So I’ve been meaning to start a blog about random things
that I like for a while now, and I’ve decided I’m going to start it off with a
game I played recently that really touched on a lot of interests of mine. It’s the great Uninvited, for the NES, and I absolutely
loved it.
I had to track the thing down, first, for which I have to
thank Ebay (it’s getting hard to find these old games in the wild, now!). It’s part of a series, of course, the
renowned MacVenture series. I had played
Shadowgate before, and loved it, (even when having to resort to a walkthrough
for one frustrating part) and I got Déjà Vu along with Uninvited. I had a lot of fun just marveling over the
amazing and cheesy cover art for the game, with a badly dressed and apparently
crystal meth-smoking skeleton. It just
doesn’t get awesome like this anymore.
As usual, the game starts off by throwing you right into the
thick of things in an interesting way.
You and your sister are driving along a deserted road when a mysterious
form manifests ahead of you, crashing your car into a tree and causing you to
lose consciousness. When you wake up
you’re trapped in the car, with your sister nowhere in sight. The gas is leaking out of the car at a
dangerous rate, and if you goof off too long examining the car (like I did!)
you burn up hideously in a ball of flames.
Pretty dark stuff for an NES game.
Anyway, your sister has somehow been spirited away to a very
dark mansion along this deserted road.
It’s the mansion itself that really captured my interest and set the
mood for the game. It’s august, and
mysterious, and somehow quaint, as the doors shut behind you and you find
yourself in a lonely, once-occupied home for a family apparently consumed with
the occult. There are all the usual
books on arcane subjects, with silly faux-Latin names, and star charts, and
maps of obscure places. It seems to be a
perfect home for people with interesting but useless interests, which is pretty
awesome. Apparently when they weren’t
playing chess or wandering in their giant labyrinth they were summoning
once-lost demons and reading long lists of names in a language that never
really existed.
There’s a genuine sense of danger in exploring the house, as
it seems to emanate a very real malevolent spirit. It will, in fact, kill you at every
step. There are also useless but
once-needed relics of life in the old place, like silverware, and stores of
food (and also a nearly unbreakable jar of cookies for a cookie demon) that all
contribute to the sense of actually having lived in the house. It strikes me as a kind of early predecessor
to games like Shadowgate 64, which to me very successfully captured the spirit
of isolation and haunting memory in a place once occupied by both sorcerers and
grieving mothers and fathers.
But yeah, much like in Shadowgate, you will die, and you
will probably die often. You have to
love getting mauled to death by the infamous Scarlet O’Hara, and I rather like
the very detailed zombie who is just waiting to destroy you. The deaths aren’t quite as humorous or
ubiquitous as in Shadowgate, but they’re pretty fun, and the images are often
pretty disturbing for an NES game.
There’s even a malevolent ruby that will slowly invade your mind and
cause you to more or less go insane and die while this crazy scary red skull
haunts your every moment. But the skull
looks like it brushes its teeth, so maybe it’s not all bad.
Another strength of the game is the music. I would personally rank its soundtrack a
little lower than Shadowgate’s, or Déjà Vu’s, but it’s a very strong soundtrack
in its own right. Daylight is the
standout, a haunting, magisterial ode that genuinely captures the feel of the
mysterious grounds of the manor. The
upstairs theme is great, too, a slightly more mischievous, upbeat number, and
the labyrinth and reservoir themes are appropriately dizzying and
beautiful. And the cookie demon thing’s
theme is just fantastic.
I have to admit to having a weakness to games like this,
because I have a genuine interest in crazy Latin and Greek literature and
obscure Biblical apocrypha and things like that. I think it’s always neat to see what popular
culture does with the occult, and the abiding fascination it holds for us even
now, when most of us (at least I’m assuming) don’t really believe you can
transmute base metals into gold (even in a Jungian sense) or summon
animal-headed demons with fancy names who will turn you invisible and this sort
of thing. There’s a sense of looking
after hidden things, invisible things, which I think is important, much like
fighting giant robots and searching for dragons.
I also think it’s really neat that a lot of the story is
told through journals and documents that you find locked away throughout the
house. Some of them aren’t even
particularly important to the plot, but they reveal a little about both the
owners of the home and the two principal students of the master.
So in conclusion, and with a long breath, I have to say that
I really enjoyed this game, and I’m a little sad it’s over. I’d really like to see games like this still
being developed. It’s hard to find the
actual carts, now. They’re like little
treasures at this point, which is kind of awesome. My only criticism would be that it seemed to
end a little abruptly, once a few things fell into place at the end, and much
like in Shadowgate a lot of the puzzles and item usage didn’t make nearly as
much sense as in Déjà Vu (or any sense at all, really, in a few cases). But I really had a blast with this game, so I
recommend it to anyone who likes the classic point and click games or pretty
much anything to do with creepy mansions and that sort of thing. It won’t disappoint.
