Crowley's haunted house of horrors wasn't a welcoming place, no, but that didn't stop it from being one of my favorite weekend hangouts.
So by the middle of 1991, I'd become a pretty big fan of Deja Vu. I'd gained a strong appreciation for its divergent qualities and particularly its film-noir-inspired presentation and its more-realistic styles of interaction and puzzle-solving.
I was happy to say that Deja Vu was one of my all-time-favorite point-and-click adventure games.
At the same time, though, I maintained that Ace Harding's world of realism and normality wasn't an ideal backdrop for a point-and-click adventure game. It wasn't the type of setting that could evoke feelings of captivation and wonderment, which is something that I expected point-and-click adventures' settings to do.
I mean, I enjoyed immersing myself in Deja Vu's sparsely populated, silently dangerous spaces, sure, but all the while, I kept wishing that its world was more in line with its antecedent's.
Mainly, I wanted Deja Vu to be more like Shadowgate--a game whose world was shaped by its amazingly rich mythos, its wonderfully fantastical characters and locations, and its powerfully haunting visuals and music.
But the fact was that Deja Vu couldn't possibly give me what I desired. It just wasn't that type of game. And because there was no Shadowgate sequel (as far as I knew), I was certain that I was never again going to get the chance to visit a world that was anything like Shadowgate's.
And thinking about such a future made me sad.
A couple of months later, though, Nintendo Power Volume 20 arrived with some unexpected news: Kemco-Seika had a third MacVenture port in production, and it was coming the NES that year! And, more excitingly, it was exactly the type of game I was looking for!
It was called "Uninvited," and it captured my attention the moment I flipped over to the page on which it was being previewed (the Pak Watch section's fifth page). Immediately my eyes caught sight of the screenshots' familiar-looking Shadowgate-style menus, and in that moment, I was overcome with a feeling of exhilaration. Because I knew, instantly, what those menu images meant: another MacVenture game was on its way!
And the best news was that Uninvited was close in style to Shadowgate! That's what I learned as I eagerly pored over the preview's accompanying screenshots, which depicted an old mansion and some of its ghostly inhabitants. Uninvited, according to what I was seeing (and reading), was the spiritual Shadowgate sequel I'd been hoping for!
(I was also delighted to learn that Kemco-Seika wasn't yet finished porting PC-adventure-game classics over to the NES. "If the PC is home to other Shadowgate-type games," I thought to myself, "then please continue your efforts and bring all of those games over!")
That was it. It had nothing to say about the gameplay, the other cast members, or the time-period in which the game's story was set (I guessed, after examining the screenshots' images, that the game had a mid-20th-century setting, and I was hoping for that to be the case because I felt as though such a setting was perfect for a haunted-mansion game).
But I was fine with that. I didn't really care to know all of the details, no. The information that was included was enough for me. It did all that it needed to do to make the game instantly appealing to me: It told a riveting story of an old creepy mansion that was filled with monsters, magic and mystery!
What was exciting about Uninvited was that it represented the convergence of my strongest interests: I loved monsters and stories about monsters. I was a big fan of books and movies that were set in large mansions and particularly the type that had unsettling atmospheres and mystical, ghostly qualities. And I was crazy about Shadowgate! Uninvited was promising to combine all of these elements into a single package, and that's why I was so intrigued by it.
It was promising, also, to give me the freedom I needed to explore and investigate a mysterious, haunted mansion at my own leisure, which is something I desperately desired to do.
And Uninvited's exciting promises helped it to become a sure purchase.
So in the summer of 1991, I bought Uninvited (sometime close to its release date), and then I rushed home and wasted no time in digging into the game. I was incredibly eager to embark on a Shadowgate-like adventure and begin unraveling new mysteries!
I didn't know if doing so was unreasonable or not, but I was heaping a lot of pressure on Uninvited. I was counting on it to a big job: carry Shadowgate's torch and create a sense of continuance--provide me an experience that was just as magical and as world-changing as the one I had with Shadowgate a year earlier. I was expecting it to evoke memories of a time in my life when there was nothing I would rather do than spend hours a day curiously and enthusiastically exploring Castle Shadowgate's wondrous environments and hoping that each newly discovered location would stir my imagination as powerfully as each of the others did. And I was hoping that it could it provide me more of the same type of memories.
