore making the entire plot completely redundant. If you get one answer wrong, the game tells you that you’re not ready to enter the secret passage and need to conduct further investigations in the manor. In my opinion, this is a lame attempt to correct what is an obvious defect in game design. It doesn’t help that some of the questions are really quite hard, and despite the fact I’d spent days investigating every nook and cranny and asking every possible question, I still had to guess the answer. Who did Murielle have an affair with? Where was that mentioned? If you’re going to test a player to make sure they understand the plot, you better make the plot understandable in the first place! Somehow I got through it unscathed, and found myself looking at a rather unattractive statue with a sword.

Hooray for disused traps! I can't wait to try them!

Noticing how similar the statue looked to the one in the chapel, I quickly brought up a screenshot to compare. They both carried a ball shaped item in their right hand, but the one in the chapel had a cross on top whereas the one in the passage didn’t. The gold ring I had in my inventory (also on the coat of arms) had a cross on the top, so I tried putting that in the slot on top of the ball. It fit perfectly...but nothing happened. I couldn’t see anything else to do, so I selected every action in the menu, including smell and eat (you never know with this game), and clicked on the ball and the ring. Turning the ring worked, and another passage opened up. This led me to the apparent climax of the mystery, discovering Murielle’s corpse lying on a chest. I spent quite a bit of time looking in the chest and trying to figure out what I was supposed to do before I searched her body and found a wooden object with a screw on it. I’d previously noticed a hole in the top of the cabinet in Murielle’s room, so I quickly headed straight up there to test my theory. It fit, but once again nothing happened. I eventually figured out that the wooden rod in the top draw of the cabinet needed to be slotted through the hole in the ball so it could be turned, revealing a secret drawer containing a notebook.

Even after death, Murielle rocked on to Iron Maiden and Slayer

I expected this notebook to make everything clear. It didn’t! It might not be as cryptic as the parchments I’d collected, but it didn’t answer anything other than the fact Murielle had followed the parchments herself and found her way into the crypt. The game quickly wraps itself up at this point in a most unsatisfying way. “You don’t know what implication Leo may have had in Murielle’s death. Was she dead outright? In any case, the family problems that you have uncovered in the course of your enquiries would explain Leo’s behaviour.” What behaviour? What family problems? I know Guy has been having an affair with Eva, Pat owes Guy money and has been forging accounts, Max is a bit of a drunk etc. etc., but what has any of that got to do with Leo and his apparent behaviour? The “revealing” talk with Leo goes part way to answering the above, as Leo describes how he and Murielle were searching the crypts when she was killed in an accident. Instead of reporting her death, he simply left her there, but not before taking her ring and the treasure he found. He then explains that Julia wanted me to investigate as she suspected Leo was involved in Murielle’s death, but that she made all the clues very difficult for me to decipher to protect her husband. So let me get this straight. Julia wanted me to find out whether Leo killed Murielle, but she scattered her own clues that led to her belief around so that I might not suspect Leo. Huh!? Oh, but none of this matters anyway, because Leo commits suicide shortly after I leave the manor after losing a bet at the races!

Was she dead outright? As opposed to what? Undead?

So...I’ve finished Mortville Manor, but it doesn’t feel like it. All the dialogue between me and the suspects allowed me to complete the test when entering the secret passageway, but otherwise played no role in completing the game. Most of the parchments still make absolutely no sense to me. Nothing happened in the kitchen, the bathroom, or the shower for the entire game, nor did I pick up any item from any of those rooms. I could now finish the game in about five minutes, without talking to anyone or accessing more than two rooms (all you need is the ring and the dagger). Why did Julia’s stepson Pat answer that she died of frostbite when everyone else said she died of pulmonary embolism? Why did I start the game with a pistol when it clearly plays no part in the game (wasting a valuable inventory slot at the same time)? If Leo isn't a murderer and merely hid Murielle's body to avoid attracting attention, who kept killing me throughout the game? Why does Guy answer “I took the picture and what’s more, it’s printed in reverse” when talking about the photo of Murielle in Julia’s room? Are these things just there to confuse the player and make them chase answers that simply aren’t relevant, or have I completely missed the point over and over again? One thing’s for sure! I’m really looking forward to playing a Sierra game after slogging through this mess. But first...I need to have a quick look at the game in French on the PC, so I can rate it properly for that platform. Then it’s case closed...for good!

