Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
The 1920s were an important time in American history. Modern America was in a way, born
in the jazzy sounds of the Roaring 20s. The culture born in the this decade would dominate
the rest of the 20th century. Radio and film, mediums we take for granted now, were just
beginning to take shape. It was the time when one of the most important music genres, jazz,
was created and pioneered by gentleman like Lois Armstrong, and a certain dapper fellow
named Edward Kennedy Ellington. His friends also simply called him...Duke. Prohibition
took *** off the streets and forced it into speakeasies, allowing gangsters to fight wars
over liquor territory. But as important, and as free and sometimes violent as the 20s were,
they are not an era commonly used as a setting in today's most popular interactive medium:
video games. There are some exceptions however: such the
one I'd like to talk about today: Laura Bow: The Colonel's Bequest, released be Sierra
On-Line in 1989. Sierra is an important company, with company founder Roberta Williams being
called the Queen of the Graphic Adventure after her and her husband Ken created Mystery
House in 1980. Adventure games prior had all been text based, but Mystery House introduced
graphics to the genre, and while crude, it was the beginning of Sierra's loveable creations.
In 1989, adventure games, especially those by Sierra, were games fueled by puzzle solving
to advance the plot. Laura Bow was an attempt to slightly shake up that formula, introducing
a more character driven narrative. Instead of solely solving puzzles to enter rooms or
defeat a monster, the game wants you to take notes on character's actions and motives,
item locations and purpose, etc. While there are still a few traditional puzzles to solve,
the main crux of the game is the interaction between the characters. But how does it play
out? Well, let's start from the beginning. Laura Bow is a student at Tulane University
in 1925, studying journalism there. Her friend Lillian Prune, an attractive young flapper,
invites Laura to her uncle Colonel Henri's estate, for an apparent family reunion. Laura
eventually agrees, and 2 days later the duo arrive at the creepy old estate in the middle
of a swamp owned by the Spanish American war hero, Colonel Henri Dijon. At dinner that
evening, the Colonel, bound to his wheelchair from old war wounds, tells his guests that
when he passes, everyone present will get an equal share of his millions. After retiring,
everyone started complaining about the old man. This disgusts Lillian and she and Laura
retire to their room. This is where the game starts and we first gain control of Laura.
Fans of these types of games will be familiar enough with this interface but for those you
not, here's a quick rundown: Laura can move with either the Arrow Keys or by clicking,
but clicking will not allow you to interact with objects: no that is a modern luxury.
You will need to type your commands. This is pretty a pretty simple formula. You can
look at objects, talk to people, ask them questions, etc. Laura is a journalism student,
and never goes anywhere without her notebook. This helps serve as a reminder for you to
take notes during the game, and trust me, you're gonna need it.
Time In Laura Bow is what forces the plot forward, and advances in 15 minute increments
each time you enter a certain room during a certain time. Enter a room and see some
people arguing? Time advances. Then if you go to a different room and see something happen,
time will advance again. Of course this means you only have a certain amount of time to
observe certain things, or interact with certain people, and can easily miss them if you walk
into what I like to call the Trigger rooms. This can be pretty logic defying as you can
almost advance an entire hour in seconds if you're in the right place.
I started off by exploring the old estate on the swamp, which is actually very expansive.
Keep in mind this is an old game, but for only being able to display 16 colors, I think
it looks pretty good; everything for the most part is pretty easy to see and the amount
of objects you can interact with are surprisingly high. After meeting most of the characters
and asking them about each other, it becomes pretty clear that they really don't like each
other. Lillian's mother's a drunk, Rudy's a gambler, and Clarence is kind of a prick.
These characters are nasty, and questioning them on the others will help Laura understand
them and what happens as the night goes on. Conversations between other characters are
private most of the time, and the family are not happy when Laura decides to come in and
interrupt. But, they have some interesting things to talk about.... If only there was
a way to eavesdrop. Well, there is. In the two floors of the estate,
there are several hidden passages hidden behind cabinets and clocks and mirrors. Moving these
allow Laura to enter a secret hallway and peer into the rooms through peepholes in paintings.
