Uninvited - ICOM Simulations - 1986 - First time Playing?: Yes!

Disclaimer: I decided to play Uninvited first because I thought it was the first MacVenture game released. I was wrong, Deja Vu is the first MacVenture. Oops.

I’ve seen the MacVenture games come up semi-regularly in discussion, and often their Mac roots are glossed over when they do come up. Consisting of four point and click adventure games, Deja Vu, Uninvited, Shadowgate and Deja Vu 2, the MacVenture series varies wildly in tone, setting and thematic genre but uses the same gameplay template across all games. The games are first-person, with an interface designed with Macintosh UI and mouse control in mind. As such, different aspects of the user interface are represented by separate windows that can be repositioned and resized as you wish. Inventory management is also handled in a fashion akin to moving icons on a desktop. It’s pretty seamless and user-friendly, especially for the era. All of the games in the series have been ported to dozens of other computers and consoles, such as the NES and Game Boy Color, which tend to be where my friends are more familiar with them. Of course, something is a little lost in translation without the original UI and control scheme, but the gameplay remains intact even if you interface with it in a different way. The game we’re looking at here, Uninvited, is going for a horror theme, in contrast to Deja Vu being a detective story and Shadowgate being a fantasy dungeon crawl.

Personally, I find Uninvited solid, but maybe a bit underwhelming in a few regards. I’m aware that it’s completely unfair to compare Uninvited to The Fool’s Errand as they’re both in completely different sub-genres of puzzle adventures, but I couldn’t help but feel less satisfied when I reached the end of Uninvited and I had this realisation of “Is that it?” It’s got a lot of seemingly important items and clues that just go absolutely nowhere, having you spend the whole game finding items you expect to have a use at some point in a later puzzle, but then the game ends and they just… don’t do anything. Regardless, what’s there is very much entertaining and worth a look.

The game opens with you crashing your car into a tree outside a spooky mansion full of ghouls. Your little brother immediately runs out of the car and into the mansion to find help while you’re knocked out cold, and once your player character wakes up, it’s up to you to find the kid. Pretty simple setup, but there’s some further lore surrounding the history of the mansion you can uncover by reading hidden documents in the game. Uninvited feels on the verge of being something you could classify as horror, featuring some gory close-ups of undead monsters, graphic descriptions of your deaths and even some jump scares, but it’s also pretty dorky with regular corny jokes, pop culture references. Even most of the deaths end up being just straight up goofy since they tend to come from your protagonist being a complete idiot. No, my dude, I told you to walk through the broken window, not rip yourself to shreds on it.

Starting out as we mean to go on, you can die in the very first screen of the game by just doing nothing for too long, after which the car explodes with you in it. Also starting as we mean to go on, you can make the game unwinnable as soon as the third screen of the game by missing an item in the second screen you need to finish the game. It’s one of those adventure games. In spite of that, and this is a rarity for me with point & clicks, I actually did manage to beat this one without a guide. Maybe I’m just starting to get the hang of the kind of logic these games expect. Either way, the game’s pretty short if you know what you’re doing, and even regardless of dead-ends you’ll likely have to start the game over a few times due to the game being on a time limit. Make some alt saves, experiment with each attempted run, take notes and eventually you’ll crack it.

Upon entering the mansion, the game essentially follows a loop of exploring all the rooms available to you, running into a spooky monster blocking the way forward that kills you instantly, figuring out what item you use on it to not die and then carrying on. For instance, when you find the ghost lady that rips your face off, you survive this encounter by using the bottle of ghosticide labelled “no ghost”. I’m giving you that solution for free because I’m pretty sure you could already figure out that’s what the no ghost bottle is for without my help. The later puzzles are of course less immediately obvious, but the game does unfortunately have a bad habit of having encounters with monsters boil down to “Use Single Item To Not Die” constantly. Heck, one of the final monsters doesn’t even need an item to be defeated. There are however other monsters that are defeated in more unconventional ways that are often more satisfying, but they’re a rarity compared to how much the game relies on the basic Use X On Y formula.

