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Review · Background · Walkthrough

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REVIEW
Anchorhead is considered a reference work in interactive fiction. The guys over at the prime interactive fiction source IFDB have Top-50 votings sessions every other year, and usually Anchorhead lands in the top 5. Classics do age though. Does this one age well? Like, it's almost 25 years old now, surely there's been more decent IF pieces since then? Let's see.

Anchorhead was originally written in Inform 6, so apart from the occasional text box and an individual status line there's no shnickshnack at all in the original 1998/1999 version. I'll stick to that one and check on the enhanced visuals of the 2018 Steam version later (while all screenshots are from the Steam version, coz it simply looks better). In case you don't know where to get interactive fiction games and how to run them: A good hub for quickly finding the game itself is the IFDB (hence de name). You'll need an interpreter program to run it (just like you need Word to run a .docx file), and you'll find plenty for example here, and if you're using Windows, Mac or Linux I'd recommend Gargoyle for a quick start. Or play it online at IFDB.

The Story

The game drops you off as a nameless woman who's just moved to the ficticious town of Anchorhead, Massachusetts with her husband Michael. Michael has inherited a mansion there, from a family branch you've never heard of - we've played enough mystery IF to know where this is going, and the term "Massachusetts" immediately rings the Lovecraft bell, and the Lovecraft quote at the beginning of the game doesn't help much in dispersing that impression. Michael is a bit of a bookworm and went off to the local university to do stuff while we are supposed to pick up the mansion key and meet him at uni.

From a game theory approach it's always a good idea to provide a "Explore and Advance" scenario to the player: Give him a game world to discover, then give him puzzles to solve in order to get on with the story. Walkthroughwise Anchorhead rather follows an "Advance and Explore" approach, but since there's no time limit at the beginning, the first steps are totally up to the player, and Anchorhead shines right from the start: The city of Anchorhead expands before your feet, ready to be explored, and you have a simple and reasonable task on your todo list that starts right where you are. A conventional, yet convincing way to drop the player into the game.

A refreshing move that Gentry took is something you usually don't realize - Anchorhead has a female protagonist and plays in present (well, 1998) time. Far from unusual for a text adventure, but if you've read and played through the Lovecraft canon you'll give these simple facts an approving nod. Feels fresh. Also, while a typical Lovecraftian story centers about fighting something (very, very) evil, Gentry puts quite some focus on the relationship between the protagonist and her husband. Michael is being... absorbed by something evil. What is the protagonist (and the player behind her) willing to do to fight that evil? To save her husband? An interesting question, although the average text adventure player will probably not even hear it but wield his sword instead, grit his teeth and jump into battle.

The intro

The Writing

The writing is... great, kinda. By today's standards it's a little bit thrifty, but it delivers all the necessary information and quite a bit of atmosphere. Not the pompous parade of adjectives that Lovecraft throws at you, but still... Every here and there the writing indicates there's dreadful things out there in the city that wait for you, and your dreams at night are vivid. In 1998 that probably blew you away. Given the verbosity of today's CYOA games the rather brief style of Anchorhead is actually quite refreshing. Once you've read the next chapter you'll know why the texts are so brief. Within these constraints Gentry manages to cough up some amazingly moody atmosphere. Example? Here's one from day 2:

>open child's coffin

Compelled by a ghoulish curiosity, you dig your fingers under the soft, rotting boards and pry up the lid. With the shriek of pulling nails and a shower of crumbling wood, the coffin comes open, and you look inside, expecting to find a child's tiny skeleton . . . Dear God. There's no child buried here. Instead, the coffin contains only the worm-eaten bones of some kind of animal.

You find that cheesy? Sorry. I enjoyed it. I do miss a bit atmosphere when dealing with NPCs - while the few answers they give are in line with the current situation and/or the overall atmosphere, they slightly tend to stand around like cardboard characters. Like, they don't really blend in with their surroundings. That's not a major issue though, and especially not for a 1998 game.

