Extropia’s Retro-gaming: ‘Uninvited’

EXTROPIA’S RETRO-GAMING: ‘UNINVITED’

It is a dark, stormy night, and two closely-related family members are travelling down a lonely road. All of a sudden, a flash of lightning reveals a figure standing in the the road. The driver swerves to miss this mysterious figure, and crashes the car. When he regains consciousness, he finds he is now alone. Discovering what happened to his relation will require abandoning the car and setting off on a perilous journey...

For any PlayStation owners who like Japanese horror games, this introduction should sound familiar. But, we are not here to talk about Silent Hill but a much older game. The scenario outlined above was the introduction to Icom Simulation’s horror adventure game, ‘Uninvited’, which came out some time in the late 80s.

The main action of this game took place in a creepy mansion. As this game was designed to run on much earlier machines than the likes of PlayStation, it could not rely on the sort of cinematic visuals that games like Resident Evil employed. Nevertheless, thanks to its use of atmospheric sound effects, it actually did a reasonable job of creating a foreboding atmosphere.

In terms of game mechanics, this adventure game belonged to the genre that largely ditched the old method of inputting text, such as “walk north and open the iron door”, and instead opted for a point and click system. Any command you wished to issue involved using the eight COMMAND options, which were ‘EXAMINE’, ‘OPEN’, ‘CLOSE’, ‘SPEAK’, ‘OPERATE’, ‘GO’, ‘HIT’ and ‘CONSUME’. Each scene of the story was illustrated with a nicely detailed picture, sometimes with a bit of animation to liven things up a bit. By using the mouse pointer to click on items in the picture, such as a door, or a chest of drawers, and then clicking on the requisite command, you could walk around, opening this, operating that, and thereby solving the game’s puzzles and uncovering the secret of what happened to your missing brother.

As anyone who has played an adventure game will know, this kind of game entails finding stuff and holding onto it until you can use it at a later date. The use of mouse operation gave this game a very intuitive way of picking stuff up and storing it for later use. You literally dragged items you wanted from the main screen, and dropped them into an inventory window. Opening containers, draws and stuff like that opened a separate window showing their contents, so if you were to go into a place with lots of things to open, such as a kitchen, you could end up with lots and lots of windows on your screen. Fortunately, with the exception of the main screen depicting the action, these screens could be resized and rearranged, enabling you to manage your inventory.

Like I said before, this managed to be a pretty atmospheric game despite the obvious limitations of hardware from around this time. The sound effects were pretty spot on, and it actually made me jump from time to time. It’s method of control was also pretty flexible, enabling a surprising amount of actions to be built up from what were only eight options, although compared to the subtlety you could have got from a sophisticated text parser, I suppose it was lacking. Also, I played this game on an Amiga, and so I was using a mouse which suited this kind of system really well. I have heard this game also came out for consoles like the Sega system. I can only imagine it was a real pain to try and play this using a game controller to operate a pointer. Another criticism is that oftentimes a logical solution to a puzzle just wouldn’t work. Like, for instance, you would work out that something was hidden inside a pillow, and that something like a knife was required to cut the pillow open and retrieve said item. You had to have the knife in order to complete this task, whereas any other sharp object you might have picked up, which really should have served you just was well, was of no use for this particular task at all.

Still, these are all pretty minor gripes and overall this game did a very good job of creating a decent, spooky atmosphere and a sense of mystery that kept you playing on to the end.

Thanks to Icom Simulations for the images