So I was asking a lot of the game.
And I was determined to complete this adventure on my own. I didn't want any help from Nintendo Power or any of my friends or family members. That's why I planned to avoid mentioning the game to my brother, James, before finishing it. I knew that he would have gone out of his way to gain knowledge of it and purposely spoil puzzle solutions for me. He liked to do things like that. He thought it was funny. (At the time, he was kind of a jerk.)
It didn't take me long to complete Uninvited. I did it in about two or three days (whereas it took me months to complete Shadowgate). And in the end, I couldn't help but feel disappointed. The game, sadly, wasn't able meet my expectations.
The fact was that Uninvited simply wasn't the game I wanted it to be. It wasn't Shadowgate. It didn't have the same level of impact: Its story and narrative elements weren't as captivating. Its environments and characters didn't have the same type of resonance. And its world didn't inspire as much awe or wonder.
So I didn't form as deep a connection with it in my first play-through.
Really, I didn't have enough time or opportunity to do so. The adventure was over too quickly. It lasted only about 8-12 hours. And I never had to spend a large amount of time in any single location or struggle to find solutions to puzzles.
That's why I don't have quite as many memories of my experiences with the game. It's why my memories are less chronological in nature and more fragmented.
But don't take any of this to mean that I didn't like Uninvited. I really did! I thought it as great. It wasn't quite as awesome as Shadowgate, no, but still it was a very enjoyable game. And I have a fair amount of good memories of my first experience with it.
I fondly remember, for instance, my first encounter with ghostly southern belle ("Scarlett O'Hara," as we called her). Her appearance was a big focus of the advertising, so I was excited to finally see her up close. I knew what was going to happen when I engaged her (because Nintendo Power had spoiled the surprise), but still that didn't make me any less eager to do it. I couldn't wait to see her horrifying response and experience it for myself!
My knowing in advance that there was a murderous skeleton hiding behind the umbrella didn't at all ruin the scene for me. I still loved it! Each of its elements was unforgettable: the closeup of the ghost's frighteningly realistic skull, whose blackened, empty eye sockets were like windows into the horrifyingly dark void of death; the creepy gloved hand that was grasping at the camera and signaling its intent to tear me to shreds; and the desperate-, distressing-sounding death ditty whose tormenting blare solidified the hopelessness of the situation.
So yeah--it was a great scene! It was everything that I hoped it would be.
Also, it was a stark reminder of how twisted and sadistic these games could be and how death could be lurking around any corner. At any moment, I was advised to recall, your adventure could end unexpectedly and cruelly and do so with the accompaniment of a gruesome death description whose account would likely entail something horrific like being (a) torn to pieces, (b) slowly dissolved by a burning liquid, (b) savagely reduced to a bloody heap, or (d) cut down in some other disturbing way.
Uninvited, that scene told me, was filled with death and horror, and I was happy to know that. Those elements were, in my view, important components of a point-and-click adventure game, and I was looking forward to experiencing all of the cruelty and depravity they had to offer!
But there were, also, some silly moments that were memorable to me because of how inexplicable they were and how they curiously belied the game's uneasy, foreboding atmosphere and made me laugh in a quizzical manner.
I'm talking mostly about my introduction to and frequent meetings with the diminutive, horned creature that would suddenly appear in certain rooms and then proceed to spin and dance his way across the screen and do so in rhythm to his own personal musical theme--a highly spirited, rockin' tune that felt entirely out of place in a game like this one. My encounters with this creature were always highlights because of how weirdly and contrastingly cheerful they were. Whenever the little fella would appear, I'd have a fun time. I'd laugh at his goofy dance moves and bop to his lively theme music, which I liked despite its feeling out of place. It was very catchy!
That creature was a big hit with my friends, too. They'd always laugh along with me as I watched him hilariously boogie his way across a room! They loved him!
And naturally, the little fella became part of our group culture. We incorporated him into many of our activities and creative projects. We included him in our "Master Criminals" card series, our "celebrity" Wiffle ball games (in which we'd pretend to be our favorite celebrities and fictional characters), our custom-made board games, and just about everything else we did. He was a constant presence in our lives. (He also made frequent appearances in my "Masters of Evil" art projects, as did all of the game's other enemies.)