The Puzzles

The puzzles... They get more sophisticated over the course of the game. Again, check the next chapter for some background information. Some of the first few puzzles don't make much sense but they're very easy and don't perturb. Also, at the very beginning (until you reach the mansion) the game is a bit on rails, but that's not bad, draws you into the game and works as sort of a live tutorial. The map is quite large (30+ accesible rooms during the introductory day 1 alone) so drawing a map is mandatory. A peculiarity of the game is that much of the background story is told through documents that you find shattered across the game world - diaries, newspapers, files. A well-known feature in today's walking simulator graphic adventures, but back then that was a bit of a novelty iirc. You need to take notes carefully as a core aspect of the game is to find out about Michael's family - who's related to whom, when was what, the whole family history, as it's crucial to understanding the story of the game and solving some of its puzzles. Taking such detailed notes and consulting them occasionally may feel tedious to some - I actually enjoy it. Gives the game a deep background, a fourth dimension, a rich game world to delve in. As long as the info necessary to solve a puzzle is available at all times and not overly hidden I'm very fine with that.

Some of the puzzles are very old-school, in a negative, Scott Adams sense. Like, there's a locked door, you'll need a key, and it's locked behind a non-related puzzle in a non-related room. That's a valid puzzle, sure, but it's blended into the game world, not into the story. That let's the mark for puzzles lower a little towards "average".

Graphics

The screenshots on the Steam page give the impression that Anchorhead is graphic-heavy, but it's not. Every now and then there's an icon added to the text on which you can click to enlarge it, revealing a hand-drawn black-and-white picture. That's it. There's not even an auto-mapping feature, which is especially disappointing as it practically locks off millennials from playing the game, since they may have seen paper before but don't know what a pen is. The pictures are atmospheric at least. Plus, the Steam version is an executable of course (using Quixe), so no need to have an interpreter installed. The 1998 version needs an interpreter, but those are plenty and easy to come by, and there's an online interpreter linked from the IFDB that let's you play the game online without you even knowing there's an interpreter in the background.

The Implementation

One thing I need to criticize is the NPC implementation. The game world is designed in sufficient detail, but communication with NPCs, even with Michael, is limited to what's necessary. There's individual responses instead of the "There is no reply." provided by the system, but they're still generic and there's not really much the NPCs want to talk about. Probably caused by lack of memory, see next chapter. Still, that's disappointing, for talking to NPCs is one of the fun things to do in text adventures. Well, good to know anyway, if the NPCs are uncommunicative then we can be so, too, while playing the game.

Sometimes the scenery is underdescribed as well. Like, paintings where details are mentioned but not described. Not a big deal, and some would probably complain about too many details because they make the player think there's something to discover while in fact they're just scenery, but still... Also, sometimes the parser prostrates in seemingly easy situations.



One thing 99.9 % of all players are not so fond of is sudden death. I personally don't mind dangerous situations at all, but being shut out of the game without warning is a no-go, as stated in Graham Nelson's Player's Bill of Rights. To spoil a simple puzzle on day 2: There's a spider web with something behind it. Might be you have something useful in your inventory. You try to get rid of the web by trying a few commands. And without prior warning there suddenly is a spider (well, that's not too much of a surprise) that bites you, and the bite is poisonous, and the poison kills you after a few moves. Is there an anti-venom? Might be, I never found out. Did I save the game a few moves earlier? No, but from then on I saved frequently. Damn mood killer. And this isn't the only sudden death spot by far. Getting killed without a warning that makes you save your game is bad design, full stop.

The Packaging

Misleading header, there's no game box obviously. BUT. Quick excursion in case you're not familiar with game packaging back in the 1980's. Back then, Infocom was the alpha developer of text adventures for several reasons, one of them being their ridiculously abundant packaging details. The cardboard box contained the game disk ans a printed manual, but also hilarious add-ons in form of... "stuff" from the game world, such as ficticious maps, flyers or blueprints along with fake ID cards, magazines and bank notes and even 3D glasses, iron-on patches and glow-in-the-dark stones. The company called this stuff "feelies", as it let you immerse further into the game world. Opening an Infocom game box was a little bit like Christmas. Now, what's the link to a freeware text adventure from 1998 that back in its time didn't see a commercial release? Well, back in the bad old times, Michal Gentry actually sold feelies! There was no box, but if you paid ahead you could receive an A4 envelope with a map and a necklace. If you're not into feelies that's probably plainly weird to you, but for a collector like me laying my greedy hands on those feelies is as close to sex as collecting gets. Which is not very close, but you get the picture.


The map is not very detailed but it makes up for that in sheer beauty. The pendant is... nice. So, three thumbs up for Gentry's "feelies"! I myself am constantly thinking about digital feelies for my game efforts, but real feelies are a whole different thing, especially when designed and manufactured so professionally. Only thing sadly missing is a box.