Murielle may have left due to the financial success of the manor? Yes, that should be avoided at all costs!

Game 12: Mortville Manor - Pillow Talk

Jérôme Lange Journal Entry 3: “I’m afraid this case is proving to be a tough one to crack. While I continue to find clues that are worthy of following up, further investigation is leading to dead ends. I have spent a great deal of time attempting to get down into the well and also in the cellar where I believe a secret passage may exist, yet a solution to those puzzles evades me. I have since focussed my attention on trying to gain entrance to Julia’s bedroom, which has been locked since my arrival here at Mortville Manor. When I ask the family members about her bedroom, they all direct me to Leo, but when I questioned Leo about it he simply told me he would prefer it to remain locked. I tried to break in but failed, so I then retrieved all the keys I’d seen previously in the house and tried them on the door to no avail. Finally, out of desperation, I searched Leo’s room for the key and found it hidden under his pillow! Within the room I have uncovered a third cryptic parchment, which I’m hoping will lead me to some answers around here. It has taken a lot of perseverance, but I’m one step closer to finding out what happened to Julia and who was behind it.”

The last few sessions with Mortville Manor have been pretty frustrating. It’s not even that I haven’t known what to do (although I have needed a hint at one point), it’s that the game is so specific about how things are to be done that its caused me to spend hours wasting time. I still don’t understand why I can’t climb into the well now that I’ve attached a rope, and it’s very possible that I would be able to do it if only I used the interface in a precise way. Having so many actions to choose from in the menu system makes the simplest of tasks complicated, and I can’t help but wonder why the creators didn’t replace half of them with a “use” action. Did they really need attach, close, eat, enter, force, knock, lift, open, place, put, read, scratch, smell, sound and turn actions (this is not even all of them by the way)? A simple use action could replace them all! How do I climb down the well? There’s no climb action. When Enter fails to work, I can’t be certain whether that means it’s not possible to climb into the well or whether there’s another way that I haven’t tried. I therefore find myself standing in the same spot trying endless actions to achieve something that may or may not be possible in the first place.

It wouldn't surprise me if the developers of the game used something shaped like this during it's creation

If you’ve read through the comments on my last post, you’d know that I requested a hint a couple of days ago, as I’d experienced a two hour period of achieving absolutely nothing. There have been a few times during other games where someone has given me a hint, noticing that I was not on the right track or had missed something vital (like the amulet in Uninvited), but I think this is the first time I’ve thrown my hands in the air and asked for direction. Daubeur came to the rescue, hinting that there was a third cryptic parchment that was located in Julia’s bedroom, and that this parchment would help me to figure out what I was supposed to do next. That’s a great hint by the way, as it informed me of an item that would help my progress, without giving away too much. He didn’t tell me how to get into Julia’s room, which is locked, and he also made no reference to what the parchment actually says. He simply allowed me to focus all of my attention on getting into the room, rather than wandering around aimlessly, which is just the push I needed. Unfortunately, getting into the bedroom has proved to be just as challenging as everything that came before it.

What exactly did they answer with? Go away!? Come in!? Nearly finished!?

I’d seen four sets of keys in various rooms, so the first thing I did was collect them all up to see if I could unlock the door. It’s here that I ran into the same old interface problem. There’s no use action, nor is there an unlock action, so I was forced to try completely random things like put and place, then click on the door and hope for the best. Since the game doesn’t tell you things like “you cannot do this” or “that’s not the right key” and instead responds with “???”, I had to go through this process with each key to make sure I wasn’t simply trying to wrong one. None of them worked, so I began to think about how I might break in. I tried putting and placing the screwdriver and the dagger on the door but to no avail. I tried knocking on the door again and was surprised to actually get a response from within, but still couldn’t see any way to get in. It’s here that Daubeur offered up more assistance, suggesting that if Leo wouldn’t give me the key, I might want to try taking it from his room. I’d already searched every room for items, so it was a bit depressing to find out that I’d missed something. I went back to what I figured was Leo’s room and looked through the cupboard again. No key! I started scouring the rest of the room, selecting search and clicking on everything I could see. Still no key! Just when I was starting to wonder whether Daubeur was sent to planet Earth with the goal of misleading me into suicide, I found it!