There’s also the fact that often getting these items is a more involved process than the act of using them. The more interesting puzzles often don’t involve monsters at all. One of the highlights for me was a scroll reading “Gold, silver and mercury. Together they form a key.” At face value that sounds like a basic recipe for an alchemy puzzle or something similar, but it’s instead one part of a larger puzzle that involves some outside of the box thinking and was super satisfying. I also enjoy the speak command, even if it’s a bit underutilised. Throughout the game you can find more scrolls with magic spells written on them, and by using the speak command you open up a text parser where you can type those spells in to activate them. You also don’t need any inventory items to cast spells, so if you’re starting a new game there’s no need to find the scrolls again to be able to cast magic, just type the spells you learnt last time into the parser.

On the topic of puzzles however, I also ran into something very strange. In the same room where you get the no ghost bottle, there’s also a bottle of “spider cider”, anesthetic for spiders. Much like the no ghost bottle, I’m not worried about spoiling a puzzle here because it’s obvious that you use the spider anesthetic on a spider. So, I find a spider, I use the spider cider, I put the drunk spider in my inventory and then I spend the rest of the game looking for a use for the little guy and I find absolutely nothing, and then I finish the game and still never found a use for the spider. Uninvited has a lot of useless items that are placed there simply as red herrings, but the spider was the only useless item I found that had a puzzle tied to even finding the useless item. Out of curiosity, I looked up a guide after beating the game and discovered that there actually is a character you need to use the spider on, but for whatever reason the character in question never appeared in my game. I’m not sure if this is an earlier build of the game that’s missing that puzzle or if it was a weird glitch. If anyone happens to have answers I’d be interested in hearing.

While I understand the purpose of red herring items both in giving misdirection to the player and also fleshing out the environments so they feel less empty, even if I prefer every item to have a purpose personally, I’m considerably more confused by the entire rooms of the mansion that seem to have no purpose at all. I guess flavour and world building is at least part of it, but part of why Uninvited felt underwhelming by the end was because of those large chunks of the game world that had me wondering “what will that be used for?”, followed by the answer being an anticlimactic nothing. To further hammer that home, there’s a command on the top menu of the HUD that you never need to use in the entire game. The only thing it lets you do is die in stupid ways.

As for that previously mentioned time limit, as you explore the mansion you will occasionally be interrupted by a sudden noise and a giant skull flashing on the screen. This is the mansion itself attempting to take control of you and turn you into a mindless undead ghoul. If the skull jumpscare happens four times in a single playthrough, it’s too late and you’re now a permanent resident of the mansion. You’re permitted enough room for error that you don’t have to do a perfect run, but it’s definitely a tight enough time limit that you’ll fail if you’re bumbling around aimlessly and making no progress. I actually kind of like this mechanic, surprisingly enough. Time only passes when you take actions such as moving to new rooms or interacting with items, so you can idle as long as you want on a screen without doing anything and it’s not going to impact your chances of survival. Meanwhile, when you inevitably need to start a new game, it’s made a little more engaging since you’re now playing the game in a different way, trying to optimise your route and puzzle solving so that you can get the most done as quickly as possible with plenty of time to spare.

Something else to consider in that routing and time optimisation is the inventory limit. How many items you can carry at once varies depending on how big the items you’re carrying with you are. Obviously this means you can’t carry every item at once, but since the time limit is a thing you also need to consider where you drop items that you don’t need to use at the moment but may need later, as well as deciding what items are most likely to be useful moving forward and worth taking. The inventory management can be a bit tedious with all the clicking and dragging of items, making a mess of the room you’re currently in if you need to pick up a particularly big item, but I do feel it introduces some interesting management aspects at least.

In spite of how lukewarm this review might sound, I did enjoy Uninvited. The fact that I felt underwhelmed by it suddenly ending means that I was enjoying it enough to want it to last at least a little bit more. I also respect how user-friendly and accessible the interface is, making the game much easier to pick up than early Sierra adventures and basically doing what Maniac Mansion did with its UI but a year earlier. It’s a solid, campy but nonetheless oppressively atmospheric little adventure with gorgeous pixel art and whatever the hell the thing below this paragraph is meant to be. Recommended if you’re into these styles of adventure games and aren’t deterred by the dead ends and such.

- Page written by MSX_POCKY, 16th December 2024