The Verdict

I'm not gonna lie - I love stories, I love Lovecraft, I love the Explore-and-Advance scheme. I love Anchorhead. It has everything a good, a very good text adventure needs. If you look into detail it's a little bit rough around the edges due to memory constrictions, but that's first world problems.

I've read plenty of Lovecraft back when I was a teen. I loved his sure feeling for psychological horror, the suspense slowly building up, culminating in a big climax. The complex pantheon of gods and creatures. And the detailed descriptions of his fin de siècle universe as well as of his nightmarish alien cities. Lovecraft was a good storyteller. Unfortunately, most of his stories follow the same scheme. After you've read a few you start to recognize patterns, and after a while you read the first sentences of a story and already know how it ends. Well, this in mind, Gentry is a good storyteller as well. Anchorhead works like a true Lovecraft work in several ways. It drops you off at an authentic old coastal town in Lovecraft County. The buildings are foreboding, the weather is forboding, the NPCs are foreboding. You stumble across plenty documents that are foreboding. From the first minute on you know this ain't gonna end well, and from there the tension slowly builds up and upper. There's probably no better Lovecraft game than Anchorhead, 26 years after its release. By today's standards it's pretty conventional, but given the countless attempts of being innovative that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's a bit stenographic at times, due to memory constraints, but I've seen enough Scott Adams to consider this a minor flaw. So yeah - Anchorhead is awesome. It's the #1 game in the Lovecraft segment and deservedly takes a place in a lot of top 10 lists. Its only flaw might be its biggest pro: It's the biggest fish in the pond of Lovecraft games, but exactly that makes it predicatble. Lovecraft was a master of atmosphere, but once you've read a couple of his novels you find out he's not exactly a master of unpredictability.

If you're new to Lovecraft, play Anchorhead! If you know Lovecraft already, play Anchorhead nonetheless. It may not leave you breathless, but it's a very good game nonethless.

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BACKGROUND



Game author Michael Gentry is from Austin, Texas. In his childhood days he bought and played Infocom classics, Zork, Trinity and the likes. He had tried to write an own game in BASIC but didn't get very far. When he discovered the existence of Inform and a community around it he decided to write a game of his own. When he started working on Anchorhead in 1996 (aged 24 then) he was freshly married and working for a monthly scientific journal. His motivation was to write a lovecraftian game that was "done right", in opposite to the Infocom game The Lurking Horror which he considered to be "campy", "zorky", "kitschy" and "too ironic". It was not his goal to squeeze his game into the canon of Lovecraft-inspired works by authors such as August Derleth or Clark Ashton Smith. While Anchorhead follows Lovecraft's storytelling patterns it does not use the geographic and mythological guidelines of the Cthulhu mythos' creator. Among the few Lovecraft references in the 1998 version were the city of Arkham and the Miskatonic river, but even those were exchanged in the 2018 release (for Innswich and the Miskahawney river).

As mentioned before, Anchorhead was written using the programming language Inform 6. By the time Anchorhead was written Inform 6 was the Ferrari among the interactive fiction programming languages, but it was also still quite new (two years old, to be precise), so Anchorhead can be counted towards the first generation of Inform games. Gentry didn't pin down the entire script before starting to code, in fact he worked out the plot and puzzles as he designed the game world. The home base was the town of Arkham as it was designed by Chaosium for the pen'n'paper RPG Call of Cthulhu. Development took around a year, including a few weeks of writing up the script and six hours per day on average to code the actual game. Around 90 % through the coding process Gentry reached the memory limit of the game engine and was close to giving up the project. With the help of fellow IF authors on the internet he was able to crunch the game enough to be able to squeeze the rest of the content in. Quite some ideas fell to the wayside, for example a cat as a constant companion, or a trip to a parallel dimension. According to Gentry he wasn't very fond of programming in general and of Inform 6 specifically, so we better be grateful that he made it to the end. The original version of the game (a .z8 file needing an interpreter) had a size of 508 KB. As a comparison, Zork I in an uncompressed version had close to 100 KB.

The nameless protagonist is designed after Gentry's wife Ramee. That applies to her features and interests. Also, the Gentry's had recently married and were about to move to the east coast. Conveniently, Gentry named the protagonist's spouse Michael and modeled it "a little bit" after himself. Fun fact: The wedding date in the game is Gentry's actual wedding date. The date and time structure of the game is inspired by 1995's Christminster by Gareth Rees. Later game design conventions like Nelson's Bill of Player's Rights were not in place yet so the game features opportunities to die or shut the player off from being able to win the game. Gentry's retrospective comment on this: „Well, it’s a dangerous world.“. He takes pride in the game's death scenes and designed them in a way that the player might be tempted to find out how many of them exist, almost like an achievement.

