Publisher: Gray Design
Developer: Gray Design
Year: 1990
Platform: DOS, Windows

Rating: 1

One of the more popular shareware adventure games, Hugo’s House of Horrors, while short and easy, is not horrific in the slightest, unless of course you’re referring to the game design.

The plot is simply that your sweetheart Penelope never came home from a babysitting assignment, and you head to the spooky house to go in search of her. You control Hugo my moving him around with the arrow keys and typing simple commands into a parser.

The first puzzle involves getting into the house. The first instinct is to look under the mat, and surprisingly the game gives you kudos for trying. The next most logical option is that a key is hidden in the conspicuous pumpkin outside the door. Frustratingly, while you can look into the pumpkin and see there is some kind of object inside, you can’t reach into it and grab it. The answer is to drop the pumpkin so it breaks. This needlessly complicated solution is a good representation of how the rest of the game goes.

Once inside the mansion, you notice an old man walking into an upstairs room, and the game notes that you weren’t noticed. One gets the sense that there’ll be some cat and mouse activities to survive; but, alas, the humans present (with the exception of a very slow moving butler) are unconcerned with your presence. While you can die on several occasions, at no moment during play is anything remotely tense or creepy.

Part of this comes from the near-absence of music and sound. Part of this comes from the lack of animations. While a hungry dog can run up to you and kill you, if he does, your sprite simply turns horizontal and you are told you are dead. Not to mention that the dog seemingly can be in two places at once and can respawn if you type in an unexpected command. In general there is poor continuity. At one point the game’s mad scientist tells you he’s going to bed; however, he never appears in the house’s only bed and you never see him again.

The puzzles are mostly rudimentary. One lock requires you find a combination, which is hidden in plain sight. Most involve you using the obvious item in the obvious place. The most frustrating puzzle involves feeding the aforementioned hungry dog. It is obvious what to feed him, but apparently you must throw the food at him rather than drop it in front of him. The dog killed me a dozen times before I simply looked up the answer.

Descriptions of rooms and objects are quite terse. One item you must pick up is a mask, but it is very unobviously a mask, and looking at said mask provides no description. I eventually guessed correctly, which did not yield any satisfaction.

The game’s worst sin is a puzzle near the game’s end where some random-ass fisherman won’t let you pass unless you answer several questions about famous fantasy novels to prove your worth to your kidnapped girlfriend(!). The questions aren’t multiple choice, so unless you have literally read these books, there is no way to proceed. Unless of course you’re playing in the internet age and can look them up.

With help from the trusty internet, I finished the game in about an hour, hilariously with 196 out of a possible 190 points. I saved Penelope, who reveals herself to be…a McGuffin. Hugo avoids a rating of zero thanks to it being generally inoffensive with a couple of amusing jokes thrown in.