A silverlock companion series#
He asked me a series of trivia-style questions to make sure that I was experienced and wise enough to handle what was to come around the next corner. The fisherman by the lake is a perfect example. Characters are introduced and then never seen again, and as the game goes on each new section feels completely separate to the whole, being both random and unsatisfying. The story of Hugo’s plight may have been similar in premise to that of Maniac Mansion, but while that classic had twists and turns, warped yet interesting characters, and an evolving storyline, the same can’t be said for Hugo’s House of Horrors. It's just a list, with no way to investigate or interact with anything from within. Oh, and the inventory is supposed to look like this (this is in DOSBox).
Overall the game didn’t feel very professional, because it wasn’t! I was misled numerous times, especially with all the “you are not close enough” messages, and the exactness required for certain complex commands were harsh. The collision detection was crap and the parser nowhere near what the competition were using at the time. Even with the improvements though, the interface was pretty bad. I was able to find out exactly what it was by simply putting the cursor on it, so who knows how long it would have taken otherwise. A lot of players struggled to guess what it was, as it really didn’t look like a mask at all for anyone that wasn’t specifically looking for one. If I’m completely honest with myself, I think the improved interface helped me quite a bit with one particular part of the game, being the discovery of the mask in the closet. Yes, I know Laukku has been telling me not to use it for ages, but now I finally understand why! In this game’s case, SCUMMVM added a mouse interface that originally wasn’t there, and it also changed the dialogue boxes and made it so items in the game were labelled when the cursor was moved across them. I have to mention straight up that I played the game through SCUMMVM and really wish I hadn’t. Solving puzzles is pretty straight forward when there are only a handful of items available in the whole game. That was clearly inserted to make the player go outside the game for the answer, and while there’s no rule that says a game developer should never do that, it sure ended up being expensive for me! Making the player walk between two rocks (which hardly look like two rocks at all) to reach a completely unapparent underground area is not very fair, and don’t get me started on the Roy Rogers trivia question. There were a couple of parts in the game that can cause head scratching, but neither of those were puzzles in the truest sense. The bung is obviously going to fix the hole in the boat, and the meat is clearly going to distract the hungry dog.
A silverlock companion code#
There’s not really any point in having a door secured with a combination lock, if the code is going to be written in giant red letters on the bathroom mirror. It doesn’t help that there is such a limited environment, with only a handful of collectible items to be discovered, but I don’t think it would have mattered anyway. The problem is that these traditional puzzles are way too easy. The puzzles in Hugo’s House of Horrors are of the more traditional variety, with the player in most cases having to find the right item to be able to progress past each obstacle towards an ultimate goal. The only question is how low will it go?! Before I can begin that new adventure though, I need to tie things up for Hugo’s House of Horrors. It’s a game I’ve never played but always wanted to.
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