Hugo II, Whodunit?

This was the sequel to the infamous parser based aventure game Hugo's House of Horrors. It wasn't a game I played a lot of, in fact I believe I lasted about 30 minutes before I gave up, but it doesn't matter how big or small the impact on my life, every game must be remembered!

Developer: Gray Design Associates

Platform: MS-DOS

Release: 1991

Genres: Adventure, Parser, Text-based.

Plot

Rather than playing as the protagonist from the original game, Hugo, you play Hugo's girlfriend Penelope (whom your goal is to rescue in the original game).

This time, Penelope must investigate the mysterious murder of Uncle Horace which coincided with the sudden disappearance of Hugo.

Penelope, with what looks like a bird of some kind.

Gameplay

Hugo II, Whodunit? is a text based parser adventure. The game is not purely text based at all, instead the player is able to move the protagonist around the various rooms and areas of the game using keyboard controls. Commands are entered manually to interact with the environment. For example:

"Kick bird"

... might, if you were lucky, interact with the bird in the above screenshot in some way. There were some basic rules about how you entered commands, but sometimes it ended up being a guessing game to figure out what something was called. For example; in Hugo 3: Jungle of Doom there was a part where you had to pick up a bouillon cube, but in New Zealand I'd never heard of that term before, we just call it a stock cube. Needless to say I had to scour the internet using my dial-up speed connection to find the answer.

The game progresses by Penelope solving a variety of puzzles and mini-quests to make her way through the game, unlocking new areas, and ultimately solving the wider story arc.

Looking at this room I'd be trying commands like "open draws", "look on desk", "open door", "sit on chair", that kind of thing.

Positives

Reasonably strong and interesting story.

I like the idea behind the game mechanics - you have to really think as a detective to solve the puzzles. It's tricky going to various areas, and drawing connections between the various objects and environments you find. This was the ancient precursor to what L.A. Noire tried to do.

Negatives

Too hard. There's a fine line between making a challenging game, and making a game where the player has to take wild guesses to progress. The latter isn't something I'm personally interested in.

Memorable Moments

I remember the precise moment when I thought "this is just ridiculously difficult and unsatisfying  I'm not going to torture myself any longer by playing this".