One of the first graphical adventures in first person, where the fatal outcomes were the real charm.
Happy Halloween everyone! Whether we participate in this holiday or not, the attraction of horror video games for this evening is undeniable where, according to Celtic legends, the spirits of the dead walk on earth while the kingdom of the fairies opens. Newly released Little Hope can be an attractive option to share with friends, as well as other releases this year. If we are alone, we can go for this year’s releases, like Resident Evil 3 Remake. Also, if classic horror overwhelms us, we can opt for disturbing titles that give us just the right dose of unease without causing a heart attack. On the other hand, there are those who want to choose a retro title that, although it lacks the spectacular nature of current video games, it did keep us in suspense in the past. This is Uninvited, a graphic adventure from ICOM Simulations in which danger lurks at every turn. And it is that the most innocuous decision could lead to the most absurd and creative death.
A pioneering graphic adventure on Mac
David Marsh was one of the creative minds behind one of the first first person point & clicks. In Adventure Gamer he recounts how he became part of the project: “I was doing ministerial work in a huge church in Chicago, when I met a programmer for a company called ICOM Simulations. I was an artist and had designed art for various machines, like Apple II and so on. The Mac had just come out and this man told me that he was working on a game called Deja Vu and that they had started another project called The Uninvited. These two were the first first-person adventure games to be sold to the user. They made good use of the window system. It was quite a leap to drag and use objects from window to window and interact with them and such. It was very neat. […] We moved it to all possible platforms: the Commodore 64, the Amiga, the Atari ST, the PC. In 4, 16 and 32 colors ”. Later on, Uninvited would be brought to the NES, with certain adaptations to meet the Nintendo label.
The Uninvited story was not notable for its originality, and the abrupt ending could be anticlimactic. Instead, what made the game exciting was the progress of the game and the constant fear of dying from a stupid decision. This interactive story began like so many other horror novels: After a car accident, our brother had disappeared. The only possible whereabouts was the grim mansion that loomed before us. Right at the beginning, the first puzzle was proposed to us: we had to get out of the car in time before it exploded. From then on, the investigation of the haunted house became a constant debate between life and death. With most of its rooms locked, we had to solve puzzles to gain access to new areas of the mansion, while dodging unpleasant encounters and mysterious finds.
Dave Marsh, one of the creators of Uninvited, photographed for Adventure Gamer.
The game’s interface, as Marsh pointed out, was very intuitive, which was praised by magazines like Computer Gaming World. With good graphics, a comfortable system of interaction by and the mouse as the main control, Uninvited was “much easier to handle than purely textual adventures and many other graphic adventures.” Also, Compute! He also praised its fluid gameplay, the solid logic of its puzzles, and “the feeling that evil lurked around every corner.” The control was deduced with the naked eye. We had three windows: one with our inventory, another with the available actions and another with the scenario that we had before us. With the mouse, we selected and combined the actions, inventory and objects in the environment. The cursor was a gloved hand that transformed into a spider when the text passed through the narrative sequences, which added a nice touch to a horror title with comic touches.
Death and mockery after every wrong decision
The horror of Uninvited was based on using an everyday environment in which we felt strange and in which we perceived a constant threat. A mansion like the ones we often see in horror movies, with mundane rooms and antique decor. Throughout the game, we are completely alone, beyond the specters that we will deal with inside the mansion, and we will not get any assistance. Loneliness is one of the pillars of the most primordial terror, as well as the transformation of a safe space into a trap. This mechanism is common in the genre and in all its formats, as analyzed by The Guardian. Furthermore, revisiting works where evil occurs in a home is an even more repulsive experience in 2020: “There is a more sinister version of those films that take place indoors. I’m talking about this gothic vision of ‘home sweet home’. In these films, when you close the door and lock it, you lock yourself in with uncertainty. These films play on that archetypal moment from When a Stranger Calls, in which Carol Kane discovers that the call comes from the same house. For all of us, who emerge reluctantly from seclusion, we remember how the cinema has reimagined our safe place as a threat. In these films, being locked up at home is the trap. “
Image from Uninvited, in one of its versions for Mac. The mysterious lady dressed as Scarlett O’Hara awaits.
