CGA-2026-10 š¹ļøšļø š¦š» INSERT CARTRIDGE š¢ Spooky Mansion Adventures
Introduction
It was a dark and stormy night...
Rain hammered the car roof with the ferocity of hail. The windshield wipers did little to help as sheets of water cascaded down the glass between every beat. The road itself was dark with no lights besides your headlights, the beams casting eerie shadows on the gnarled trees as you drove past.
Or they would, if the car was moving.
Because of course the car broke down, leaving you stranded on a remote country road far from the nearest town. You sat in the driver's seat looking at the MapQuest printout, determining it to be useless given the lack of signage on remote country roads.
You did, however, receive a surprisingly detailed novelty map of local landmarks from when you stopped at a diner an hour ago. Squinting out the window, the headlights just illuminated a large rock with a pointed tip near the base of a tree. A good match for the "Wytch Hat Stone" on the map.
According to the novelty map, there were three mansions nearby: the Edison Mansion, the Derceto Manor, and the DeFoe Manor. Perhaps one of them would have a phone you could use. Or at least be a quieter place to spend the night, the incessant hammering of the raindrops was really loud. The flashes of lightning every time you mumbled the names of any mansion would help illuminate your way.
And surely the "Beware And Avoid" heading on the map was just a marketing gimmick, right?
Welcome to the Spooky Mansion Arcade Special!
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I shall be your hostess this delightfully dreary evening.
Now as your hostess, I must be upfront with you: I have no personal experience with any of these titles. I originally nominated Maniac Mansion since I have wanted to play it for some time, but then realized there are many old games set in spooky mansions. And I also had the thought: what better time to explore some creepy mansions than October, the month most associated with all things spooky and creepy?
So for this month's adventure, I have selected three potential mansions for us to tour: the classic LucasArts game Maniac Mansion, the classic survival horror game Alone in the Dark, and the freeware adventure game 5 Days A Stranger. All three provide glimpses into different periods and niches of gaming history.
Maniac Mansion (1987) helped redefine the adventure game genre, and established LucasArts as a powerhouse in gaming. It removed many frustrations of the genre such as guessing and typing text commands in favor of one of the first point-and-click interfaces, or super-linear puzzles with specific solutions. It placed more emphasis on cinematic storytelling, and added humor to a generally serious genre.
Alone in the Dark (1992) meanwhile is one of the games that defined the survival horror genre alongside Sweet Home. It was the first 3D survival horror game, with many of its mechanics such as limited inventory and a focus on survival over combat appearing to this day. Even the first Resident Evil game was influenced by it, nixing the original plan of first-person gameplay for similar fixed camera angles.
5 Days a Stranger (2003) is comparatively lesser known and influential than the other two. However, it's also CGA's first foray into the early indie dev scene! This is a freeware game about a cat burglar who becomes trapped in a house with four others, and is the first part of a series called the Chzo Mythos. Its developer is likely to be familiar: Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, famous for the Zero Punctuation review series for The Escapist.
Also: it's free. Of all the games we've played to date, this may be the most accessible because it's always been free, so no legal barriers.
Moving on.
You have your choice of up to three beautiful mansions to explore. I have hopefully given you enough information to decide which to visit first. They can't be worse than spending the night in a tiny, cramped, broken car. Feel free to chant the names of whichever mansion you most prefer as you begin the mad dash through the rain. The dramatic lightning flashes are so convenient, aren't they?
I hope you all have a terrific time.
GAME INFORMATION
Maniac Mansion
Versions: Original (1987) (notes: NES versions had some changes/censorship to fit Nintendo's criteria)
Platforms: Commodore 64, Apple II, MS-DOS, Amiga, Atari ST, NES, Famicom, Classic Mac OS
Genre(s): Adventure
Stores:
Steam - On sale until October 8
GOG - On sale until October 7
Alone in the Dark
Versions: Original (1992), Remake (2024)
Platforms: MS-DOS, RISC OS, 3DO, Mac OS, PC-98, FM Towns, iOS
Genre(s): Survival Horror
Stores:
Steam - Original Trilogy - On sale until October 8
GOG - Original Trilogy - BIG sale until October 7!!! (And also just cheaper than Steam in general)
Steam - Remake - On sale until October 8
GOG - Remake - On sale until October 7
5 Days a Stranger
Versions: Original (2003)
Platforms: Windows
Genre(s): Adventure
Links: Mobygames
Downloads:
Official site
Adventure Games Studios site
Internet Archive
DOS Games Archive - This one has a "play online" button! No download required!