I'm sure some of the one liners in the game seemed funny at the time!

Now when I tell you how I found it, you’re probably going to think it all sounds very obvious and that perhaps The Trickster isn’t an ideal gamer to be blogging his way through a kabillion adventure games. I beseech you to give me a chance to explain why this sort of puzzle should be banished from the genre for all eternity! To find the key, you need to select the Lift action and then click on the pillow on the bed. Here are just a few reasons why that’s too hard. 1. To this point in the game, searching anywhere other than cupboards and draws reveals absolutely nothing, so in a way the game trains the player to simply not waste time using the numerous actions anywhere else. 2. There’s nothing in the game that lets the player know that to progress any further, you need to access Julia’s room somehow, so it’s easy to assume that the room will become accessible at some stage and to look elsewhere for something to do. 3. My previous experience with the game had led me to believe that using keys on doors was impossible. The lack of an appropriate action, such as unlock, and the vague results of my previous attempts to do so had pretty much squashed the idea. 4. While there’s a chance that some players might turn their attention to trying to steal the key out of Leo’s room when he says he wants Julia’s room to stay locked, it’s by no means an obvious approach to take, particularly when you’ve already searched his room and didn’t find a key. 5. Looking at or Searching the pillow does not reveal the key, you have to Lift it. Given how specific and yet unclear the key under the pillow puzzle is to begin with, surely the developers could have been a little more lenient with its resolution.

Julia's Room: How old did you say the victim was exactly? Nine?

I’m happy to admit that even when I knew I was supposed to get into Julia’s room, I couldn’t do it. Even when I knew the key was in Leo’s room, it took me a long time and a heap of trial and error to find it. It’s fair to assume then that without Daubeur’s help, I would not have progressed any further in Mortville Manor. But…that’s one of the reasons why having this blog is so great. There’s a community of readers to help me out of these sticky situations so I can get on with the game without spoiling anything else. Right now I’ve got the third parchment and while it’s once again entirely cryptic, it’s given me some direction. “Take your prayers as you would to the holy place” seems to suggest that my next clue might be found in the chapel and “from the pillar of wisdom , bring the sun to his knees” the altar with the sun engraving. Despite all my whinging and complaining about the interface, solvability and translation in Mortville Manor, I still really want to know what happens. I guess that’s what makes the flaws so frustrating as they delay my attempts to piece together what is an intriguing mystery. Here’s hoping my next post contains some unassisted success.

Cryptograms were all the rage in 1950's France

Game 12: Mortville Manor - Unco-operative Suspects

Jérôme Lange Journal Entry 2: “I have spent quite some time questioning everyone in the manor, assuming that literally anyone could be the murderer. It became clear pretty quickly that this questioning alone was not going to lead to a resolution, so I have also started sneaking into each of their rooms and going through their stuff, looking for anything that might assist in my investigation. It has been very eye opening, and I’ve found quite a few documents that suggest not all is well between some of the family members. Pat seems to owe a lot of money to Guy and has been forging his accounts, whereas Guy is apparently having an affair with Eva. I’m not yet sure if any of this has anything to do with what has happened, but knowledge is power. Most interestingly, I have found a second cryptic parchment in one of the rooms, and I’m not convinced that figuring out their meaning will be the key to my success. Reading over the first parchment again, I now realise that it must be speaking of the well outside the manor, but I have not yet figured out how to get down there. I plan to ask everyone about the well and see if one of them will let slip something of value.”

