Mystery Mansion

The Game

You find yourself inside a musty old mansion, with no memory of how you got here.  As you collect your senses, you begin searching the mansion for an exit...

The Backstory

Mystery Mansion was created in 2012 for a digital design college class. The goal for this project was to learn Javascript and build a website, but I decided to go off and make a browser game instead (I got an A on the project though, so no regrets here).

Mystery Mansion was based on my own foggy recollection of a tutorial shipped with an old programming language for making your own text adventure games. This tutorial game also featured a house with four rooms, and each room had a puzzle to solve before you could escape the house. This game also featured a meta, reality-bending ending, if memory serves. But for the life of me I can't remember the name of the programming language or the tutorial project...

Fast-forward to the 2020s: I decided to remake Mystery Mansion as a minigame for MonCon, and this remake was fashioned as an old-school text adventure game, which sort of brought everything full circle back to the mysterious text adventure that inspired all of this.

Controls

Mystery Mansion is played in a browser with the mouse. Click on one of the four directional arrows to move through the mansion. When you pick up items, they are added to the blank area in the bottom-right portion of the screen. Clicking on items while they're in your inventory will allow you to try to use them in the room you're currently in.

Some browsers have a bug that causes inventory items to momentarily disappear and reappear. Leaving and re-entering the room usually fixes this problem.