We affectionately dubbed him "The Cookie Monster" (because, according to the game, he loved cookies), and we made sure to turn any meeting with him into a special event. Each time he'd appear, we'd let his theme music play for a minute or two, and we'd spend that time exaggeratingly bopping along to the tune's hot beat. That was our silly custom.
And those interactions represent some of the most memorable moments from all of my subsequent Uninvited experiences.
But getting back to the subject of my first play-through and my initial impressions: I had some mixed opinions on the game's presentation.
Visually, I thought, Uninvited was a bit of a step down from Shadowgate and Deja Vu. Its view-window imagery seemed to be more compacted and compressed, and quite often, its cramped-looking renderings stood in contradiction to the lavish descriptions that were attached to them. Its rooms were said to be "grand," "glamorous" and "oppressive," but really, they almost never appeared to be any of those things. So a lot of the time, I had no choice but to instead imagine what the rooms might have looked like in reality and rely more on my highly embellished, idealized visualizations of them.
I got a lot of assistance from the game's other elements: its inspiring, thought-provoking writing, whose power helped me to form my visualizations and provide them grand form; its entrancingly eerie, foreboding atmosphere, whose evocations imbued my mental renderings with rich character and texture; and its haunting music, which conveyed to me that the mansion's emptiness and placidity were merely an illusion--that unseen forces were definitely at work here--and thus helped me to fill in the gaps and put together a more complete picture of the game's world.
I felt that the music was the best part of the package. It was really great. It told a compelling story. It informed me that there was more going on than what I was seeing. It conveyed to me that I was searching a quietly haunted mansion whose ghostly inhabitants were lurking within dark corners, the surrounding woodland, and other spaces that were hidden from view. It evoked feelings of unease and made me feel as though it was in my best interest to remain alert and cautious even when it appeared that nothing was going on.
"Something's here," it said, "and it's watching your every movement."
The music performed its job spectacularly. It kept me engaged, it inspired me imagine and wonder, and it helped to create an interesting, thought-provoking world that was very close in spirit to Shadowgate's.
I had a problem with some of the game's design decisions. I didn't like, for instance, how the game supplied its spells. In Shadowgate, you learned new spells over time, and you had to work to discover them; you had to search for and procure the scrolls and documents that contained them. But in this game, you were supplied four of the six total spells right at the start and in the exact same location (the library)! And I felt that receiving spells in such a manner heavily detracted from the adventure-game system of discovery and reward.
Also, I didn't like that certain game elements had zero intricacy to them. The locked doors, for example: There was no real mystery to them! You never had to figure out how to unlock them. There were only two keys in the entire game, and one of them unlocked three of the four doors. So there were almost no instances in which I'd come across a firmly locked door and have to spend days trying to figure out how to open it. And consequently there was no opportunity for me to spend the off hours thinking about the nature of the obstruction and excitedly wondering about what huge secrets might lie beyond it.
And that was a real bummer.
But what I disliked more than anything else was the game's weirdly implemented, annoyingly intrusive time-limit function. It was a constant source of irritation.
Here's what would happen: After every fifteenth action, my progression would be interrupted, suddenly, by the appearance of a bloody red skull whose presence, the accompanying text stated, was meant to serve as a warning that the "evil air" that pervaded the mansion was beginning to invade my very being. And each subsequent time, the accompanying text would escalate in seriousness.
The frequent interruptions were bad enough, but what was worse was that the game would promptly end when the skull made its fourth appearance. And there was nothing I could do to stop any of it from happening. I had no obvious recourse--no way of warding off the skull or extending my life for a few more minutes.
I mean, the game was nice enough to allow me to continue right from where I died, yeah, but still it would do nothing to stop the skull from tormenting me. Rather, it would simply restart the cycle.
This issue didn't kill the game for me, no, but it would always make me shake my head and wonder what the hell the designers were thinking when they decided to implement a mechanic whose only function was, apparently, to inconvenience me and force me to reload my game every few minutes.
"Could it be that this 'curse' mechanic is an ill-conceived answer to Shadowgate's torch-lighting mechanic?" I wondered. "Is it the case that they wanted to expand upon the latter and somehow make it more irritating than it was originally?"