Game Setup
The main purpose of this topic is to get people up and running with the games. As such, it's recommended that you:
- Share which version of the games you're playing
- Share what hardware you're playing it on
- Share if there are any tools/mods that you recommend
- Share anything you think is important for people to know before they start the game
- Ask questions if you need help
Another purpose of this topic is to revisit the games and their time periods:
- Do you have any memories or associations with this game itself?
- What about its system or era?
- What aspects of retro gaming were common at the time?
- What other games from the same time period are you familiar with?
- What are you expecting from this game in particular?
Finally, this topic is the beginning discussion for people starting to play it:
- Post updates sharing your thoughts as you play.
- Ask for help if you get stuck.
- Offer help to others.
It is recommended that you reply to your own posts if you are making consecutive updates so that they are in the same thread.
IMPORTANT: Any links to the game should be legal distributions of the game only. Please do NOT link to any unauthorized copies.
IMPORTANT: Put any spoilers in a dropdown block. Copy/paste the block below if needed.
<details>
<summary>Spoilers</summary>
Spoiler text goes here.
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FAQ
What is CGA?
Colossal Game Adventure (CGA) is Tildes' retro video game club.
Each month we will play a different retro game/games, discuss our thoughts, and bask in the glorious digital experiences of yesteryear!
Colossal Game Adventure is a reference to Colossal Cave Adventure. It's one of the most influential games of all time, one of the first text-based interactive games, and one of the first games to be shared online.
What do we want to do with this group? Play influential games; interact with each other through text; and share the love for retro games online!
It also abbreviates to CGA (because we love chunky pixel art), and its name communicates the Colossal amount of fun and excitement that we have with retro video Games in our shared Adventure of playing them together.
Do I have to sign up?
No. Participation is open to all.
There is a Notification List that will get pinged each time a new topic goes up. If you would like to join that list, please PM u/kfwyre.
Are there restrictions on what/how to play?
Each month will have a focus game or games that will guide our discussions. Beyond that, there are no restrictions. The philosophy of CGA is to play in a way that works for you!
This means:
- Choose whichever version of the game you want.
- You can use cheats, save states, mods, etc.
- You can watch a streamer or longplay instead of playing it.
If you have already played a game and want a different experience:
- Try a randomizer or challenge run.
- Play a different version of it.
- Play a related game (sequel, spiritual successor, something inspired by it, etc.)
There is no wrong way to participate in CGA, and every different way someone participates will make for more interesting discussions.
What is the schedule?
Each month the Insert Cartidge topic will be posted on the 1st, while the Remove Cartridge topic will be posted on the 20th.
Nomination and voting topics will happen in March and September (every 6 months).
Schedules are also posted then.
All CGA topics are available using the colossal game adventure tag.
What do Insert and Remove Cartridge mean?
Inserting and removing cartridges are our retro metaphor for starting and stopping a given game or games.
The Insert Cartridge topic happens at the beginning of the month and is primarily about getting the game up and running.
The Remove Cartridge topic happens toward the end of the month and is primarily about people reflecting on the game now that they've played it.
There are no hard restrictions on what has to go in either topic, and each can be used to discuss the game, post updates, ask questions, etc.
Enter if you dare...
> PRESS START
(Credit to @Boojum for the splash screen!)
I'm currently staring down Timasomo AND an Arcade Special this month, so we'll see how much of either I can successfully make happen.
I was a PC Gamer subscriber way back in the day. Each issue came with an awesome demo disc full of little snippets of games to try out.
Except for that one time.
In July 2000, the disc that came with the issue wasn't demos but full games. I simply cannot convey how utterly exciting this was to teen me. It was like I had won a Vegas jackpot.
One of the games on the disc was Alone in the Dark, which I have memories of that are equal parts fond yet frustrated. I had played Resident Evil previously, thinking that RE was carving its own unique name for itself in the world of gaming. Turns out that, nope, Alone in the Dark actually laid that groundwork 4 years earlier, and RE was just following in its tank-controlled footsteps.