According to himself, Gentry had thought about revising Anchorhead for quite a while since he wasn't satisfied with the 1998 release. He wasn't too fond of working with Inform 6 again though. In 2006 Inform 7 came out, and while I personally consider the "natural language" approach to be a fail, Gentry thought it to be "so different, such a paradigm shift, and it fixed so many things that I found tiresome or frustrating about Inform 6". Gentry planned to re-write Anchorhead in Inform 7, but back then he and his wife had two small kids and he didn't find the time for programming. It didn't exactly help that he liaised with Textfyre Games at this time, writing Jack Toresal and The Secret Letter together with David Cornelson which saw a (successless) commercial release in 2009.

In the second half of the 2010's his kids were in high school and he finally find the time to work around the game. In 2015 or 2016 Gentry stumbled across an Anchorhead Let's Play on SomethingAwful.com. The author had added small illustration to his walkthrough text, which gave Gentry the inspiration to do so as well with the game. After fruitless negotiations with the Let's Play author Gentry found Carlos Cara Àlvarez, a Spanish painter, who did the illustrations for the 2018 release (some of which you can see shattered across this page). Gentry himself didn't simply re-write the game in Inform 7. Freed from the Inform 6 memory limitations he expended some of the prose and added rooms and puzzles. For example, in the 1998 game the asylum was three rooms that hosted one NPC (the madman), while the 2018 release saw more rooms and a Hunt the Wumpus style puzzle added.

In the 20 years since the original release society in the United States had slightly changed. Among other dark topics Anchorhead deals with sexual abuse and incest, and those topics were viewed in a different light in 2018. For the 2018 release Gentry didn't change the story bits in question (Michael's ancestor Croseus Verlac impregnated his own daughters to pass into the resulting children) but added a trigger warning in the "About" section.

Text adventure reviews in mass media are sparse since the commercial area ended in the early 1990's. Very sparse. The re-release of Anchorhead got a few short reviews though, probably because the original release was already canon. Rock, Paper, Shotgun had a short and rather favourable article about the game that was surprisingly correct and, despite its shortness, detailed. PC Gamer had an amazingly detailed review, pointing out how old school Anchorhead is and that that's cool, despite design decisions that were outdated even in 1998.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/textfyre https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/what-call-of-cthulhu-and-the-sinking-city-could-learn-from-this-interactive-fiction-classic

The XYZZY Awards are something like the Oscars of the interactive fiction scene. Nowadays they have lost quite some fame to yearly competitions like the IFComp and Spring Thing, but back in 1998 there was the IFComp and the XYZZY Awards and that was it, and the Awards were the Oscars. Anchorhead won one then, for "Best Setting". It was nominated for four additional catagories but didn't win them.

In very late 2018 something happened that doesn't happen very often in the world of interactive fiction, or rather that rarely ever happens: A tribute game to Anchorhead was released. A game that explicity cites Anchorhead as its inspiration and template. And not only that - it was the collaborative work of several IF authors. 84 authors to be precise, among them Graham Nelson, Emily Short, Andrew "Zarf" Plotkin and Baldur Brückner :). I'm talking about Cragne Manor of course - if you really never heard about it, look it up.

After an episode in Washington, D.C., Gentry nowadays lives in Alexandria, Virginia, and works for the American Society of Civil Engineers. He's got two kids (who are twins). He himself calls Anchorhead "the archetypical Call of Cthulhu scenario".

Sources:

• AvventureTestuali.com: And if a puzzle is not puzzling anymore?
• IFWiki.org: XYZZY Awards 1998
• Gamecouch.com: Interview: Mike Gentry
• StayForever.de: Anchorhead: A conversation with Michael Gentry
• LPArchive.org: Anchorhead. By Grimwit
• SPAG #50: Interview with David Cornelson, Michael Gentry and Graeme Jefferis

Further reading:

• Anchorhead at Wikipedia

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WALKTHROUGH

https://dr0.ch/if-anchorhead/

This walkthrough is for the 2018 Steam version. The 1998 free version slightly differs, even the first puzzle. Just so that you know. http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/interactive-fiction/solutions/anchorhead-2017-solution.html

DAY 1

The game drops us off in the town of Anchorhead, right in front of the real estate agent's office where we're supposed to pick up the keys to our new home. Our husband's gone to do some paperwork at the local university and will, or rather should, pick us up later. The office is closed although you have an appointment. It starts to rain. Doesn't exactly look like a beautiful day.