The number of possible deaths in Uninvited was on the ICOM Simulations hallmark, and some of these were comically absurd. Some of them could even be considered Easter eggs, since you could only achieve them with deliberate action. For example, if we used the knife on ourselves, instead of the usual and expected “you can’t do that,” our character would accidentally commit suicide. We couldn’t take too long on our expedition, either: the game gave us an hour to leave the mansion with our brother safely, otherwise we would succumb to the curse and be possessed and transformed into zombies. It should be noted that time in Uninvited was not measured by seconds or minutes, but in movements. Every time we interacted with an object, talked to a character, or entered a room, time was consumed by one unit. If we exhausted our actions, we became part of the horrors of the haunted house.
Also, one of the greatest charms of Uninvited was the second-person narrative, inherited from textual adventures and essential to guide the story and the effects of the player’s actions. The sarcastic tone of the descriptions of some of the deaths lent a certain dark comedy to the work. For example, if we drank a bottle of poison, our outcome read like this: “You are unable to walk or move. The weakness you have felt has spread to your mind. During the last moments of your life, you ponder the wisdom of eating and drinking unknown substances ”. It is also worth mentioning the scene of the well; If we try to access it, the narrator will alert us to the giant spider that lives in it. If we insist several times, we will fulfill our purpose to verify that, indeed, the warning was not in vain and we will become the dinner of the creature. “There is a spider, what did you expect”, announces the narrator sarcastically.
Compilation of some of the most violent deaths on Uninvited
Scarlett O’Hara trauma
On the other hand, Uninvited gave us grotesque scenes that, without much audiovisual fanfare, managed to give us chills. This is the case of the most famous specter in the game: the woman dressed as Scarlett O’Hara, which became the cover of the NES version. His face was a preview of one of the most visceral deaths in the game.
We found this lady during the first minutes of the game. From the back – and if we didn’t recognize her from the NES cover – she could seem like a possible ally, someone asking us for help or providing us with clues as to our brother’s whereabouts. However, if we tried to interact with her, she would turn around to show a gaunt face and proceed to tear us apart with her bare hands while laughing crazily. Hardcore Gaming studies the impact of this outcome: “This is where the nature of the game, based on the text, is very effective. It transmits creepy images that shake us without showing us anything at all. That is, we will not see how they mutilate us little by little, but we will see a close-up of the horrible being that is killing us ”.
Close-up of “the lady dressed as Scarlett O’Hara” as she tears us apart.
A smoothed adaptation to NES
Uninvited was brought to the NES, which was a not inconsiderable process, as David Marsh recalls in Adventure Gamer: “Then Kemco-Seika came and told us they wanted to go ahead and bring some of the Mac adventures to that 8-bit console. , the NES. The specs were passed on to us and as you know they were very limited. We burst out laughing. We answered: ‘of course yes, try it, but you will not be able to, it will be a pain, a problem. It’s not going to be big enough. The screen isn’t big enough, not to mention the colors and the resolution. ‘ In the end, they came out with a pretty convincing product, especially when you consider all the NES games that were side scrolling. This was very different ”. Kemco-Seika was dedicated to the entire programming part, which ICOM was dedicated to supervising. The game was translated into Japanese and then English for the western version. However, there were several changes.
First of all, the person we had to rescue was not our younger brother, but rather the older sister. An Easter egg was included which consisted of including the main theme of Shadowgate – another ICOM title brought to Nintendo – if we used the phonograph in the arcade. The texts were simplified, and the description of many of the deaths was softened by their degree of brutality. Likewise, any element that could be offensive to religious freedom was eradicated: the crucifix that appears as one of the objects of the game was transformed into a chalice, and another cross that belonged to the decoration was removed. The pentagrams we found in our inquiries had become stars. The mansion’s original address was removed, although the name Master Crowley – a clear reference to the celebrated occultist Aleister Crowley – continued to appear on it. Finally, there was no time limit in the NES version, so we could dedicate as much time to the rescue of our sister as we wanted, as well as discovering all possible deaths as a personal achievement. Of course, if we decided to take the ruby, our character’s life began to be consumed unless we could get rid of the gem in time.
Uninvited start
Horror has progressed a lot since 1986, when ICOM Simulations invited us into a grim mansion without invitation. If tonight we decide to investigate this graphic adventure, we will fondly verify that its technology has nothing to do with the hyperrealism of today’s titles, in which 5.1 sound is capable of making us feel voices behind our necks. Few games, however, have the narrative delight of Uninvited texts, where the fine humor and explicit violence of its multiple endings are a timeless charm.
