Malstrum's Mansion

Malstrum's Mansion is a serious retro hoot; from the first Flash screen, which imperfectly recreates the screen of a 512K Mac running the Finder with the floppy disk for a game called "Malstrum's Mansion" in the drive, you know you're not in the same century. Upon starting, you're asked for the kind of "copy protection" scheme we used to use -- you must enter a particular word from the manual (or in this case, readme file).

The game schema is a perfect recreation of the pixellated MacPaint art of graphic adventures of yore; buttons let you examine, take, and use, with inventory at left, and the usual "use X with Y" sort of adventure game puzzles.

The game itself is moderately entertaining -- a creepy Poe-esque horror game, with the black and white pixel art working in favor of the feeling of antiqueness. As with old school graphic adventures, some of the puzzles are fairly obtuse, but if you stick with the time-honored tradition of "use everything on everything," you won't go wrong. There is one annoyance; there's no save game, and there are several places where you can die, after which you must restart and bang through what you did to get where you died. However, the game generally does provide notable warnings before you get to a death scene, and unless you're a completist and insist on seeing them, they can usually be avoided.

It's worth checking out for a variety of possible reasons: Nostalgia, of course; to get a sense of what gameplay on early home computers was like (yes, we did this stuff, and we liked it, by gum); or simply to experience a unique and loving homage to a bygone style of game.

For the impatient, Jays is Games has put together a walkthrough, linked above.