Well I’ve certainly done some hard yards on Mortville Manor over the weekend. I’m up to six hours in total on the game, but over three quarters of that has been taken up by going through every item in every room and recording it in my spreadsheet, and asking every possible question to every suspect and recording that also. It’s taken a long time to collect all of this, mostly due to the way each suspect drip feeds information before telling me I’m “too curious”, but also due to my game ending prematurely due to death or dismissal. I still don’t completely understand why Max is sending me packing occasionally. It doesn’t seem to be at any set point in time, so I don’t think it’s because I’m failing to achieve something within a timeframe. It seems more likely to do with me snooping around in places I’m not supposed to, but it happens at such random times that it’s very difficult to associate with any of my actions. Perhaps it’s because I’m leaving cupboards and suitcases open when investigating which gives away the fact that I’ve been snooping, or maybe it occurs after a manor inhabitant catches me in their room (occasionally when I walk into a bedroom, the owner is already in there). Whatever is causing it, it’s pretty damn annoying, and causes me to start over (I can’t use a recent save game as I don’t know whether I’ve already done whatever it is that causes the dismissal). If it is indeed random, then The Adventure Gamer will not be happy!

Is that a joke? As in "Red...what's on the walls"?! Or is it a Read Herring?

Regardless, I’m now at a point where I can really start to look over all these notes and try to figure out what it is I’m supposed to do. The key to the game seems to be figuring out the cryptic parchments, of which I’ve currently got two. The first one, which seemed stupidly cryptic at first, is starting to unravel for me. “Like a deep stony stare, a solitary eye that points towards the stars; the artery that links heaven and hell. You must fathom these depths keeping hold of that which is, and will become.” I’m certain this is talking about the well outside the manor, but I don’t know what the thing “which is, and will become” is. When I stand in front of the well, I have the option to Move “into the well”, but the game simply responds with ??? when I try to do that. I remembered that I’d seen a rope in one of the rooms and referring to my spreadsheet, figured out where it was. Once I had the rope, I was able to Attach it to the well, certain that this would allow me to climb down. Strangely, when I try to Move into the well now, the game responds with “Too deep”. I stopped playing at this point, but will have another shot at it tonight. It may be that I need to use the rope somehow (it’s ridiculous given how many actions there are to choose from, that Use isn’t one of them). I feel like I’m getting very close to opening the game up a bit, which is exciting.

That's what she said! (sorry, it's an Australian thing)

The other parchment makes no sense to me at all just yet, but I do recognise some of the stuff it’s talking about. This section means nothing to me: “You will drop your chord of stone at your feet. The laugh of silence at the highest pitch, and in your right hand, the measure of genius”, but it later speaks about passing “between the two crescents beyond the abyss of the wall of silence”, which must be talking about the two moons on the pillars in the cellar.  I’m hoping that by getting into the well, I’ll find something down there that will make the second parchment make more sense. I’m pretty determined to finish Mortville Manor and will do my best to do so without asking for hints. However, for speed reasons alone, I’ll give 10 points to the first person that can explain exactly why I’m being thrown out of the manor with such regularity. This would stop me having to start over and significantly increase the amount of time I can spend on trying to actually solve the game. I reckon I could figure this out through trial and error, but I’m conscious that I’ve already spent over six hours on the game and have very little to show for it. This is a perfect example of where I’m just going to ask for assistance, as the answer most likely won’t spoil anything else (if it does, please don’t tell me) and it will help me to push through the game to more interesting stuff (and I mean interesting stuff in this game, not that I just want to move onto another one).

Pat's worksheet. So...what did you do on your weekend?

