You can easily kill yourself through stupid means – such as lighting a candle, tripping, setting the house on fire, and not putting it out in time – plus you can get lost in the surrounding forest. If you pay attention to their bodies you can piece together some clues that implicate the murderer – one was strangled by pantyhose so the killer is probably a girl, and another is holding a daisy, which… well, spells out the killer’s name right there.
(“You are in the kitchen.”) All of the characters have professions, but none have any personality, nor any real purpose beyond popping up dead. There’s not really much in the way of prose so much as stark descriptions. While Mystery House was a true pioneer amongst text adventures, its puzzles, story, writing – pretty much everything, actually – are all quite amateur. It’s all understandable given the game’s age it had to fit in the limited RAM of the Apple II, and since there were no real drawing programs on the market, Ken and Roberta Williams had to assemble their own device, combining a graphics tablet with a mechanical arm.
The characters look as if they were lifted from a first grader’s notebook, and even minor items like knives and shovels are crudely drawn. The visuals are, of course, quite rudimentary, consisting of shakily drawn white lines against a black background. One of the most important adventure games ever made, Mystery House was the first in the genre to add graphics, whereas all previous games were entirely text-based.
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