House Adventure

Funny, the house didn't look nearly so big on the outside. You're beginning to wonder if you'll ever find a way out - there must be a hundred rooms in the old place. You violently twist the doorknob once again, but the heavy door might as well be stone. As you stand amidst musty old wraps in the coatroom, you decide you'll never again take anyone up on a stupid dare. At least not one from James - it's his fault you 're stuck here, anyway.

"Betcha you're scared to go in there," he'd taunted.

"Am not," you brilliantly replied.

Am now, you think glumly. You wonder why you didn't think it just a little bit strange to stumble across this abandoned

house. You've hiked these woods all your life thought you knew them like the back of your hand. Something should have tripped off the warning bells, but then you were thinking of adventure.

So when James egged you on, you clambered up onto the porch, opened the door and stepped in. Everything was fine until the door slammed shut behind you and refused to open. First you yelled for James, but you suspect he ran away laughing, going to tell everyone what a goob you were. Then you took a hurried jaunt through the house and noticed there were many more rooms than ought to be there. The house seemed almost as if it were a hodgepodge of rooms gathered from various unlikely sources. And the strange architect who designed the place forgot to make the windows so they'd open. It is amazing you made it back to the front door - the house is like a maze.

You even caught a glimpse of a laboratory as you jogged through on a first survey. Perhaps a mad scientist once lived here and performed strange experiments with the space/time continuum, n-space and that sort of stuff. Your situation reminds you of something you'd read in a novel by Stephen King - or was it Robert Heinlein? Yeah, it was Heinlein: There was this tiny, cramped flying car that nonetheless had doorways through another universe into spacious his-and-her bathrooms.

(Speaking of which ... )

You wistfully try the front door again, but it's no good. Well, you decide, its adventure I came for, and its adventure I'll have. With that you square your shoulders and march back into the long, dark hall to seek another way out.

House is a text adventure for the CoCo l, 2 or 3 requiring 32K ECB. The game leaves you stranded in a mansion with 71 rooms. You need to overcome several obstacles before you can escape from the old house. The game cannot be saved, because once the solution is discovered, playing time is under half an hour.