Game 12: Mortville Manor - Fatal Translation

Jérôme Lange Journal Entry 1: “Something terrible has happened. My good friend Julia is dead! To make matters worse, I am convinced that foul play was involved. If I’m right though, given the circumstances of her death, that means someone in her family or manor has committed murder! Just before her death, Julia sent me a letter that suggested she was in trouble, but by the time I travelled to Mortville Manor to assist, it was too late. I now feel it is my duty, as an investigator and friend, to try to solve this mystery and put things right. I’ve begun my investigation by searching the bureau, the dining room and the kitchen for clues, asking the manor inhabitants questions as I go in hope of finding out some useful information. Everyone seems a bit reluctant to help, which is strange given how they all profess to having loved Julia very much, but gradually I am finding out some answers. There are some interesting artefacts around the house, such as engraved inscriptions on pillars and a coat of arms that is missing the motto, but I don’t yet know what they mean or whether they’re relevant. I also have a parchment with a strange message on it, although none of it makes any sense to me yet. If the murderer really is in this manor, I will find them out eventually. It’s just a matter of time.”

Mortville Manor is a strange game! I didn’t really know what to expect when I started, but since then I’ve found myself switching between genuine interest, total frustration and utter bewilderment. On the interest side, investigating objects for clues and drawing information out of family members is certainly thought provoking, and I like the way that new questions enter the list available every time I come across a new item or location of interest in the manor. The result is new information becoming available to me each time I come into contact with a family member, which is a good way to make the game unravel at a gradual pace. It’s a technique that hadn’t appeared in adventure games prior (that I know of) and could be considered a predecessor to the future genre blueprint. I’m genuinely intrigued as to who murdered Julia and why, and at this stage, plan to see the game through to the reveal. However, there are many, many things about the game that are making it quite challenging, and unfortunately the majority of these challenges are not of the intentional type.

Not a bad place to drag out an investigation.

I don’t even know where to begin when discussing the aspects of the game that are frustrating, but I’ll start with the most obvious one. The speech synthesis is what Mortville Manor is most notable for, as it appears to be the first game of any genre to make use of it, but it’s exceedingly awful! Considering the game revolves around collecting information from the various suspects and that there are no subtitles to assist, it’s of vital importance that the player can understand what’s being said to them. It’s bad enough that the voice is totally monotone and has crappy audio quality, but the French accent and terrible translation job makes it at times plain impossible. If it wasn’t for the fact that I can replay responses over and over again until I vaguely understand, I would call the game unplayable and move on. As it is, it’s merely a frustration, and I’m pretty sure I’ve picked up enough to be able to get by. I’ve got a spreadsheet set up with a worksheet for each suspect and I’ve been writing down all their responses to each question to look back over (nothing is recorded in the game to go back to), and the cells are filled with things like “it is ???????? and I have enough to keep me busy” and “that’s how the ?????? that lies at the foot of the manor”.

Is this Mortville Manor or Maniac Mansion?

Before I criticise the game further, I’ll try to give you an idea of how the interface works. Everything is controlled through drop down menus. Right click on the screen to bring up the menu bar, select the menu you want and then scroll down to the option you want and let go. For example, right click on the screen, move the cursor up to Act (short for Action) and then scroll down to “open” and let go, and then click on a door to open it. Right click on the screen, move the cursor to Mov (short for Move) and then scroll down to “dining room” and let go to go to the dining room. It’s pretty straight forward and easy to get used to. In fact, I find myself unable to use Windows properly after playing the game as I right click on icons, move the cursor up and let go, expecting that to run the application (it doesn’t). The main issue with this menu system is not the interface itself; it’s the sheer number of options available. Check out the screenshot below to see the Action options you can choose from at any time. Scratch? Smell? Force? I have to wonder how many times these actions will actually produce a result and yet I’m having to look at every item in the game and think about whether any of that long list of actions might be relevant in that case. I’ve smelt, scratched, and listened to every item I’ve come across so far, as I don’t yet know whether Mortville Manor relies on logic or trial and error to solve (I don’t trust adventure games until they prove themselves trustworthy).

I look forward to the part of the game where I need to sound something!

