PC Games: Hugo's House of Horrors

Channel:

Erifellen

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Published on September 17, 2021 11:42:27 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf8We24DcQQ

Game:

Hugo's House of Horrors (1990)

Duration: 5:58

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Hugo's House of Horrors! It's a catchy name, at least. A more obscure adventure game in the vein of earlier SierraQuests, this one features a haunted house, where the hapless hero Hugo goes to find out what happened to his girlfriend Penelope. Like similar games of its type and time, you have a hybrid graphical/text interface, a score that increases as you solve puzzles, and death lurking around every corner. Save early and save often! I wouldn't call it a great game, but it's good enough as a sample of its kind, can keep you busy for a few hours while you work through the puzzles, and if nothing else, it has a memorable setting.

Parts of this video also demonstrate some of the downsides to a text-based interface, with the game understanding "restore" but not "load" to resume from a saved game, and one of the function keys but not the word "inventory" working to display inventory. Perhaps because they had no graphics to fall back on, the earlier Infocom text adventure games tended to have better parsers. And since all the output was in text to begin with, you never had to guess what to call something from its appearance, either.

HHH is also the first of a trilogy. Hugo 2: Whodunit stars Penelope as she tries to find a missing Hugo and solve a murder mystery (and survive poor collision detection around even more arbitrary death traps), while Hugo 3: Jungle of Doom has Hugo reprise his protagonist role as he seeks an antidote for spider venom after Penelope gets bitten when their plane crashes in the jungle.

For some unknown reason, this recording saved as 1920x1080 (with added black bars on the sides) instead of the actual resolution (and aspect ratio) of 640x400. I was able to scale it back down to the proper size after the fact, but if the image doesn't seem quite as sharp as usual, that's why.

And, come to think of it, where I ended the video, the actual solution to leaving the room is to get back in the chamber and tell Igor to press buttons. Depending on which button he presses, other effects can also happen, including making Hugo too uncoordinated or not solid enough(!) to open the door, but he'll get the right one eventually.

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