Weekend Intermission: The Curse of Crowley Manor

As promised, we will take occasional breaks from the Great Scott Project proper for asides and intermissions. Beyond the founder's titles, Adventure International also published works of interactive fiction created by other authors. I remember looking at these in the company's catalog once upon a time, fascinated by the possibilities, but never anted up the cash to buy any of them. One of the earliest was Other-Venture #1: Classic Adventure, a port of the original Colossal Cave Adventure, and the series continued with several other games over the years.

I spent a little time this weekend with the 1981 release, Other-Venture #2: The Curse of Crowley Manor, written by Jyym Pearson and Norman Sailer. These games are definitely not running on the Scott Adams engine -- the screen layout is very different, the parser has uniquely aggravating quirks, it requires a disk drive, and the Other-Ventures did not appear on the same broad range of platforms as the Adventures did.



It's always interesting to look at early works in any genre, before the conventions are fully established, because it's apparent that some experiments proved enduring and others were creative dead-ends. Crowley Manor is one of those failed experiments -- it's aiming for a dark, novelistic approach, but is hamstrung by some major issues.

First, even on disk, there isn't enough text storage to create the literary feel the authors are aiming for, and typos and grammatical issues undermine it at every turn. When we LOOK WINDOW and are told "ITS LONDON AT NIGHT.." [sic], it kind of pulls us out of the story. We can find the date by looking at the furniture and discovering a desk calendar, which helps a little. But creating atmosphere with limited text was a real art form in the early days, and this game doesn't pull it off. There's a static graphic of a tower that I presume represents Crowley Manor at the side of the screen, but in the TRS-80 era it doesn't help either.

***** SPOILERS AHEAD (ASSUMING THIS GAME CAN BE SPOILED) ******

The design and parser have a lot of problems -- play testing appears not to have been a priority, and even assuming we have to think like the authors doesn't help much. TAKE is not a synonym for GET, for example; GET KEY does not work, GET GOLD KEY is expected; WAIT produces the intended effect at some points, at others a generic WHAT ?? response. Very often, the game seems intentionally obstructive. Consider this early exchange:

YOU ARE IN A LARGE OFFICE. A WINDOW IS HERE AND SOME FURNITURE.
LOOK FURNITURE
A CALENDAR AND NAMEPLATE ARE ON THE DESK,A CLOSED DOOR IS E.
OPEN DOOR
YOU ARE ON A LANDING. A HALLWAY LEADS S.
W
YOU ARE IN A LARGE OFFICE. A WINDOW IS HERE AND SOME FURNITURE.
GO DOOR
WHAT ??
E
YOU CANT GO THAT WAY
LOOK FURNITURE
A CALENDAR AND NAMEPLATE ARE ON THE DESK,A CLOSED DOOR IS E.

Why is the door only listed as part of "furniture"? (I actually have an answer to this one -- LOOK FURNITURE is being evaluated as LOOK, I eventually realized.) Why does opening the door force me to walk through it? Why do potential exits go unmentioned in any given room? Why do I automatically close the door without saying so when I come back into the office?

Most problematic, the game is so intent on telling a set story that, as players, we feel like we're just along for the ride, trying to guess what command the game wants us to type in order to move the plot along. At the start of the game, we look around the office and wait for the phone to ring. If we try to leave the office before the phone rings, it rings just as we are leaving, and we are prevented from actually leaving. If we don't answer it, it rings some more. It will in fact ring indefinitely, until we answer it. We can't really do ANYTHING ELSE once the phone starts ringing, except ANSWER PHONE. This approach protects the player from missing a critical plot development -- but it also robs the player of anything resembling freedom.

The constraints persist once we have dispensed with the telephone call -- in order to get to Crowley Manor as directed, we have to take a hansom cab. Fair enough -- we get into the cab, talk to the driver, ride through Trafalgar Square and see Big Ben, arrive at Crowley Manor... and then wrestle with finding a means to end the cab ride and get on with it. The driver will say "HERE WE ARE" forever, but EXIT CAB, PAY DRIVER, GO MANOR, GO DRIVEWAY, LEAVE CAB, THANK DRIVER and TIP DRIVER are all unsuccessful. OPEN DOOR produces "YOU CANT" [sic], which I trust is just bad punctuation and not a typo. GET OUT finally does the trick, and the cabbie takes 10 shillings for his trouble automatically, after having apparently rebuffed all previous attempts to pay him. It's all very scripted and formal, and the game is no help at all when it comes to making progress.

No adventure game can offer complete freedom, of course -- there are always restrictions. If we finish Zork I and decide that in Zork II we don't want to adventure any more, but prefer to cash in our treasures from the first game and set up a training school for novice adventurers, or perhaps a nice bakery, that's not really an option. Modern MMORPGs are better at that sort of thing, offering many more choices to the player, at the expense of narrative structure. But Crowley Manor doesn't even play fair -- it's downright painful trying to guess what it wants.

Once I've arrived at the scene of the crime and am told to meet Inspector Strade in the kitchen, where the body is, I find my way there and:

YOU ARE IN THE KITCHEN
THERE IS BLOOD SPLATTERED ON THE WALLS AND FLOOR..
LOOK BLOOD
BOY..ARE YOU GRISLEY..
LOOK FLOOR
THE BODY IS NOT HERE
A NAILED SHUT DOOR IS N
LOOK I.D.CARD
IT READS "A.BLACK"

Sorry for the non-sequitur -- just had to check. I half expected it to say J.CLOUSEAU, because I cannot imagine being a less competent Police Inspector than I seem to be. I am apparently discomfited by the sight of blood, and I fail to notice that A) the body has gone missing and B) there is a door in this room until, ashamed of myself and my dereliction of duty, I look at the floor. (Again, LOOK FLOOR turns out to mean LOOK in this context, with no indication that FLOOR isn't actually being recognized. Arrrgh!) Back to work -- Inspector Strade was supposed to meet me here, but there's been no mention of him yet, so perhaps I should:

LOOK STRADE
HIS BODY IS TORN TO PIECES


Whoa! Didn't see that one coming. Was Inspector Strade invisible or simply extremely quiet and retiring, then? And if I can't see him, how on earth do I know his body is torn to pieces? Or is his body just now torn to pieces because I looked at him? This Inspector Strade seems to have serious self-image problems. Oh, wait -- I can LOOK STRADE in ANY room and learn that HIS BODY IS TORN TO PIECES. Perhaps I'm clairvoyant... oh, wait. I eventually find a key and unlock a cabinet, and Strade's body falls out. It is, in fact, torn to pieces. Silly parser.

Enough! As this is just a side excursion from the Great Scott Project, I do not feel compelled to finish The Curse of Crowley Manor. But playing it even briefly confirms that there's a reason the Scott Adams and Infocom text adventures have endured where so many of their contemporaries have been forgotten. There was a lot of substandard product published in the golden era -- it's just easier to separate the wheat from the chaff with a little historical perspective.