If so, it was a terrible thing to do. That new mechanic was annoying as hell, and it added nothing to the game.
It took me around two years to realize that the "curse" mechanic wasn't actually an intrinsic feature. The red skull was pestering me, I came to learn, because I was taking the "large, blood-red" ruby from the northwest bedroom's black dresser. That item was cursed (it had "some sort of strange power running through it," the game said), and my having possession of it was what was causing the skull to torment me.
So basically I was an idiot. The designers hadn't, as I'd ignorantly concluded, implemented a compounded version of Shadowgate's annoying torch-lighting mechanic just to be jerks, no. Rather, they'd simply thrown in a cursed item that I could have easily avoided. The pain was self-inflicted.
Once I figured out that you could dump the ruby, Uninvited really opened up for me. At that point, I no longer felt pressured to rush my way through the game. I'd gained the freedom to move about the mansion at my own pace. I'd gained the freedom to explore in a more leisurely way and really enjoy what I was doing.
In the hours and days that followed, I took the time to thoroughly inspect and examine the game and gain a greater appreciation of its setting. I visited each room and examined every possible object and did as much as I could to get a sense of the mansion's history and find out what was going on in the time before I arrived.
What I liked to do most was head out to the mansion's backyard deck and take in the view and use the moment to imagine what the landscape and its foreboding atmosphere would look and feel like if I could experience them in person.
The way I pictured the scene: It was around noon-hour on a mid-autumn day. The climate was calm and quiet. The air was crisp and cool, but still a lingering summer breeze would occasionally waft on by. The sky, for as far as the eye could see, was blanketed by woven-together gray clouds that were conspiring to not allow for even the faintest ray of sunlight to pass through. The only sounds to be heard were the skittering of dead leaves and occasional light rumbles of thunder. Darkened trees stood silently in the distance, their barren branches functioning to leave shadowy, gloomy impressions on the skyline and make it appear all the more ominous. There were no neighboring houses, and no human life existed in the surrounding spaces.
It was a glorious visualization. I loved creating it and thinking about it.
That's how it was with Uninvited in general: I loved examining and thinking about its environments. Doing so made me wish that I could visit its world and really see what it was like.
Simple window-view descriptions, for instance, provided fascinating accounts of what was occurring beyond the mansion's walls. They spoke of increasingly eerie skies, oncoming storms, grim-looking scenery, the estate's general sense of desolation and decay, and other compelling sights and events. And each one of those details served to enrich and intensify the mansion's gloomy, foreboding atmosphere and thus help me to put together a better picture of the game's world.
And as I'd explore the mansion, I'd keep all of the fascinating item descriptions in mind and use them fuel my imagination. I'd wonder about what was going on around me, in both the tangible and imperceptible spaces, and the forces that were at work here.
"Surely an unseen menace is lurking about and observing my every movement," I felt. "There has to be. I mean, who locked up those animals in the maze? Who's been feeding the guard dogs? Who's been paying to keep the utilities running? It has to be someone! But who? And does this entity have any relationship to the green-robed gentleman or Dracan?"
That's what Uninvited did: It invited me to wonder and imagine. And I enthusiastically took it up on its offer.
My only real problem with the game was, like I said, its lower difficulty. It didn't challenge the mind as much as Shadowgate and Deja Vu did. Its puzzles were comparatively easy to solve.
The biggest problem was that the game didn't always trust me to make logical connections. The most obvious example was chapel puzzle: A gypsy doll told me to speak with its "pious" brother, whose word could open doors in high places. "Fine!" I thought. "I'll try to find this guy and talk to him."
But because the authors probably believed that people from my age-group had too limited a vocabulary to understand words like pious and draw inference from them, they flatly labeled the intended target, the chapel's marble bust, as "pious" and thus removed all of the mystery! Then all I had to do to solve the puzzle was use the spell that the gypsy doll taught me.
The game wasn't always willing to leave me to own devices. Oftentimes its scrolls and documents' text would lack any ambiguity and simply spell out puzzle solutions for me, and its narrator's commentary would spoil puzzle solutions with overly explicit intimations and allusions.
This was a running theme.