There are not as many options in the other menus thankfully. In fact, there are surprisingly very few rooms that you can Move to, at least initially, with Bureau, Dining Room, Kitchen, Cellar and Chapel being the only places to explore. That being said, there are stacks of items to look through in the various cupboards and draws, many of which surely have no relevance to the investigation. Pens, romantic novels, packs of cards, tennis balls etc. etc. The only things I’ve thought might be of value and therefore tried to pick up are a pistol, some keys, a locked jewellery box and a parchment. This raises two other criticisms that I need to raise. Firstly, the parchment is really cryptic, but I have no idea whether it’s intentionally so or whether it’s just a terrible translation. It’s pretty much the first item I picked up and it could very well hold the key to the mystery, but lines like “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Sunday, from Monday 1st to Sunday 1st, plunging from one day to the next your is or will become” just don’t make any sense whatsoever! The second criticism is around the inventory, which is ridiculously limiting. You can only have about five or six items in your inventory before you are unable to pick up anything else. I guess it would be silly for the character to carry around every available item, but limiting it to such an extent is downright annoying.

I'm sorry...um...what?!

What’s that? You want more criticisms of Mortville Manor?! Well, since you asked, the conversation mechanics are also pretty annoying. Every time you choose to have a discussion with someone, you are taken to a close up view of them and have the choice to bring up a tree of possible conversation topics. As mentioned earlier, it’s nice that new questions are added to the list as you discover new things in the manor, but the amount of dialogue options combined with the amount of repetition between family members’ answers makes it less interesting than it should be. Add to this the fact that you only get to raise a few topics with each suspect before they continually respond with “you are too curious”, and that if you later go back and talk to that suspect again, the topics you’ve discussed previously are no longer highlighted, and you’ve got yourself a pretty irritating system. I set myself the goal early on of discussing every possible topic with every suspect and writing down what their response is, and I was hoping that after that was completed (which would likely take hours due to the above irritations) I would have a better understanding of what I need to do to solve the mystery. However, this is where we get to the bewildering bit…

Let's cut to the chase...did you do it or not?

Mortville Manor has a habit of ending my game extremely abruptly, and for no apparent reason. I’ll be looking at items in the kitchen when a random message will pop up telling me that someone has come up behind me and stabbed me in the back. At other times, the servant Max will simply give me my bags back and send me on my way as though I’d done something wrong. I’m beginning to think that I’m being murdered because I’m wandering the manor at night time instead of sleeping, but I need to test this theory. I literally have no idea why Max is sending me away though, and can only assume that I’m supposed to achieve something by a certain time or I’m considered a failure. I’m hoping that all this becomes clearer as if the game is forcing me to sleep at nights instead of investigating while still placing a time limit on me to achieve my goal, I won’t be particularly kind in my next couple of posts. Anyway, I feel like I’m a long way from being able to judge the merits of Mortville Manor. The obvious flaws don’t help its cause, but the jury is still out on whether it can overcome them. I’ve suffered a calf muscle injury today, so while I’m forced to use crutches and request assistance like a cripple, it does make it likely that I’ll be spending quite a bit of time this weekend in the manor, trying to figure out what happened to Julia.

That's a bit harsh don't you think? I got here yesterday!

Game 12: Mortville Manor - Introduction

Oh, non! J'ai oublié je ne peux pas parler français!

The twelfth game I’m playing for the blog is little known French game Mortville Manor (at least it seems to be little known outside of France). Created in 1987 by Lankhor, a fusion of two other companies called Kyil Khor Creation and Béatrice & Jean-Luc Langlois, the game was originally developed for the Atari ST before being ported to Amstrad, Amiga and PC in various languages. It’s the first of two games to put the player in the shoes of private investigator Jérôme Lange, with the sequel being 1990’s Maupiti Island, which was based on a tropical island and seems to have had a much more widespread release. Mortville Manor is based in 1951, where Jérôme is called in to solve a murder mystery in a grand manor. I know little more than that, other than the standard “all is not as it seems” style marketing that accompanies all games of this type. The game seems to be most well known for being the first to utilise speech synthesis, which is another way of saying artificial human speech (think Stephen Hawking).