Doing so allows her to overhear the conversation going on and hear information that helps expand
the story of the characters. Spying into the right trigger rooms also advances time, but
you can also enter the room then exit to spy on them too. The characters are pretty bitter
and these hidden conversations show to just how much of an extent they dislike each other.
Things are pretty hostile around this place So far, there has been no real suspense during
the game; but that all changes around 8 o'clock when we decide to visit Gertrude, the Colonel's
sister in law. Previously, we find her sleeping in her bed. Later, we come back and there's
clearly something wrong. A knocked over table and an open window? This doesn't look good....
We can't see that far outside from the window, so we go outside and confirm our fears. Gertie
looks like she fell, or was thrown from her room in the middle of the night.
This is where I was having problems with the text commands. I'm trying to tell Gloria about
her mother's death. Her response seems a little out of place. I take out the word 'death'
and just say "Tell Gloria about Gertie" and suddenly she goes and checks. But she comes
back, saying there's nothing there! What? How is that possible? I went back out
to check and sure enough Gerie's body is gone. Someone's killed her and moved the body, because
if she had just fallen, why go through the trouble of moving the body? Something is going
on here, and it's making Laura's journalistic sense tingle.
It isn't hard to figure out what might be happening. The Colonel said that his estate
will be split up equally to his family and if anyone died before he, their share would
be split with the others. So, clearly, someone must have killed Gertie to make the pot bigger.
... Later, Laura discovers Clarence, Gloria's
boyfriend, and Wilbur, the Colonel's doctor, speaking outside. They don't want Laura overhearing
them so they move rooms several times after Laura follows them. We get a chance to spy
on them in the dining room, and it turns out they've stolen money from the colonel to invest
in a racehorse and lost out bigtime. That's not good... In fact, most of the characters
have a secret, including the colonel himself, who's been getting a little frisky with his
maid Fifi, and isn't as disabled as we all thought. As time passes, characters leave
certain rooms, and when the colonel is away I snooped around his room, finding a key to
his convenient elevator shaft. And after taking a bone from the kitchen and throwing it to
distract the dog, I found a necklace. I also found a oilcan and a crowbar in the carriage
house on the island. The game doesn't have a ton of items, but these are important ones.
Dr. Wilbur was reading in the library a while ago, but at a point we notice his chair knocked
over and a fire poker just laying around. What happened the last time we found a room
in disarray, we found a body outside, but Wilbur is nowhere to be found. When this happens,
you will get no indication from the game on where to check, or what to do next, and this
is a prime example. After not really seeing much of anything going on I decided to go
back to the chapel on the island. I was already there before, and low and behold, there is
wilburs body. Searching him allows Laura to take his monocle which helps us examine different
objects closely. This will come in handy, but poor Dr. Wilbur is dead and his share
of the estate now goes to the rest of the family. And yes, his body disappears soon
too. That necklace we found belongs to the Colonel's
servant, who warms up to Laura and eventually let's us visit her shack and talk with her.
She has some interesting thoughts on our friend Lillian, and we learn that Lillian's dad committed
suicide, and that her mother Ethel cares more for the bottle than her own daughter. Interesting.
Spying in the colonels room at one point allows Laura to overhear Lillian upset at the colonel
that he cares no more or less for her than anyone else in the family, which leads her
to believe that someone has gotten between colonel Dijon and her; upsetting her greatly.
We later find her inside a playhouse on the grounds of the estate, reading a book to a
bunch of dolls.... Okay, maybe Lillian isn't exactly the girl
we thought she was... Remember the secrets some of the characters
have? Well, Fifi the maid and Jeeves the butler certainly have one. They're planning a nice
little....uh....get together later this evening that Fifi is getting ready for. She even took
a decanter of cognac from the parlor room to help fuel their evening. Looking around
in the bathroom, Laura finds a bottle of sleeping powder that we couldn't read all the label
of previously, but now with Wilbur's monocle we can read it's fatal in large doses.....On
a whim, I went back to Fifi's room to find that Jeeves and Fifi had been killed as well,
and they were drinking cognac before collapsing. They have no wounds and looking at the decanter
shows a little white powder at the bottom.... Someone really has it out for this family.