There were some stumpers, of course. It took me a while to do things like find my way through the complexly constructed stone maze and figure out how to dispose of Dracan. But still, no puzzle in Uninvited was as demanding as even a mid-level Shadowgate or Deja Vu puzzle. There was nothing as complicated as, say, the multi-phase construction of the Staff of Ages or the process of destroying incriminating evidence. And that's what disappointed me the most.
The biggest letdown was that you could take out the final boss with a single ordinary item and thus treat him as though he were some second-tier grunt! "Oh, come on!" I said to myself after I disposed of him with the simple goblet. "Force me to do some work, game! At least make me have to combine two of my items!"
Unfortunately, Uninvited simply didn't desire to challenge me in that way.
This was the only time in which I had to turn to Nintendo Power for help. I discovered the solution by reading the recently arriving Volume 29's Counselors' Corner, which revealed that the ghostly servant suffered from arachnophobia and that you could banish him by tossing a spider in his direction. To obtain the spider, the counselor said, you had to go out onto the veranda, spray spider cider on the railing, leave and reenter, and then pick up the spider after it was rendered unconscious by the cider.
"Now how the hell was I, or anyone else, supposed to know that you could do that?!" I thought to myself after reading that bit. "Who would ever think to 'take' a spider?!"
I mean, I was completely on board with the idea of Uninvited's puzzles having a bit more arcanity to them, yeah, but complete nonsense like having to pick up an unconscious spider and throw it at stuffy ghost servant wasn't exactly what I had in mind when I pushed for it.
Ultimately, though, I arrived at a point in which I no longer cared that Uninvited's puzzles were too easy in comparison to the previous MacVenture games'. After reflecting upon my experiences, I came to realize the lower difficulty wasn't as big a deal as I made it out to be. It didn't really hinder my overall enjoyment of the game. I still had a great time with it.
Uninvited had plenty of brilliant counterbalancing qualities. It had a wondrous atmosphere, a highly engrossing setting, wonderfully immersive music, and a powerful ability to stir the imagination and inspire the grandest of visualizations. It had one of the most alluring, most-thought-provoking worlds I'd ever visited.
That's why I returned to it as many times as I did. It's why I still return to it today.
And I consider my enthusiasm to continuously revisit the game to be an emphatic objection to those who say that there's no reason to return to a point-and-click adventure game once you've solved all of its puzzles. I don't agree with that idea at all. I contend that there are plenty of other fun things for you to do in a game like Uninvited: You can, for instance, spend time soaking in its atmosphere and thinking and wondering about the nature of its world. You can read all of its item and object descriptions and learn more about the setting and story. And you can observe how it uses language and draw inspiration from its uniquely styled, edifying literature.
These games have more value than you realize.
I'm glad that I took the time to learn about the mansion's history and the events in which I was caught up. It was fascinating to discover how all of the separate story threads fit together and how Master Crowley (the mansion's owner), the evil Dracan, and all of the ghosts and monsters were connected to each other.
What surprised me the most was that the game's story was actually set in the 1980s (though, most of the mansion's supernatural and demonic phenomena were residual byproducts of the bizarre occult activities that occurred within the mansion thirty years prior). I'd guessed, while observing the mansion's antique-style furnishings, that the story was taking place in the 30s or 40s. But it wasn't; it was occurring within a time-period that was pretty close to ours. And that was interesting to me because I didn't know that it was possible for a modern setting to have such a mysteriously bygone air to it.
Originally I preferred that my tales of castle- and mansion-exploring were set in older time-periods, but after I played Uninvited, I changed my thinking. I realized that it made a lot of sense to set such stories in the modern era--particularly in the 80s, which I remembered as a time when kids used to dream about going on adventures and bravely exploring labyrinthine caves, dark forests, ancient castles, and other idealized places. It was a period in which it was still conceivable that you could locate an isolated, abandoned haunted mansion and explore it at your leisure. There were no cell phones, texting devices or GPS trackers, so no one could bother you or track you down. There'd be no one around for miles, and you'd be free to do whatever you wanted to do. The mansion would be your faraway playground.
That's what Uninvited did for me. It showed me that there was magic to be found, also, in the era in which I was currently living. And that's why I couldn't think of any other game I'd rather play when I was home alone on a rainy weekend afternoon and dreaming of going on an adventure.