I loved the game's atmosphere, but its trial and error gameplay was grating for me, even by the standards of the time. I remember loving playing it, but also never even coming close to finishing it.
I then didn't touch the game for well over a decade, until I picked up the re-release of the original on GOG and decided to go back to it. This time I used a guide, so I was able to successfully finish the game without wanting to tear my hair out, though it admittedly did kill a lot of the game's (quite good) tension. The graphics are quaint these days, with its spookiness coming across much more cartoony than it did back in the day. Admitting that this game scared me feels like I'm fessing up to some bad secret now, because graphical fidelity has come so far that I don't think anyone can ever look at it now with the type of eyes we had on it back in the 90s.
I think, if I do manage to play it this month, I'm going to try out the 2024 reboot/remake rather than going back to the original. Despite having been so long since I've last played it (another decade), I still remember parts of it. That's honestly pretty rare. A lot of stuff I play slides right out of my memory these days, but not this one.
Meanwhile, Maniac Mansion and 5 Days a Stranger are new to me, so I think I'm more inclined to give those a shot first. Mansion has that classic, name-brand status that makes me feel like I need to play it just to have an opinion on it. Meanwhile, I love an indie darling, and I especially love mid-00s freeware games, so Stranger has genuine appeal to me too.
It's hilarious how on this "demo disc", this Daikatana demo - supposedly the newest hotness - gets upstaged by ancient DOS grime like the first Ultima game and Duke Nukem II.
Why is it disc 5.10 if it's for the July 2000 issue?
John Romeroās about to make you his bā NEVERMIND HEREāS KINGāS QUEST
And I have no idea on the numbering? If I had to guess: they started the demo discs after the magazine had already been running, so the 1.1 disc coincided with what ever issue they paired it with and then they just counted up from there. Thatās pure speculation though.
Sidequest: What are all the other Spooky Mansion Adventures out there?
We've got three listed for CGA right now (technically 4 if we count REmake in January). What about all the others?
Let's make a big megalist of ALL THE SPOOKY MANSION ADVENTURES WE CAN THINK OF. I'll edit things into the list as they come in:
The Comprehensive List of Spooky Mansion Adventures
If we focus on retro games, plenty were suggested in the nomination thread. I'll leave it to the people who recommended them to mention them, since I hadn't even heard of them.
Though I only just now remembered Clock Tower. Would've been a perfect fit for this month... Oh well.
Sweet Home also deserves a shoutout as the first survival horror game and precursor to Resident Evil!
If we expand beyond retro games to include more recent titles though, the RPG Maker genre is rife with spooky mansions. To highlight just a couple:
I added all those in, as well as the ones from the nominations topic.
I'm also kicking myself for only just now realizing that we all missed possibly THE quintessential game for the genre, which would have been great for this month as well:
Luigi's Mansion!
This may not qualify, depending on your definitions of āspookyā and āadventure,ā but last yearās Blue Prince has āmansionā in spades and itās really a terrific game. Much more puzzle than horror but itās plenty atmospheric and mysterious, and far deeper than it seems at first glance.
CGA Announcement: We have officially inserted the cartridges for the arcade special Spooky Mansion Adventures. Use this topic to get set up for the month, help other people get set up for the month, and start playing!
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There are a couple different versions of Maniac Mansion... I haven't played the original but I've played Maniac Mansion Deluxe and can recommend playing it that way. It appears to be the same game but with updated graphics.
But if you're going for the full 8-bit nostalgia factor--all official releases of Day of the Tentacle contain the complete, fully playable original Maniac Mansion as a built-in secret "mini-game"!
5 Days a Stranger is the first game in the Chzo Mythos series. If you enjoy it definitely play 7 Days a Skeptic, Trilby's Notes, 6 Days a Sacrifice, and Trilby: Art of Theft.
A note for purists who are looking for the original version of the game: the version you get out of your Day of the Tentacle copy depends on the version of Day of the Tentacle that you are playing and the language that you are playing it in.
