Maxwell Manor: Skull of Doom (1984)

Name:Maxwell Manor
Number:206
Year:1984
Publisher:Avalon Hill
Developer:William Maxwell
Genre:Top-Down Shooter/Survival Horror
Difficulty:5/5
Time:2 hours 10 minutes
Won:No (83W/66L)

If there's one thing that hasn't changed over the years in solo development, it's the habit for developers to include themselves in a game, usually as a fountain of wisdom or merely as some god figure. The habit seems inescapable for most, though it is better than obvious author stand-ins stating their opinions on the tax rate and the link between gum disease and heart disease. Maxwell Mansion does something unusual, a dungeon named after the author. But rather than being Maxwell's dungeons of the unforgiven, the unnamed figure who owned the mansion is dead, and it's up to you to ensure further deaths don't happen by finding the skull of doom.

No, no car travels down the road to my knowledge.

You are allowed to pick from 100 game situations and 10 difficulty settings for a total of 999 options. I picked game 000, because why not? Starting off, you're in the middle of a road. Near me are a gun and a shield. The joystick moves and the button does various things. A quick press uses the object in your hand. Holding the button and pressing left/right switches between items, the same with up looks and down drops. Screen movement changes between scrolling and "flip" scrolling.

At the start you get two options. South to the graveyard and north to the manor. The front gate of the manor is locked, naturally and there's no other way in. I looked all the way around. There's a vase containing bullets on the side for some reason. Vases tie into the time mechanic you see, every hour they respawn, not that you'll be playing in one session long enough for that to happen. It's a nice-looking game though, that dirt texture is top notch, and believe me, I know how hard it is to make a dirt texture. So, since that petered out, the graveyard.

When you die, you're brought to a place called limbo. Objects that you can't interact with appear as you reach a higher score. The first time you're here, you can walk in any direction and you return to life. Afterwards, one direction holds life, and the others result in the end of your game. Assuming you didn't know that S saves and L loads. Saving only seems to be good for the currently active game, as soon as you quit the emulator your save disappears. Possibly, it's just a weird emulator issue since this is a tape game.

I figure out the way in...eventually. If you go left or right while in front of the mansion, after a certain point you're sent down, back towards the opening area. If you go further left or right and then up, the door opens, and a path in through the back appears. I went in through the front door.

Three vases were here, each containing 6 bullets, and a hand popping up out of the wall shooting at you. I advance but a wall appears around it, so I assume that the hand is blocking the way out. The shield blocks bullets if its in the path, and you can shoot back, but not both at once. Shooting is tricky because bullets hit each other, and even if you do shoot it, it comes back. I noticed I shot one of the walls, and making a conclusion from that, shot the wall north. You can only shoot side to side, which is unfortunate, but you can destroy the wall. Or you can only take two of the vases and the wall never appears at all. Sometimes.

This isn't actually inside the mansion, no, it's a hedge maze or a path maze. I'm not 100% clear. Enemies occasionally pop up. This is annoying, because you have to be at the edge of the screen to scroll. No time to react, and you better believe this was designed with that in mind. You even lose a space of what little visibility you get while moving.

The first area I find through this maze is a mine. Inside the game changes into a sort of side-scrolling section. With jumping. Yeah. It's very awkward. The thing in the middle is a platform with two chains, climb up, then jump over to the other side and grab the key. Don't grab the treasure, because then a dart will pop out. I die this time, and after reloading I notice the key is gone. Uh-oh. So in-game saving isn't reliable either. Which is a shame, because this was really nice for 1984.

After eventually making my way out, I go through to the front door. Huh. I walk onto the mat and fall down. Oh, that old gag. Straight into a spike pit. Believe me when I say this is a game that needs to be played with save states. It's a good game, but it needs to move along quicker.

Inside are is a proper building. You can't go through the doors. So I go to the right, since I'd like to stick to this floor for now. Later, when I came back, I discovered that this is the only exit on this floor I can go through.

East changes the view again, to a room with a fireplace. Don't stand in front of the mask for too long or you'll get hit by an arrow, but do go in the fireplace. It has a cross, just be careful to dodge another pit, which technically isn't instant death, but more of a slow death. If I go right from here there's a dark room, which really just has a darker palette. I can't go far in there, or I die. Time to go upstairs.