There were a few other reasons why I returned to Uninvited regularly. The first was that I enjoyed the game's sense of humor, which ranged from referential (it spoofed works like Indiana Jones, MacBeth and The Twilight Zone) to bitingly facetious. Quite often, the narrator would make a smartass comment that was so horribly inappropriate or so aggressively derisive that I couldn't help but laugh it at.
The funniest bit, I thought, was the narrator's desperate attempt to stop me from descending down the chapel's dark pit. Every time I'd attempt to do so, he'd obstruct my movement and issue a warning. He'd say, for instance, "You really don't want to go down there. There's a spider down there that's bigger than a bread box!"
And when I'd ignore his repeated warnings and descend down the pit, anyway, I'd come face to face with the advertised threat, and in that moment, the narrator would sarcastically quip, "Well, what do you know. It's a giant spider."
Because he was a funny guy.
Another reason was that Uninvited had some memorable Easter eggs. It was fun to find them and revisit them.
The most easily discovered Easter egg was in the Game Room: If you operated the room's gramophone, it would play part of Shadowgate's main theme before conking out! I loved this reference because it directly connected Uninvited's world to Shadowgate's and thus provided it some extra depth. Mainly, it inspired me to wonder about how the two worlds were connected--how Shadowgate's shaped Uninvited's. And I had fun doing that.
What fascinated me most and provided the game's already-rich mythos an even larger amount of thought-provoking depth was what I found in the stone maze. I'd thoroughly explored the maze, so I knew that it contained two gravesites that alleged to house the remains of Ace Harding (Deja Vu's protagonist) and Talimar (the Warlock Lord from Shadowgate), respectively. I knew, also, that you could strike the associated headstones and cause the graves' zombified inhabitants to appear. But because those two zombies looked like every other zombie, I assumed that (a) they weren't actually the characters in question and (b) the headstones' text was likely conveying nonsense.
Then I discovered something important: You could actually talk to the zombies! That's when I learned, to my great amazement, that the zombies actually were Ace and Talimar! They confirmed as much when you spoke to them.
And those discoveries sent my imagination into overdrive. "Was Uninvited's mansion built in the same space in which Castle Shadowgate used to stand?!" I excitedly wondered. "And if so, what is Ace Harding's corpse doing here?! Did he move to Europe at some point and continue his career abroad?!"
Over the years, this game kept giving me so much to think and wonder about!
(Really, though, Ace's response is one of the saddest lines of dialogue I've ever read in a video game. I can't imagine anyone choosing to be alone forever. Such an existence is depressing to think about.)
In recent years, I've been enjoying Uninvited in a much different way. Specifically, I've been playing the computer versions of the game, and I've been having great fun learning about their variances and experimenting with all of their unique gameplay elements.
The computer versions, I've been finding, are quite different from the NES version in terms of presentation, style of interaction, and degree of content: Their action is controlled with a mouse and keyboard (more so the former). They feature windows-based drag-and-drop systems. Their visuals are higher-quality. Their writing is superior. And their sub-systems and textual elements are more fleshed out.
So far, I've played through the Windows, Amiga and Apple IIGS versions of the game, and I'd like to talk about them a bit and further explain how they differ.
All of the computer versions share the most notable divergent qualities. They all have, for instance, environmental sound effects. Actions and movements are accompanied by appropriately unsettling sounds: Doors creak as you open them, floors buckle beneath your weight, and ghosts and monsters scream in agony when you kill them. Also, thunder booms and rumbles intermittently and does so in a chilling fashion. And this aural depth works to heighten the game's foreboding atmosphere and create a greater sense of unease.
Also, their writing is, as mentioned, much superior. It's smarter, more descriptive, and better at explaining what the atmosphere is like and conveying to you how serious the situation is (it eerily predicts the oncoming of violent storms, it constantly informs you of how the estate's evil air is affecting you, and it provides all other types of grim, concerning details).
Their environments and renderings, aside from being higher in quality, are generally darker and creepier, and they never look compressed. And that's to say that they more closely match the descriptions that the narrator provides.
And the best part is that you can arrange your items any way you like! You can even stack them on top of each other!
What's convenient, also, is that you can drop items anywhere. And you don't have to worry about losing access to them because they remain in the place in which you drop them!