With the original Day of the Tentacle (1993), the game prioritises the original 1987 version of Maniac Mansion, but falls back to the "enhanced" 1989 version for languages in which the 1987 version is not available. Meanwhile, Day of the Tentacle Remastered (2016) only gives you the 1989 version.
More information about different versions can be found here (your browser may complain about lack of https) and here (many of the embedded images sadly dead links by now).
Personally, I am playing the original C64 copy, just like
godRon intended. I believe the Steam and GOG releases also include it, although they launch with the 1989 version by default.Edit: A quick note on Maniac Mansion Deluxe -- while it's largely the same game with higher fidelity graphics, it removes some things to prevent dead ends, the graphics change the mood of the game, and there is additional content that doesn't exist in the original. In other words, it's a very well made fan remake, but it's definitely different from the original game.
If going the Deluxe route, do you recommend the original game or ScummVM?
Whichever is easiest to get running! I'm not sure there's a big difference for platforms which can run both
edit after a bit more research: if you are on Windows without a 4K or ultra-wide display, run the original AGS exe, otherwise run via ScummVM
Don't play 5DaS without the other games in its series! It stands alone, but barely, as the complete horror story is actually four point-and-click games in length, as the ritual deepens and recurs over centuries. I remember when these games were too scary for me to complete! Careful out there, game-stronauts!
The Chzo tetralogy is a remarkably good series and I love how each game experiments with a different user interface. Back when these games came out, my favourite was the third game Trilby's Notes, which uses a Sierra style text parser. I'm looking forward to revisiting the series this month.
The main issue with text parser games, and one of the main reasons for Maniac Mansion's then novel approach of using clickable verbs on the bottom of the screen and clickable objects on the graphical side of the screen, was the common frustration of having to fight the parser in text based games. Very often you knew exactly what you needed to do, but communicating it to the computer was difficult. One of the things I'm most excited about when it comes to AIs/LLMs is that we now finally live in an age where someone could create a text parser game that actually understands more or less anything you try to tell it.
In fact, we wouldn't necessarily even need text at all: by now, surely you should be able to control your adventure game protagonist simply by speaking to the game and telling it what you want to do. This could open up a whole new range of puzzles and experiences, as developers wouldn't be so constrained by user interfaces.
Stop the presses! Some beautiful soul has just released an English fan translation of the Famicom version of Maniac Mansion. The International House of Mojo (a LucasArts fan site) wrote about it today and you can find more information about the release here. I believe itās the first time the Famicom version is accessible to those of us who donāt speak Japanese.
Unlike the NES version, the Famicom release was not done by LucasFilm Games and ended up being quite different from the original. Not only graphically, but also in terms of many gameplay elements.
Iām excited about this! I do love LucasArts adventures but Iāve never actually played Maniac Mansion so itāll be fun to dig into. I have a hazy memory of playing a demo of the Mac version of Alone in the Dark back in the ā90s, I think it was just the beginning of the game. I remember being pretty awestruck by the graphics (in their proper temporal context) but was put off by the tank controls and alsoā¦ just the horrorness of it all. Iāve never really done horror.
I did play the first couple Czho Mythos games around 2010 or so and enjoyed them. Theyāre well-made and engaging but also legitimately disturbing. Donāt be fooled by the pixel art!
I'm considering checking out the Maniac Mansion Deluxe fan-remake after seeing it mentioned on Mobygames. (Honestly I'm surprised there hasn't been an official remake given its influence and legacy.) Also planning to most likely play 5 Days a Stranger inside a browser, since my primary device is a Macbook and it's made for Windows. As for Alone in the Dark... I am actually a coward when it comes to survival horror games, so still unsure if I'll try to play it or just watch someone else play it. (Maybe the old graphics and inevitably janky gameplay will make it a little less scary...)
By the way, when I hosted The Last Express, I came up with some fun meta challenges that didn't relate to the game itself, but the real world. Only one person completed one (and it was a coincidental completion), but it was still fun to think about. And spooky mansion-related challenges feel a lot more accessible than train, especially in October. So!
I hereby use my powers as host to issue a new round of Meta Challenges!
Once again, these will (mostly) have nothing to do with gameplay itself. The purpose is to spur some fun discussion, and also potentially spark some inspiration for fun activities to do outside of gaming! These are once again 100% optional and just for fun.