Knocking at the door doesn't help, but we don't want to give up. Maybe there's a back entrance? At least there's a back alley to the southeast. A fire escape ladder, that's obviously where we need to latch on. A bit high up, but there's means: There's sturdy garbage cans, and we have an old school umbrella with a bent handle. Now if that doesn't get us going!

There's a retracted fire escape ladder above us, presumably on the back wall of the building we need to enter. It's out of reach. We do have an umbrella with us, with a hook-shaped handle. Isn't that convenient? Unfortunately the ladder is still out of reach. But there's these garbage cans, so we climb one of them, and now we're able to pull the ladder down with the umbrella. We climb it up, and after a bit there's an open window we immediately climb through. Tadaa, we're in the real estate agent's office.

Two rooms only to roam, that's pretty straightforward. The first floor room contains filing cabinets, and we'd love to look up our "case" in hope of finding the keys there, but we've forgotten the name of that branch of Michael's family that lived here. Well, let's check downstairs. There's a styrofoam cup of old, cold coffee which we pocket. Then there's an answering machine with a recorded message, so of course we press "play" - the message is one word only, but luckily it's the family name we're after, so we go back up to the filing cabinets and look up the name. No info, but we got the keys. Yay! Time to pay our beloved husband a visit. No need to climb back through the window, just go west from the downstairs room. We need to cross half of Anchorhead on our way to Michael (who is at the university), so let's quickly get the mapping done:



We'll surely get back to the local pub. The twisting lane... Hopefully not, for it sends us into a random direction. For now let's better not even go there. The Whateley Bridge separates the northern half of town from the southern half, so we'll leave the southern half be for now. The part north of North Square - we've mapped it now, and there'll probably be plenty to do (like, a lighthouse! An old mill!), but for now we just continue to uni where we indeed find Michael, our beloved husband who completely forgot we exist and sticks to his books like there's no tomorrow. Right now he's reading a suspicious old tome he doesn't want to talk about and the title of which he even hides from our eyes. We find out anyway, for at the circulation desk there's a register of who-read-what, and there we go: A Historical Overview of Superstitions by Arnsworth Frazer. Hm. While we're at it we also look up the only other name we know so far, Verlac - looks like that dude checked out that very book as well, along with some weird esoteric stuff like Mechanics of Metempsychosis or N-Fold Transduction and the Space-Time Barrier or Stranger Stars by one Brian Monmouth - we've read enough Lovecraft to know where this is heading. Also, the librarian we can call by ringing the bell looks somewhat fishy - pun intended. Communication attempts with the librarian end in a hint that providing an ID is required to check out a book. We don't have one but Michael does - noted for later. For now let's play the loving wife and show the keys to Michael. He returns the book to the circulation desk and gets back to us, confessing that the car broke down, meaning we have to walk to our new home. Not that inconvenient, for this way we get a chance to map some more of the town. Michael is following us from now on until we reach our new home. So here's what we find:



Make sure to examine the obelisk on town square. The courthouse south of the square and the asylum in the southwest are closed but likely to open later on. Fun fact: The courthouse description when seen from the hidden alley is the same as from the town square, describing the front of the builing. The town square houses a strange obelisk that definately has some ill-fated meaning. There's some steps down to the river but Michael won't let me go, generally preventing me from going too far away from the path to our new home.

Our new home doesn't really look inviting. And we've read enough Lovecraft to know where this is heading - no yoga sessions, no happy kids playing in the yard, no organic home-grown tomatoes. A note on the door says there's no electricity and no phone connection until next week. Awesome. Can't do anything about it though, so we unlock the door and enter the goddamned house. Leap ahead: If we don't close and lock the front door we won't be able to find sleep, so why not do it right now. Due to the lack of electricity it's dark everywhere but upstairs (why is there light there??) so we go there and then south to our bedroom. Michael falls asleep immediately, and we should do so, too, so we undress. If we want to we can take a bath first - drop all stuff, enter the bathroom to the east, bathe - but what that's good for is beyond me. Sleep. Great, a nightmare. We've read enough Lovecraft... Day two.

