by Matt Brennan

Mystery House, an Apple II mystery game that roughly follows the plot of Agatha Christie’s groundbreaking 1939 murder mystery novel And Then There Were None, is an interesting hybrid of the many concepts of contemporary video games that were being thrown around at the time of the game’s development and release in 1980. The game is ostensibly a text adventure in nature, relying on the player to input commands via a text parser as in text adventures like Adventure or Zork, but with primitive graphics similar to those seen on Atari 2600 systems of the time. This was a great feat for game development, and doubtless Mystery House has its place among the original cornerstone video games that shaped the medium into what it is today. However, it does not hold up in any real regard when returned to in the present day.

Mystery House is at its core a balancing act. Its developers deserve their flowers for what they were able to accomplish with it, combining graphics and story-driving text into a single product, but at its core is a balancing act between these two main components. The text and image don’t operate independently of each other, but they don’t always work together either and can create some nasty overlaps that affect the player’s experience. In addition to this is the text parser, which is regularly a hindrance to the player and nearly impossible to move around with, let alone solve a string of murders.

The game’s ambition and scale is obvious from the start, and the inventive use of graphics puts these qualities on full display, but that just makes it all the more frustrating when the player is stuck wrestling with the parser for minutes on end just to accomplish the slightest interaction with the world of Mystery House. Whether it’s inspecting a crime scene, picking something up, moving between rooms (and even just walking forwards is a challenge), or most infamously attempting to turn on the water, the terrible text parser will find ways to rebel at every turn and turn an experience that should be awe-inspiring for its accomplishments into a downright miserable slog due to its shortcomings. (Worse still, according to the game’s guide on the microm8 emulator, the way I experienced Mystery House, the inept text parser was packaged as a feature of the game rather than a bug as it should have; the game pats itself on the back for its immense difficulty, neglecting the fact that so much of the difficulty with the game is artificial and a result of Mystery House’s chief misuse of the adventure form.)

From a technological standpoint and a development perspective, Mystery House is still a triumph in every sense of the word. While this does make the glaring issues that make the game a difficulty to play more glaring and somewhat ironic, but the game succeeds in its strange marriage of text-based game design and graphics in a way that would ultimately set off a whole genre of adventure games after itself. While Adventure and contemporary adventure games could describe the cave or the dungeon using its words, Mystery House was alone in its capability to take the plot of an adventure and show it directly to the player as a picture.

However, again, the parser comes back to center stage, the only way to control the player character fighting the player every chance it gets. Mystery House doesn’t have many places in which it falls short. The display is often perfectly fine, and while having text block the action on the screen can be a pain, it’s easy to fix. The graphics are excellent for their time, especially when deployed on the scale that they are in Mystery House; the fact that they were able to create such stellar graphics for a game that was for all intents and purposes text-based and make it work deserves commendation. The story itself is excellent, a loose take-off of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None that plays to its strengths to create an air of mystery and danger within the game that gets genuinely tense as the bodies start to pile up. The only significant issue with the game is the controls, the text parser—but that’s a backbreaking issue considering how crucial the parser is to the game experience.

Mystery House is a fascinating game on a truly ambitious scale for its time and level of sophistication, sunk by one single fatal flaw. Looking at the game around this flaw shows that all elements are clearly there for an excellent adventure, as the game has a lot of good ideas and executes them all well. Sadly, and let this be a lesson to aspiring game developers everywhere, the player’s experience is quickly derailed by a control parser that regularly feels unfinished and unable to handle the demands of the game.