Those are all the challenges I've come up with. While they're all optional, I really hope you at least share your "canonical" deaths in whatever games you play. It'd be fun to see who would survive the longest in each of these mansions... Though given two of these are adventure games, I expect many of us will get killed by simple curiosity first rather than bad survival instincts.
Yay, more meta challenges! I still think fondly of that previous (glorious) train-on-a-train moment.
Does this mean it's so bad it wraps around to good again, or is it just so bad it's bad?
Also, if I somehow do miraculously have EXTRA time to game this month, I'd love to pick up Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare since it's another Dreamcast game that I've yet to play, and I always love taking things off that list. That counts as related media, right?
huh? lol I just realized the deluxe version is a fan remake. It seems so solid that I thought it was an official release. Much more legit than something like Meteor Mess 3D...
I may take some creative liberty on that last challenge - mixed with the spirit of CGA - and finally try out Alone in the Dark (2008), which I hear is a wonderful trainwreck of very creative ideas implemented as poorly as possible by overambitious driving game developers to the level of ludonarrative comedy. Will post results if I do!
I have never been more sold on a game. This quote should be on the box.
Update: I know I should be prioritizing the actual CGA games, but curiosity got the better of me. Iāve now played this for an hour.
Itās bad.
So bad that itās good? I wouldnāt necessarily go that far, but I have genuinely laughed several times (and not because the game is wanting you to).
Thus far itās almost a cross between Uncharted and QWOP. Thereās lots of climbing and big set pieces crumbling around you, but also the game lets you pick up objects and swing them around with the right joystick. This is absolutely as clumsy as it sounds.
I beat a zombie to death with a soup ladle in a very uncoordinated and protracted manner.
The game has a literal blink button that you have to use to clear your eyes.
Everything about it is janky and unpolished.
Iām honestly having a pretty decent time with it.
Sounds like the perfect reboot! :^)
Iām only upset that you hadnāt played from the times I told you about the kusoge glory.
I will warn you that when you first get into the car EVERY VERSION OF THE GAME is a frustrating buggy mess that will have you flying off of the level geometry but the sequence will end and regular gameplay will resume and more fun is to happen.
If anyone is interested in extracurricular activities around Maniac Mansion, the game designer Ron Gilbert gave a postmortem for the game at the Game Forum Germany in 2011 (and other places). It contains no real spoilers.
One could say that there have been three spiritual successors to the game over the years:
Day of the Tentacle (1993) is the official sequel. Ron Gilbert himself was no longer involved, but Maniac Mansion's co-project lead and sole artist Gary Winnick did work on it as a writer, and the game was led by Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman, with whom Gilbert had created the first two Monkey Island games. It's a classic in its own right.
The Cave (2013) is a game by Ron Gilbert (developed and published by Tim Schafer's studio Double Fine Productions) which develops some of the concepts introduced in Maniac Mansion, including how character selection works, and puts them into a more puzzle platformer type setup similar to games like Limbo. It's one of my personal favourites and I think was somewhat overlooked at the time of its release.
Thimbleweed Park (2017) was Gilbert's return to adventure games, together with Maniac Mansion co-creator Gary Winnick. It was pitched as an undiscovered LucasArts adventure game that could have been developed somewhere between Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island, and I think they delivered exactly that. Thimbleweed Park 2 is currently under development and set for a 2028 release.
I don't want to search for this since I always inadvertently read spoilers. Does Maniac Mansion let you know you've reached a dead end? Are there a lot of dead ends in the game?
There are a couple of places where you definitely know you have reached a dead end, but generally you wonāt know if you are in a winless state.
And yes, there are quite a few ways to play yourself into a dead end. In fact, Iād say itās almost certain to happen.
Maniac Mansion comes from an era when adventure games worked with a philosophy similar to what roguelike games employ these days. You are expected to try things out, fail, restart, try other things, fail, try again, and so on. Every ārunā you make gives you more information about the world and the puzzles. After a number of tries, and maybe some help from friends, you figure out what to do. Some games of the era also allowed you to play around with multiple save slots.
Maniac Mansion expands that philosophy and loop by allowing you to choose the kids you want to play as whenever you start a new game.