DAY 2

By now you already know what to do when a new area on the map opens up. Which is the case here, there's daylight, we're not tired, and we're not on rails in terms of having to work on a task without being able to look left or right. So, save the game, pull out pen and paper, the house won't map itself. Oh wait, it's your lucky day, I'm gonna do that for you. :) We're starting on the first floor (after getting and wearing our clothes):



As you can see I've taken note of objects I've stumbled across without looking too much. I'll discuss them here and think of a "what to pick up and when" strategy later. When we wake up Michael is in the bathroom. His pants are in the bedroom. Boy are we gonna search those after the creepy stuff that's happened so far. There's his wallet, which we take and open. His library card! We sack the latter and put the wallet back into the pants as to not arouse suspicion. That's the only time critical thing. When Michael's done showering there's a towel in the bathroom, might come in handy later. In the upstairs hall there's a cord dangling from a trap door in the ceiling, and pulling on it opens up the attic - we'll spare that for now, probably need a light source anyway. In the library there's one book on the armchair (which tells us a way to open magically sealed doors, we'll definately need that later), but examining the bookshelf reveals an Edgar Allen Poe book that's somewhat odd - we pull on it, revealing a safe (for which we need a combination). West of the library is Michael's study, but he shoos us away, so we'll need to go back there later. The child's bedroom - now that's creepy. Short discursion. You need to take a lot of notes to progress in this game. That's because we're investigating a family secret (so much should be clear by now) and we'll encounter a lot of names of people and their relations among each other. We've already encountered two places where we can look up names: The real estate agent's office for current names, and the uni library for all things old. Probably there's more, like, there's this courthouse, and an old church - names will be important. Dates too. So take notes. Or rather let me do that for you. I'll prominently place notes right here in the text so you'll find them when you need them. What do we have so far?


So, onward to some shocking info that hints at what the game will throw at us over the course of the next hours. The child's bedroom. There's a jewelry box with a locket inside that contains a photo of a deformed person. Quirky. But when we examine the bed, and its coverlet, we notice scratches on the ground, and we know from countless other games what that means - push the bed aside, and there's an alcove with some soggy diary pages in it. We can only read a few lines, but those are quite heavy stuff. They were written by Edward Verlac's mother in the 1950's and 1960's. Here's the important part:

The diary also speaks of a charm that Edward was given by his mother to protect him from... something. Guess we need to find that. That's it for the first floor for now, so now we go check on the ground floor.

We're still not able to do anything with our luggage. So let's go explore. Not that big a house, actually, but still plenty to explore. The gallery has paintings, the sitting room has an interesting scrapbook, and there's a cellar AND a mausoleum - we've read enough Lovecraft to know where that leads to. ;-)

West of the foyer is the sitting room. A room for... sitting? Anyway. The old, colonial rug brings up memories of Zork, but there's no trapdoor below it. A portrait is hanging on the wall, it's depicting a grim man. He's the man from your nightmare, great. There's a scrapbook and it contains a shitload of stuff to read. Let's take notes:


Dude, this definetely looks like some Charles Dexter Ward story to me, but let's continue. Time to map the ground floor.



Let's continue with the dining room. Pretty minimalistic room, but it has a chandelier, and inside that is a crystal pendant that looks like we want to have it. Can't reach it from the ground. Well, since we own this place we might as well get on the table and voilà, the pendant is ours. Nice. It even has its own picture.

Next up: The Gallery. Four portraits of Michael's ancestors, all obviously insane. We've already read about these guys in the scrapbook, so now we're getting a picture (figuratively speaking), and some disturbing details. On Wilhelm Verlac's portrait is a strange woman. Heinrich is holding some sort of compass "not found in any earthly architecture". Elijah has six fingers on his right hand and holds a flute that's actually "a strangely twisted instrument with irregularly spaced holes spiraling down its length". The Mordecai portrait shows a little girl. All pictures look as if they were painted by the same artist, which cannot be the case as there's around 200 years between the lifes of Wilhelm and Mordecai Verlac. He he... Yeah, we've read enough Lovecraft to know where that's heading.

Now we go east twice to the kitchen. There's a flashlight there. Who are we to despise free loot? There's some cabinets, and there's some matches inside - also ours now. To the east is a pantry where we find a broom. There's a door leading down - sounds dangerous. But we've seen enough text adventures to know that important stuff is down there. So down it is. It is pitch dark, we are likely to be eaten by a grue, but we have a flashlight. Hmhm, spooky. Let's map that.



That's all? Well, let's see. The crates in the storage room can be searched, revealing an old but intact-looking fuse and a spider web. Behind the spider web there seems to be a key. Now if you've read the review above you already know that this is a scene where you can die, so save your game here before you try something out. The wine cellar is empty, but examining the racks reveals some strange markings on the wall, so there's likely a secret door.

