Adventure of the Week: Spook House (1982)

This week, we visit the Spook House, written by Roger Schrag in 1982 for the TRS-80 Model I/III, published by Adventure International:

This game, a.k.a. Graphic Venture #2, was marketed as half of a "double feature" set with Schrag's Graphic Venture #1: Toxic Dumpsite (which we will cover in a future post.)  Trivia note: the dedication is to Roger's brother and sister.

There were very few graphic adventures released on the TRS-80 Model I/III, as the system's black-and-white, low-resolution, oblong-pixel graphics were not well suited to visuals.  The Graphic Ventures are also unique compared to most graphics adventures of the time -- rather than displaying a single illustration per location, the player can face and see North, South, East and West, essentially creating four sub-rooms for each room, and can also navigate Forward, Backward, Right and Left.  I asked designer and programmer Roger Schrag about this innovative approach:

I think I just saw it as a natural progression. I really enjoyed the Scott Adams Adventures, but I thought it was time to turn up the volume and inject a visual aspect. Facing different directions in a room was just part of adding a dimension to the experience.

I tried to find out how the graphics were stored, but Roger himself doesn't remember!  My own peek at the disk contents implies that the graphics were stored as raw blocks of screen data, perhaps with some sort of run-length encoding for compression.  The display technique is quick and solid, as evidenced in the spinning room that rotates through all of its four perspectives fairly rapidly, so I don't think the graphics are being rendered as vectors.

Another unusual aspect of Spook House is that the doomsday counter runs in real time -- the player has thirty minutes to find and defuse a time bomb, and if the game is allowed to run without input, or the player takes a break, the game will charge ahead to ignominous defeat.  Most games of the era measured "time" in terms of moves -- the time pressure here ups the tension level significantly. 

Roger created three Graphic Ventures for the TRS-80 -- this one, Toxic Dumpsite, and Sledge of Rahmul.  On the technical design of his adventures and his days as a young programmer, he recalls:

I don't think I actually built an adventure engine, in the way that Scott Adams did. With the Scott Adams Adventures, you could create a new adventure by preparing a data set only. You would not need to write a single line of code because the engine is already complete. I believe when I went to write Spook House I took the code from Toxic Dumpsite and tweaked it. So I did a lot of code reuse.

But I don't think I actually wrote an engine per se, probably because I didn't sit down beforehand and spec out the functionality for an engine. Rather, I just sat down and started writing an adventure. And when I discovered I needed a widget to do X, I coded a widget to do X.

I was not a planner in those days. I just wanted to write code. I'm like the impatient driver who starts the engine, puts the car in gear, and starts driving down the road before thinking about the fact that they don't know how to get to their destination.  I've always been more detail oriented than creative. So I suspect I enjoyed the coding much more than actually mapping out the adventure itself.

I had to fight my way through the Spook House on my own -- even Roger Schrag himself doesn't remember the solution more than 25 years later, my desperate late-night emails notwithstanding.  I wasn't able to find a published walkthrough for this game anywhere online, so for the first time, my spoilers section will conclude with a complete walkthrough.

I do encourage readers to play this one for themselves -- it's not too difficult to solve, and it's a unique experience in the history of the graphic adventure.  If you get stuck, the spoilers contain some significant hints, and there is a walkthrough down at the bottom of this post.  The game is definitely worth a play-through.

******* SPOILERS AHEAD! ************


The biggest snag I ran into was that I could SAVE GAME, in one of five slots, but couldn't get LOAD GAME, RESTORE, RETRIEVE, or UNSAVE to work to get back to my save point.  I finally referred to the manual -- CONTINUE A GAME is the magic phrase!

The opening is reminiscent of Scott Adams' Adventure #7: Mystery Fun House -- but with a real-time twist:

There's a great gag in the water area that subverts a traditional adventure game convention -- the player character constantly reports "HELP!!! I am sinking!", but never seems to drown.  A little investigation reveals that we're actually in a swimming pool, and it's not of a dangerous depth:

 

I did find one bug, maybe two -- LOOK WATER and LOOK SAND cause part of the verb dictionary to be dumped.

The TRS-80 graphics are necessarily schematic, but there were times I couldn't tell what I was looking at.  I finally realized that the house-shaped object visible from a platform was actually another platform with something on one edge, rendered in perspective, rather than a hill with a little house sporting a disproportionately large chimney:

A parser note -- the player can LOOK UP and occasionally discover something of interest, but LOOK DOWN simply acts as a synonym for LOOK.  Another oddity that perplexed me for a while, partly because of the LOOK SAND/WATER bug -- DIG works in sand, but finds nothing; it is more productive to DIG in the water.

Other than being blown up by the bomb when tikme ran out, the only fatal scenario I encountered was semi-random, with a hint of forewarning by the game, and also slightly disturbing -- too many jumps off the ramp or climbs down the pole occasionally led to a game-ending case of paralysis!

The infinite hallway was a vexing puzzle, in part because the parser responds to GO WALL elsewhere with "What?" or "Huh?", implying it's a nonsensical command, but accepts it on the north and south sides of the hall near the end of the game:

 

I got stuck at this point for quite a while -- I could hear the pirate talking on a recording, but couldn't find a way to make out what he was saying, or open the treasure chest.  These were, as it turned out, red herrings.  I finally discovered I could BREAK SKULL WITH ANCHOR to yield a remote control.  Pushing its button in every location in the game, facing in every direction (there is an in-game hint about the right location that I missed but recognized in hindsight), I finally discovered the time bomb.  I expected DROP BOMB IN WATER to be a fatal experiment, but it actually worked!

So that's Roger Schrag's Spook House.  Soon we'll take a look at his earlier game, Toxic Dumpsite.  (I just happened to tackle Spook House first because it got top billing on the game's packaging.)

The game's difficulty was rated as Moderate in the Adventure International catalog, and as I was unable to find a walkthrough for the game anywhere online when I got stuck, I am posting my own as a public service.  The puzzles in Spook House all make sense, but the parser can be a little bit obstinate at times when dealing with prepositions, and with only 30 minutes to solve the game, time is of the essence.  I was finally able to solve it in 63 moves, in under ten minutes, including the time to log my commands for your adventuring pleasure.

Detailed walkthrough is below the break:


**** WALKTHROUGH - ROGER SCHRAG'S SPOOK HOUSE (1982)  ****

E
W
JUMP TO PLATFORM
TURN SOUTH
LOOK BEHIND MIRROR
TAKE ROPE
TURN WEST
JUMP TO PLATFORM
TURN NORTH
CLIMB DOWN POLE
SWIM WEST
DIG
TAKE BLUE KEY
SWIM NORTH
TURN EAST
TAKE ANCHOR
TURN NORTH
N
E
S
W
TURN EAST
TIE ROPE TO ANCHOR
THROW ANCHOR TO LEDGE
CLIMB UP ROPE
TAKE ANCHOR
TURN EAST
TAKE FILE
UNLOCK DOOR WITH KEY
E
S
S
E
TURN NORTH
PULL NAILS WITH FILE
TAKE RED KEY
E
W
TURN NORTH
CLIMB DOWN POLE
SWIM NORTH
TURN WEST
UNLOCK DOOR WITH KEY
W
TURN NORTH
GO WALL
BREAK SKULL WITH ANCHOR
TAKE BOX
S
GO WALL
TURN NORTH
N
E
S
S
TURN NORTH
PUSH BUTTON
TAKE BOMB
W
TURN NORTH
CLIMB DOWN POLE
DROP BOMB IN WATER

*********** END WALKTHROUGH ************