Reminisce with me to a time when consoles were still quite young. Computer gaming was all the rage back then, outside of a few choice titles that started to warrant more of a glance towards the console market. The curtain rises on one game in particular, though at the time it was first released, I was much too young to even consider playing it. Thank the stars for retro gaming and all that jazz, right?
(A bit of a cautious read here as I try to change things around so I'm not entirely gushing or droning on.)
Game: Laura Bow: The Colonel's Bequest
Released: October 1989
General: Released around 1989, this is a text-input adventure game made by Sierra Entertainment. This was back in the time when pixelated characters were all the rage. Granted, this wasn't that bad back then, nor is it even now. If anything, the game seems to be in similar design to the early King's Quest games, only slightly better, if that makes any sense. By that, I mean the text input command bar is known from the King's Quest games (and I believe the early Leisure Suit Larry games), where you have to type out what you want Laura to do and be very specific about doing so. Take into consideration that some of the terminology we use freely nowadays wasn't as common back then, too.
Story: It's 1925 and the opening starts out at Tulane University. Laura, a college student, is invited to a dinner party by her friend Lillian. The dinner takes place on the Dijon estate out in the bayou, and what starts off as a tense dinner easily leads on to one of the most dangerous nights that Laura has ever had to experience. The only question on her mind is if she'll even survive the night! The pile of bodies begin to narrow down her chances. What seemed like a simple dispute at the dinner table starts having people drop like flies, their corpses littering the estate grounds for brief moments before they mysteriously disappear. Who is the murderer? What is the motive for the deaths? Will Laura make it? That is up for you to help figure out. The game starts out like a play, introducing all of the characters like actors, and the game is separated into several "Acts", where specific conversations and incidents occur only during this time.
Gameplay: As described above, you play this game as a text-input adventure. Any commands such as interrogating suspects and checking out suspicious items of interest involve typing it in. While you can easily move Laura around with the arrows, it does get rather clunky as some things aren't directly flat. Even the stairs separating the first and second floors are slightly diagonal, meaning you have to go back and forth. The majority of the estate, including the manor and the outlying features, are up for exploration, and many of the keys and clues you will need to discover the entire story behind this game can be hidden in the simplest of forms. Thankfully, when it comes down to a time crunch, the text input field does pause the action, so you can make sure you type out what is needed when the time comes (and there will be one time in particular where this helps).
Meanwhile, the inventory system known from such action games doesn't necessarily prove to be too helpful outside of actually allowing you to keep stock of what you've collected. To look at the items, you have to leave that screen and put in your command, but you are at least given a visual key if you look at it in the inventory screen.
Sound: Take into account when this game was made. If you ever played the original King's Quest games (1 through 4 would work), you will know that the music was very... bit-ish. By that, I mean they were very basic beeps and bloops that the computer itself was capable of making (without speakers). For this reason, there wasn't actually much that involved, such as music for parts of the house. There was ambient beeps and bips that came from like frogs or thunder when outside, and the suspenseful shock ditty that came up when you found a corpse, but there really wasn't much of note.
Additional: While the estate may not seem too spacious, there is definitely enough to discover that you may not uncover it all throughout a single play through, especially if it is a blind run. The characters are colorful enough to stand out from the sparse interaction truly needed to get through the game, and if you dig deep enough, you can see that Roberta Williams (the creative mind behind this game) did an excellent job for this game's time. After all, it did end up getting a sequel game attached to the title line (Dagger of Amon Ra, will write on that at a later date). The Dijon estate holds many secrets, and with those secrets, more will only become available. Couple this with the piracy protection for the time and you have yourself an interesting game.
* A note about the piracy protection: This game came packaged with a notebook similar to the one that Laura ends up using for her own information, but this was a game manual like any other game's pre-packaged material. One thing to note was that it had the fingerprints of all of the characters involved in the play, and the first thing you come across when starting the game is an identification key. It will show you a fingerprint and it is your job to say who it belonged to by choosing from the choices. Failure to do so would close the game, but there was a work-around for this that they probably didn't take into account.
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