Stumbling through Uninvited

[davidn]

After two weeks with my parents here and not really working on anything during the evenings in favour of actually going and enjoying life with people, I'm back on my computer again now. I've missed these - have you?

This time, I picked up a game that I'd been aware of for ages, but hadn't ever tried - a game which, as I was to find out during the course of this video, contains three hundred rooms, six thousand inventory items, and a puzzle. It's Uninvited!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bERyeu6_Z0g

I actually did this about a fortnight ago, but it took me this long to finally edit it together. I think I got a few good moments out of it, but the majority of the video is of wandering around hoovering up items from most of the house and not really understanding what to do - the pitfalls of the adventure game genre. By the end I felt like I was just getting started, but the video had already been going on for over twenty minutes, so I felt it best to quit while I was ahead.

I think I'll do something more actiony again next time, that I have a decent chance of grasping entirely instantly - perhaps Marble Madness.

Please don't laugh at the way I say "Gameboy".

Comments

[davidn]

A wheelbarrow and an item-hoover that feeds into it! I really cannot imagine using a tenth of the items that I picked up here - particularly as there's another cupboard-of-stuff just around the corner from where I stopped playing. (Much like Mortal Kombat, it was when the game started becoming weird that I decided I couldn't really take any more.)

The NES Shadowgate does bring you back to life just before you made your fatal mistake (which you do, very often) - so dying doesn't feel as oppressive as it otherwise would, seeing as it lurks around every corner, straight line and obviously intact ladder. (I take it the Mac versions didn't do this?) The Shadowgate character's particular brand of stupidity seemed to be in dying in every way possible... this one seemed to go for the approach of having been told precisely what to do, down to opening a book or bottle as a necessary prerequisite for using it (which I think would have been implied by the fact that you're using it at all).

I thought that I put a bit of a weird Kensingtonian inflection on the word "Gameboy". However, I could see that being very much lost among all the other words that I pronounce more notably transatlantically, now that I think about it.

There was quite a string of shocking muttering there, but I thought it sounded funnier with the bleeps. Also my mum knows about these videos.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

In the Mac shadowgate, you had to load a save file when you died! You can imagine how many save files we had, after a while :P

[davidn]

At least, in an unusually generous gesture for the time, I can't think of any places where you can make the game unwinnable. I used to think that you could block your path permanently in the coffin room in Shadowgate, but apparently you can use an unlabelled bottle to dissolve the slime away... if you think like the game designers.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

What, in Shadowgate? It's FULL of ways to permanently wreck the game! Admittedly I can't think of a ton off the top of my head, but I think the hammer breaks if you don't use it on the right mirror, and I know you can fail to pick up items, or use them on inconsequential things.... to be fair, I guess the more I think about it, MOST of the situations like that (that I can remember) involve it being obvious that you've done wrong before you can leave the room... I'm almost certain there are some more nefarious ones, though.

This, of course, goes without mentioning the problem of saving after you've left yourself with not enough torches to finish the game...

[davidn]

I see... then in the Gameboy one that I played, they generously "fixed" those points by making them just kill you instead! If you break the mirror on the left, then shards of glass fly at you, and into your brain, and dead, and the one on the right opens a portal into deep space that you're then sucked through.

Torches, though, those are always going to be an unavoidable problem. Particularly as I used to reignite them so much earlier than I needed to to avoid hearing that music...