So, let's work with this. Pick up the fuse. Wipe the web and get the iron key. Fuse, key - that already sounds like the trip to the cellar is a success. Now over to those wine racks. Go south then west into the wine cellar, and examine the markings. Pull the rack and examine the mural behind it. Hm, bumps, lines, arcs, circles... Can't make anything out of that yet, but it sure will be important. The wire box at the cellar entrance doesn't seem helpful, so that about wraps it up what we can currently achieve here. But we'll be back!

Anything left to check on ground floor? Ah yes, the kitchen back door. So, up to the pantry, west to the kitchen, and then south and southeast. Making use of the iron key found in the cellar we can now enter the mausoleum. Creepy, but only one item worth closer inspection. Examine the child's coffin. Open it. An animal skeleton?!? Examine the bones. We've come so far, and it's a horror game, so take them. Oops... Well let's just get the leftover skull then. An animal skull in our pockets, wow. Nothing left to desecrate here, so let's go back to the kitchen. Some safety work, just to be sure: Turn off the flashlight (wouldn't want to run out of battery here at night...), close the door and lock it.

Spooky place, this house. And Michael is starting to act weirdly. Can it get more creepy? Well, we've explored the house, so let's explore town. Back to the foyer and north out of the building, closing and locking the door behind us, as it has become a habit. If you don't have the map in mind, the way to town is northwest, east, north and west.

So, town square. There's an old newspaper, so we pick it up and read it. More abduction, more murder, and Michael's relative Edward is involved. Remember, the incest guy. Committed suicide earlier this year while incarcerated in a lunatic asylum. Used to be a professor of history at the local university before. What have we gotten into... Well, it's daytime on a work day so the town hall should be open. Head south. Jeez, what a deserted place... But we can go south into the record room, and since we've stumbled across so many relatives of Michael already, this is definitely the place to look them up and shed some light on them. Time to do some paperwork and collect all the info we have so far. Now what do we have here...

Relative	Born	Died	Note
Croseus Verlac		18. February 1651
Wilhelm	18. February 1651	4. November 1734	Built the original paper mill.
Heinrich	4. November 1734	14. March 1802	Grandson of Wilhelm, rebuilt the paper mill after a fire.
Elijah	14. March 1802	22. June 1886	Founder of a sect, painter.
Mordecai	22. June 1886	15. February 1959	Grandson of Elijah, reverend in Elijah's sect, rebuilt the paper mill. Died of "natural causes".
Edward	15. February 1959	14. March 1997	Death by suicide.

Some other persons of interest we can look up include:

Person	Born	Died	Note
William Verlac	22. June 1954	18. September 1956	Incest boy. Death certificate seems to be manipulated.
Julia Ward	4. May 1964	10. January 1997	Married Edward on 8. June 1985, died of homicide
Tara Luffington	12. December 1976	1990	Missing, declared dead in 1990.
Christopher Tillworth	19. June 1966	1990	Death by animal attack.
Daryl Beasley	8. July 1950	1969	Missing, declared dead in 1969.

And that's all names I found out so far. Now, Charles Dexter Ward, anyone? ;-) Well it's pretty sure by now that someone, Croseus perhaps, switches bodies through generations. Also, the paper mill seems to have great importance to the Verlacs, and that sect (the HQ of which was raided by the police in 1956, probably for a reason) needs some closer inspection as well. Enough to do for several days! Let's just hope no sinister development around Michael gets in our way. Wouldn't want to pant "Choke me grandgrandgrandgranddaddy!" in our new bedroom.

Where to find further information about the history of Michael's deranged family? The university of course! And maybe it's also about time to check out the local townsfolk regarding this topic, though we better be careful about that. Go north four times, which takes us back to North Square. Uni is visible from here, but let's first see if we find some locals we can trust. East and north takes us to the local pub. Dammit, not a single person in sight! But there's a lantern and a flask of whiskey lieing about, and they are ours a second later. Since there's no patrons here we can move on to the university building, which is south, west and northwest.

West and north takes us to the university library circulation desk... again. Luckily we already know what book we want, so just have to ring the bell, show the fish librarian Michael's ID and ask him about the Superstitions book which he promptly brings us and which we promptly start to read.