The NES port's visuals are clearly modeled after the Amiga version's. They closely match the latter's.
Expectedly, though, the Amiga version's imagery is cleaner and more detailed, and it's not compressed-looking (thanks to the Amiga's superior 320x200 screen resolution, which gave the designers more real-estate to work with). The only downside is that it has loading times for almost every action (the other computer versions, in comparison, run more smoothly).
Lately, I've been playing the The Uninvited: MacVenture Series on Steam. It's a compilation that includes two separate versions of Uninvited: the 1986 Apple Macintosh original, whose visuals are rendered in black and white, and its colorized Apple IIGS update, which was released two years later.
The latter is my favorite of the computer versions because it offers the best visual representation of the game's world. (And I love that its title-screen image is the same as the Amiga's! That helps it to cement its status as the most-artistically-on-point version of the game!)
At the moment, the IIGS version is the most accessible of the computer ports because the Windows version doesn't run on modern Windows computers (neither natively nor in compatibility mode). So it's definitely the computer version that I'll be returning to most.
I have to mention, though, that the computer versions have some qualities that might repel you if you're a console-centric gamer.
Most notably, they completely lack music (save for their horribly ill-fitting victory themes), and thus most of their game action is accompanied by stone-cold silence. If you grew up with the NES version, it's easy to perceive the absence of music as a negative quality and one that robs the computer versions of an important atmospheric element. Though, if you're a computer gamer, you might appreciate the lack of music and embrace what you view as an "appropriately eerie silence."
Also, they handle spells differently. They don't have scrolls whose magic words are recorded in your inventory and invoked via a simple button press, no. Rather, they have complex spell systems that require you to memorize several magic words and chant spells by typing correct combinations of them (three magic words in a certain order).
And, like the computer versions of Shadowgate and Deja Vu, they have strict time-limits. Every ten minutes or so, the aforementioned bloody skull will appear and harass you, and the fourth time he does it, you'll die. And there's nothing you can do to repel him. So you'll necessarily need to learn how to speedrun these versions of the game if you hope to see their endings. And that, to me, is a negative because it removes your ability to thoroughly explore the mansion and spend time reading the interesting item and object descriptions.
Oh, and in these versions, you're attempting to locate your lost brother, whereas in the NES version, you're searching for your sister. I don't know why Kemco-Seika made that change.
So far, I've enjoyed every computer version I've played. Each one has offered me a satisfyingly unique taste of Uninvited action. I'm glad that I've been able to spend time with them and gain a deeper understanding of what the point-and-click-adventure scene was like back in the mid-80s.
I still consider the NES version to be the best the bunch, but I admit that the Windows and Apple IIGS versions are very close to being on its level. If you gave them some music and took away their time-limits, they'd be serious challengers. (I'd say that the perfect version of Uninvited exists somewhere between the NES and Apple IIGS versions.)
And I'm thrilled to say that there's still more Uninvited out there! There are other computer versions that I haven't yet played (the Commodore 64 and Atari ST versions). I look forward to discovering them, too, and examining and enjoying their uniquely styled presentational elements.
The most surprising thing I ever learned about Uninvited was that it was in fact the first of the MacVenture games. Up until then, I assumed that Shadowgate was the series' first entry because I felt that it a had a prototype-like quality to it. It was, it seemed, the inspirer and the not the inspired.
But that's not how it is: Uninvited, in reality, predates Shadowgate by about a year!
Yet, still, I can't help but see Uninvited as a culminating third act--as a satisfying capper to a thoroughly engrossing adventure-game series that transported me to one amazingly wondrous world after the next. Crowley's haunted mansion was an ideal final stop on the long, highly enjoyable gaming adventure that began a year and a half earlier in a basement in Brooklyn.
So even though I'm disappointed that Kemco-Seika failed to bring more Shadowgate-style point-and-click classics over the NES (because it was probably too late in the console's life for it to consider doing so), I don't feel any need to complain. I'm extremely content with the three games that it gave us. They, on their own, have the power to eternally stir my imagination and inspire a lifetime's-worth of grand and glorious visualizations.
Uninvited, as it's always been, is my portal into a captivating world of desolation and mystery, of awe and wonder, and of sinister undead nightmares that hope to pull me into the shadows and claim my soul.
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