The Colonel’s Bequest is a point-and-click murder mystery game that uses “real-time” mechanics to give the player an active investigation experience involving traveling through rooms to find physical clues, peering through the eyeholes of paintings to hear secret conversations, and talking to NPCs to get information about suspects. As one of the first of its time (first released in 1989), this game takes some bold approaches to mechanics, and oftentimes fall flat, though the ideas explored can be observed both for their successes and failures to further the genre.
During the regularly scheduled Monday evening play sessions held for MAAD 14900, Alex Duarte, Hunter Kuhlemeier, and I chose to play The Colonel’s Bequest out of the possible “real-time mechanic games” options we had to choose from. To quote Kuhlemeier, “[The Colonel’s Bequest] is the worst gaming experience I have ever had.” Duarte remarked similarly. I found this interesting, considering the fact I personally had a wonderful time. I realized quickly though that there was one small difference: each of them took turns playing the game, while I watched and offered suggestions, but never took the helm. This led me to a really interesting question: What made the play experience so awful?
When in a friendship, there is a certain aspect of doing activities together where small amounts of pain to one member of a group is enjoyable for the others to observe. This has been seen time and time again, and at times, friends can be no better than bullies when it comes to pain reactions. And thus, as I think more on it, perhaps what made the game so unenjoyable to play was exactly what was enjoyable to watch. In talking with my companions afterwards, they shared similar experiences: the game only got unenjoyable once they themselves took the controls. There are a couple factors that I think played into this.
The first factor was definitely the movement. Rather than a standard movement system where players use W, A, S, and D or the arrow keys, holding them down to instruct the character how to move through the space, The Colonel’s Bequest instead has a press-and-release movement system, and in fact, trying to press and hold down the arrow keys leads to the game becoming slow and unresponsive. Beyond that, even when the movement was used in the intended way, the character would consistently get snagged on set pieces and invisible barriers. As a result of these, moving anywhere in any quick fashion is nearly impossible. Additionally, many modern-day point-and-click games have additional measures built into their movement system to allow the player to type a written command to move to a specific area; when used to those systems, coming to this early exploration of the genre can be met with frustration.
The second large frustration is the data gathering methods. The biggest problem here was the idea that due to how time passes, data is incredibly easy to miss. Throughout the game, various things happen that are time-sensitive, and the only way to catch them is to go to the correct place at the correct time. This becomes a problem when time progresses by simply walking into specific rooms, pushing the clock later into the night and removing any chance of hearing important conversations, barring returning to previous saves (which are manually done, the game does not save automatically), making players do things again and again in order to find everything. Additionally, sometimes the game expects one specific command to do a certain action, so even when you know what you are supposed to do, there are times where the player sits there typing 20 different commands before finding the one that the game expects to actually execute the action.
Each of these alone and even together, while frustrating, can still be played with some success, if not for the third frustration, which is how punishing and random the possible ways to die are. Upon further analysis, it is definitely understandable to recognize this problem as a product of its time, where games weren’t taken quite so seriously and unavoidable, unfair deaths were probably a little bit funnier for the player (don’t get me wrong, they were hilarious to me). The most egregious example of this is that at some point in the evening, the chandelier in the front entryway begins shaking (which you can only see if you approach from the second floor) and from that point on, if the player walks underneath it, it falls on the player’s character, crushing them and instantly ending the game. I imagine that the intent is to be a reference to Clue, released 4 years prior, as other references to this have been seen previously, such as the titular colonel’s name being Colonel Dijon (referencing Colonel Mustard from Clue). Other unfair deaths include being grabbed from a mysterious person inside a closet upon inspecting it, opening the gate in front of a horse which kicks you to death, and using a cane found somewhere else in the house to pull the string on the old bell outside, which promptly falls on the character’s head. All of these deaths are unpredictable and most certainly not fair, and really interrupts the flow of play when the player is trying to focus on a specific task.
With all this information on the table, it is easy to see how a player in control of the game could be extremely frustrated with the result. Even using a guide, we only got through the first three of eight acts in the time that we had, and by the end, both players were ready to call it quits. Not having this control gives the spectator a different perspective, and watching my friends get slowly deteriorated by this, upon closer look, torturous game was a delight. But maybe that says more about me than the game itself.
Written by Echo Ziemba
Intermittent Mechanism 