The book sheds some more light on the dark family history of Michael's ancestors. The first one was Croseus of course, born "under the auspice of the Gnawer of Graves", who fathered Wilhelm with his youngest daughter Eustacia and dies on the day of William's birth, indicating that he somehow acquired Wilhelm's body. Eustacia had to flee with Wilhelm as the locals killed the Verlac family (suspecting them of witchcraft) but returned years later when the matter had settled down. Remember we found out a few more details about Wilhelm earlier. The rest of the book is about witchcraft and myths and stuff - hopefully nothing we need to remember later on.

Some other books were mentioned before, books that Edward Verlac had consulted. I checked 'em out for you, and the only one worth (and necessary!) to lend out is Stranger Stars by Brian Monmouth. It's about astrological gibberish, but it contains a detail that made me seit up and take notice: It has timeframes for "black zodiacs". And one of these "black zodiacs" is the "Gnawer of Graves" under which Croseus Verlac was said to be born. The book says those "Gnawer of Graves" guys were born between July 21 and August 17. And so far we have no information about when Croseus was born. Hmm... That might come in handy later. The other books (The Righteous Invasion by Warner Greene, Mechanics of Metempsychosis by C. C. H. Horne and N-Fold Transduction and the Space-Time Barrier by Lord Wheldrake) are related to the story, so read them for entertainment, but I don't think they're necessary to progress. Enough library for today!

Go south, east and southeast to exit the library, then east and south into the twisting lane. Examine the graffiti. Aha, "a side street you hadn't noticed before"... So east we go. A hidden courtyard, hm-hm. To the south is a shop that we enter immediately. Nice, feels safe here. Out of the trinkets in the display case the amulet catches our eye, probably because it looks like the graffiti outside in the street. Ask the proprietor about it, and he'll gift it to you, making some strange suggestions. Well, you don't look a gift horse into the mouth. The tarot deck and the violin also look interesting, and the proprietor has something to say about them, but for now I have no idea what to do about them.

So, that's probably it. Leave the shop, leave the hidden courtyard, and when you're in the twisting lane, go anywhere but back to the courtyard. You'll end up in a random place in the city. Refer to the map above and stumble around until you find the place called "Vacant Lot". There's a bum there, and the description indicates he wasn't exactly born as one. Addressing him indicates he's an alcoholic on turkey. Good thing we have this flask of whiskey with us that we stole from the tavern earlier. Here, Mr. Bum, have one on the house... Now it's time to talk. Ask the man about...

• himself → So he used to be a doctor. And he knows Edward, and a woman called Anna who's probably related to Edward somehow.
• Edward → So he's the doctor who delivered Edward. And Edward maybe had a brother.
• Anna → She's Edward's mother - and his sister, as she got raped by her father and got pregnant with Edward.
• Mordecai → Confirmation: He's Edward's father and grandfather and a rapist.
• William → So William was another child of Anna, Edwards older brother, also fathered by her father Mordecai. William was malformed (e.g. he had hooves) and sick, and after a few years the doctor killed the kid upon Anna's request and buried it in the family crypt.
• Verlac → They're bad. Okay, we knew that before. ;-)
• Crypt → William was buried there.

I tried other names but that's basically what I got out of him. Do ask about all these topics because of conversation filters. Show him the locket and he'll tell you that the boy in the picture is William, Edwards older brother. Show him the skull from the crypt and... whoah! Okay, slight amendment to the list above: The doctor did not kill William. The order to kill the kid was issued by Mordecai, because the kid was misshaped, and Mordecai needed a decent vessel. Upon Anna's pleas the doctor marooned William in the forest, and somehow the kid survived. Mordecai though, he impregnated Anna again, this time with Edward. And we've read enough Lovecraft to know what's happening here: Edward is Mordecai, or rather Croseus, who's switching from body to body through the centuries. And at the end of the chain is... Well, hopefully not our dear husband Michael. We'll see. The old man has a copper key that's probably useful to us, but he wants our newly-acquired amulet in exchange. Okay old man, here you go. He gives us the key and disappears. The sun is setting. Time to go "home" - almost.

Go back west to the riverwalk, then down the steep steps. You're on a small ledge below Whateley Bridge now, and there's an old manhole cover. It needs to be unlocked - and our newly-found copper key fits! Down we go... Sewers! Never a cozy place... There's a mysterious vault to the southwest but right now there's nothing obvious to do there. To the north there's a flooded passage where we can't continue either, but at least there's something shiny on the ground: A brass key, which of course we pocket immediately. Nothing else happening here, so we climb back up to the surface. Time to head home, finally.

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