Upstairs, actually downstairs, is more mazes, with more enemies. East of the staircase is this room, shoots some walls to get what I thought was an important item, but is just treasure. All while under threat from one of those wall creatures. This is pretty much what you get upstairs, each room has it's own gimmick. It's less survival horror and more one of those platformers with short but hundreds of levels, each a bizarre new challenge.

There's a creature that consistently pops up here, a spider. According to the game's hint book, a vampire spider. By the time I figured this out I didn't have the cross, opting to go from the front door directly to the basement again. Here after going up, then left then down, I find a candle, needed to enter that dark room. My way out is a tedious maze, finally leading out through the mansion's backdoor.

The dark room just has some vases containing ammo, seemingly all vases contain ammo. But the room next contains this vital hint. From reading the hintbook, the surprisingly unhelpful hint book, I knew I needed the skull to reach the graveyard. Rather than further explore the basement, I figure out that I have to use the key to open doors.

Northwest of the lobby is this. Yeah, this game isn't trying to annoy the player or anything. If you missed the platform, tough luck, you get shot when it reaches the end. There's a room after this where you just jump over a robot thingy, unless you want a treasure, requiring you to make precision jumping in this engine.

The skull. Uh-oh, I don't know how I can get this. The flashing stuff isn't something you can climb. I assume at one point that the object there needs to be shot. It can be, but that does nothing. So I try going down, this leads to a ledge, with an opening to the right, and to the left a series of platforms which end in a wall. Right eventually leads to a room with more of that particular object, which pushes the player up here, and a rope which is being eaten by something. I can't get up that rope, so at this point I have no option forward and the game is effectively over.

I suspected at this point that the correct answer out of the room would be to arrive from the top onto the little object and reach the skull that way, but the hint book says that you have to jump up to reach there. So I have no idea how you're supposed to win. Neither does anyone else seem to be able to, judging by what videos seem to exist on this game.

Weapons:
There's supposed to be a sword in addition to the gun, somewhere. Never found it, and frankly there's enough ammo for the gun that it isn't a problem. What is a problem is how the gun only allows you to shoot left and right. 1/10

Enemies:
A couple of gimmick enemies and then your usual allotment of melee enemies, all in the slow department. 2/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
The concepts for individual levels is well-thought out, albeit hampered in some respects, but between the important bits you get mazes. Mazes, mazes, mazes. With this screen-scrolling and the PC dying in one hit, this isn't very nice. 4/10

Player Agency:
The top-down controls are fine, but the platforming is truly dreadful. Selecting items isn't so easy either, especially since the game likes throwing arrows at you if you stand still for too long. 3/10

Interactivity:
Depending on the room you can shoot walls, but mostly you just bump into things and hope that works, in addition to the occasional puzzle room. 3/10

Atmosphere:
Perhaps not truly scary anymore, but the game has enough surprises up its sleeves to unnerve the player in some scenes. 3/10

Graphics:
Some very nice tiles, but most character sprites have a really low number of frames or just don't look like much. 3/10

Story:
Your basic intro text scrawl. 0/10

Sound/Music:
Simple blips and bloops, but mostly non-intrusive and contributing somewhat to the atmosphere. 2/10

I feel generous, so I'll give it an additional point. That's 22.

A very apt comparison is to modern indie darling Faith, a kind of top-down survival horror game which does that whole retro-styled, but clearly taking advantage of modern features kind of game. It kind of looks like a C64 game, but it has way too much animation and sound, including the use of a voice synth for the C64. Both games involve arriving from somewhere else to deal with a tragedy that's already happened, the use of full-screen text to state something important to the narration, and not quite survival horror but perhaps it actually is gameplay.

I would have given a stronger chance towards reaching the end of this one if I could, but unfortunately time and an inability to make a proper save hampered my enjoyment of this one. This is basically the spiritual ancestor of those horror games you play once, enjoy then, then forget about.

I note that 1984 is shaping up to be a better year than previous ones. Not just on average or because I've been ignoring games I don't have anything interesting to say, but because with this game, 1984 has hit 3 titles over 20 points, which is more than any previous year. I've actually had enough to say about some games that it hits my usual goal for the bar minimum to say about a game, not just my early game target. 1984 is proceeding well, though I suspect progress will come to a halt once I get back onto 1992 FPS titles.