The Colonel's Bequest - Atari ST (1989)

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Published on August 30, 2019 3:32:50 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2WNta2e3mg

Game:

The Colonel's Bequest (1989)

Duration: 52:28

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"The Colonel's Bequest" is a character-driven graphic adventure game from Sierra On-Line released in 1989 on the Atari ST.

00:00 Title Screen
01:32 Introduction
10:30 Act I
13:43 Bathroom
16:20 Spy : Lillian & Ethel
15:23 Secret door
18:54 Spy : Colonel & Fifi
24:09 Spy : Rudy & Gloria
28:03 Spy : Clarence & Gertie
32:12 Act II
38:32 Spy : Clarence & Wilbur
44:48 Garden
48:18 Gertie's corpse
50:32 Act III
50:35 Spy : Clarence & Gloria

The Colonel's Bequest is set in 1925. The game's main character is Laura Bow, a Tulane University student, daughter of a detective, and an aspiring journalist. Laura is invited by her flapper friend, Lillian, to spend a weekend at the decaying sugar plantation of Colonel Dijon. When the reclusive and childless Colonel gathers his quarrelsome relatives for a reading of his will, tensions explode and the bickering leads to murder.

Throughout the game, Laura remains stranded on the island, surrounded by suspects and potential victims in a classical Agatha Christie manner. Laura's task is to learn the family secrets and ultimately, the identity of the murderer. There is also an optional subplot concerning a hidden treasure. The storyline advances by a quarter-hour when new plot elements are witnessed. Sometimes a quarter-hour can advance in a few real-time seconds, if Laura happens to be at the proper place.

The Colonel's Bequest is one of the few Sierra On-Line adventure games to focus more on the characters than puzzles. Although solving puzzles is required to obtain a high score, it is more important to discover information about the characters' backgrounds and relationships with each other. Regardless of the importance of these elements, it is possible to finish the game without solving any puzzles, discovering many important details about the characters, or even identifying the murderer.
The game's characters make plans to be in certain places at certain times, which allows the player to follow them. Characters may get annoyed with the protagonist Laura Bow if they catch her snooping on them or asking too many questions, although this is obvious only in dialogue and the plot is not affected.
Death lurks around every corner, but Laura is almost never threatened by the mysterious villain because she is not related to the Dijon family. Staying consistent with other Sierra adventure games, most deaths experienced by the player occur by accident or misadventures such as falling off a balcony, or being crushed by a falling chandelier. However, the player may be killed by the murderer in the later phases of the game. For example, the murderer's arm reaches out at specific locations and snatches Laura away. In another case, the murderer appears in the darkness and strangles Laura to death. One of the more notable non-accidental deaths occurs when the player simply attempts to shower: the murderer stabs Laura in a reference to the Alfred Hitchcock film Psycho.
The game's unusual title can be accredited to Sierra's long-standing tradition of including "Quest" in the title of nearly every graphical adventure they published.

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