A couple of years after Maniac Mansion, the gameās designer Ron Gilbert wrote something of a manifesto where he argued against this type of design. You can read it on his website: Why Adventure Games Suck And What We Can Do About It.
Appreciate the explanation! Still, great game for 1988 and at least we get to play it without load ttimes, so restarting isn't as big a problem.
As I find myself in what I think is an unwinnable state in Maniac Mansion (I failed to pick up an object when it was available, and both of the kids that I selected for the run seem to require it to solve the game), I was reminded of last spring's Adventure Game Aptitude Test, which tested 831 players against Maniac Mansion and a four-hour completion deadline (in the spirit of How Long To Beat's rather ridiculous suggestion of 3.5 hours). Apparently, two people managed to pass the test, which is more than I thought could if they really had never played the game before. You can read about it over at Kotaku. As the article notes, this game was designed to be played for weeks or months, not hours.
At the other end of the spectrum, the current speedrun record for the game, as reported by speedrun.com, seems to be 3 minutes 51 seconds with a mod, and 8 minutes 24 seconds without it. It doesn't seem like a particularly popular speedrunning game, though. And this in turn reminds me: if you find the idea of people speedrunning classic adventure games interesting, the YouTube channel OneShortEye has excellent documentaries on many games and their speedrunning histories. Sadly, there isn't one for Maniac Mansion yet.
As I'll be starting my second attempt with Maniac Mansion, I'm contemplating switching from the original Commodore 64 version to the enhanced 1989 PC release. Partly for a fresh coat of paint, but mainly because ejecting, flipping and re-inserting the floppy disk whenever I move from one part of the mansion to another is starting to get a bit tiresome. Some areas, like standing in front of the garage, even seem to require data from both sides of the disk to be loaded. And I also encountered a disk read error at one point which forced me to reload an earlier save, so I'm a bit worried that something wonky is going on with the disk.
One thing that I had completely forgotten about is that first LucasFilm adventures lacked two verbs that one could argue became the very identity of all later adventure games from the studio: look and talk. Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, which followed Maniac Mansion, still didn't have them, but 1989's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade did. And I would say the first Monkey Island game perfected their use in 1990.
Anyway, I'm off to think about which two kids to pick for my second attempt at solving the mansion. Which kids are you guys playing as? (In case you haven't read the manual yet, keep in mind that your choice of kids determines how some of the main puzzles play out: "The story ā and your approach to rescuing Sandy ā will be different depending on which kids you choose and how you interact with the people and things inside the mansion itself.")
Are you playing on actual C64 hardware?
Ah, I indeed made it sound like I do! While I do own more C64s than my wife says is strictly speaking necessary, I decided against running the game on any of them as I only have 30-year-old PSUs and I fear they'll burn down the house if I use them. I should get around to buying a modern replacement.
Also, I think the last time I booted up one of the C64s, the disk drive was acting up. It's probably fixable, but I just haven't found the time to attend to it.
So, I have been playing Maniac Mansion on the C64 emulator VICE instead. It still requires ejecting and inserting disk images manually. Maybe there is a more elegant way to do it but that's how I use it.
Which would you recommend playing first, Maniac Mansion or 5 Days a Stranger? I use an old 32-bit Windows 7 laptop for gaming. These should run fine on there, right? I also have an old macOS High Sierra 2010 MacBook Air, but I didn't find Mac instructions for any of these games.
I canāt recommend a play order but I think both games should run fine on your Win7 machine. These arenāt exactly cutting-edge technology, lol. Alternately, you might consider using the Mac. Maniac Mansion will run in ScummVM (the āmmā in SCUMM literally stands for Maniac Mansion), and Iām reasonably confident that 5 Days a Stranger will run well in WINE.
Maniac Mansion is the big classic (indeed one of the biggest classics), so play it first if you want to explore gaming history.
5 Days a Stranger is arguably the better game, so play it first if you just want to play a good game.
I would assume (but can't be sure) that 5 Days runs fine on your Windows laptop and Maniac Mansion should be playable at least either in ScummVM or another emulator that runs on your systems. I've been playing the C64 version of MM with the VICE emulator on my more recent MacBook.