Developed over thirty games, but would always be known for Mortville Manor

Mortville Manor is without doubt the most underground game I’ve played so far for this blog. There is very little information on the internet about it and I was very close to just ignoring it and scratching it off the list. There were two things that made me decide that I should hunt the game down and play it. Firstly, reader Daubeur suggested that he’d really like for me to give it a shot (yes, I take requests...within reason) and secondly, I can’t ignore the fact that the game was the first to use speech synthesis, making it significant to the evolution of the adventure game (which is what this blog is all about at the end of the day). However, making the decision to play the game was the easy part. Finding it has turned out to be something much more difficult, and has required some dexterous Adventure Gamer rules loopholing to achieve. Before I describe what I plan to do to play Mortville Manor, I wanted to quickly thank all those people that spent time trying to track it down for me. You know who you are!

The mysterious Daubeur!

While there are quite a few sites that make reference to a DOS version of Mortville Manor in English, including Moby Games, there are others that say that it was released for only French and German speaking audiences on that platform. The latter seems likely to me as I simply cannot find a PC version of the game in English, but there’s no shortage of downloads available in the other two languages. There’s no way that I could play through the game in French or German, so I decided to try something a little different to complete my mission on this occasion. I’m going to play the Amiga version of the game, and with the knowledge I gain from that experience, will make my way through as much of the DOS version in French to be able to rate it. From what I can tell from the small amount of time I’ve spent in both versions of the game, the interface, plot and even the sound, are almost identical, so it’s really only the visual experience and possibly the atmosphere that I’ll need to focus on to get a good feel for the PC version of the game.

The chapel in the PC Version of the game

Having spent the better part of my childhood permanently attached to an Amiga, I have to admit that I was pretty excited to get n emulator up and running, with the possibility of one day playing through some of my old favourites, but as with everything to do with my attempts to play Mortville Manor, that turned out to be a learning experience. It turns out that you need to configure the emulator you’re using to match the game you’re playing, as many games made use of different hardware components available for the Amiga platform. Thankfully I came across Amiga Forever, a website devoted to Amiga emulation, which offers various purchasable applications that make running Amiga games simple. The basic $9.95 Value Edition of Amiga Forever (which comes with 40 games installed and ready to go) will play any game compatible with the Workbench 1.3 ROM, of which around 70% of Amiga games are. I checked out what I needed to play Mortville Manor and it turned out 1.3 would do, but still decided to dish out $29.95 for the Plus Edition (which comes with 100 games) as that will allow me to play any Amiga game I want at a later date.

The Amiga Forever interface. Definitely worth the money!

Now that Amiga Forever is installed on my PC, all I needed to do is double click on the ADF file that I downloaded for Mortville Manor to add it to the long list of games I have available in the interface. The software does the rest! As for the PC version I will be playing, I ended up downloading the ZIP file from www.lankhor.net (I just kept clicking on the French headings until I found the one with game downloads), which is a package containing four versions of the game. Versions 2 and 3 don’t seem to run in DOSBox 0.74, version 4 starts up but crashes as soon as the intro completes, but version 1 seems to run perfectly well. I found a manual (that contains some truly horrible English) at the same site, which describes the fairly obvious interface. More importantly, it gives a few hints about the relationships of the Mortville Manor inhabitants, which I assume will come in use at some stage. Well, wish me luck...Detective Lange is on the case!

The chapel in the Amiga version of the game.

Mortville Manor for PC...in English!

As I'm approaching the end of a game (in this case Maniac Mansion), I always start making sure that I have all the resources I need to play the next one on the list. As it turns out, while I thought I had a working version of Mortville Manor, it's actually in French, which isn't much use to me (I tried to learn French once but found out quickly that learning languages takes the sort of crazy commitment I usually only attribute to things like playing through an endless list of adventure games and blogging about it).

I've Googled every variation I can think of, but can't find a PC version of the game in English to download. I've also found forums with others searching without luck, so I'm starting to think this game might have to be removed from the list. That being said, Moby Games shows screenshots of the DOS version in English, so there's every chance it did exist at some point.

Anyone else know where I might find it? Before anyone mentions that I should play the Atari or Amiga versions through emulators, I've already decided I'm not going to do that.

Thanks,
The Trickster