Lillian doesn't really want to talk to Laura much at this point, but we spy her writing
in her diary and hiding it in her suitcase As the game goes on, more bodies start piling
up and a shadowy figure in a large hat starts stalking the estate. Gloria gets strangled,
Clarence gets stabbed, and Ethel gets killed and dumped in the garden. Lillian's diary
says others in the family have to go....and we later find her back in the playhouse with
a set of tallymarks on a chalkboard. Her crazy talk, attitude lately, diary entry and the
tally marks seem to indicate something rather nefarious with our best friend...
The suit of armor inside the manor can be oiled in various places with the oilcan we
found in the carriage house. Just gonna oil the arm here and......
Laura Bow wouldn't be a classic Sierra game without some interesting deaths, and Laura
Bow has a few of them. From the axe cutting you in half, falling down the elevator shaft
or laundry chute, or even getting killed by the murderer in closet. A chandelier can fall
or the railings can give out. These deaths are easily avoidable once you get killed once,
but they serve as a good reminder to save often. My favorite death scene is in the bathroom,
where you can tell Laura to take a shower. After stripping down butt-naked for us all
to see, she starts her shower, and in this scene right outta physco, she is cut down.
This is really an Easter egg more than anything, but it is rather amusing.
Back to that suit of armor. You can actually oil the mask to find a hidden handle. The
handle works in the hedge garden statue to open a secret tunnel. Just remember to light
your lantern before going inside. The tunnel leads to a closed off section of
the basement, where the laundry chute leads. As we creep closer, we find where those missing
bodies from before. A huge pile of bodies.....gross. If you found the crank from the bell you can
knock down, you can escape from the the basement via a tomb and find a pouch full of jewels.
You don't need to do this but they change the ending a little bit. It's also much shorter
to get back outside than going the way we came.
There's a note in the door telling someone to meet them in the hedge garden and there
we find poor Lillian dead, but dressed up in a weird outfit: which actually belongs
to the colonel. It's possible she was the shadowy figure we observed outside in this
weird getup. But she's been shot through the chest and dead now. She also has one of the
colonel's guns and a bullet. Let's take that. Returning to the mansion, there's the sound
of fighting upstairs, and going up to the attic, we see rudy and the colonel, fighting.
We have two options, shoot the colonel or shoot rudy. Earlier in the game we saw Rudy
searching Lillian's stuff, so it's possible he was involved in the murders of everyone
else....so I shot him down instead. The colonel thanks us for saving his life
and explains that Lillian killed everyone because she thought they were getting between
the colonel and her....it really wasn't about the money, just the jealousy of only being
cared about the same as everyone else. Rudy managed to save himself from Lillian, killing
her, and decided to finish the job himself. He is arrested, the colonel leaves everything
to his servant and let's Laura keep the jewels she found, and that's the end of the game.
After the ending cut scene we are given a rating on how well we did snooping around
the house. I've never managed to get the super sleuth rating, which means you discovered
everything in the game. The notebook allows us to review things and see what area's we
were missing things from, so on the next play through we can go back and find them to raise
our rating. Laura Bow, the Colonel's Bequest is a decent
game. I think it's hard to play through more than once or twice because nothing really
ever changes. Sometimes the bodies are in different places but that's all I've noticed,
and once you know when rooms will force the plot forward, you can play the game pretty
systemically, since most of the items will always be available during any point in the
game. It's not a bad game and really nails the creepy mansion atmosphere, but with a
terrible vacant set of outdoor screen that really slow travel to certain areas down,
and some cheap deaths that only help to encourage save-scumming for new players, the Colone's
Bequest can be very off putting to newcomers to the genre. Also, the time element really
throws a puzzle in the logic of the game: If someone was in a room at one point, such
as with Gertie, you can leave, come back, and she's been tossed out of the window. The
game isn't really counting on you to enter and re-enter rooms, but if you do, you'll
encounter such gaps. But hey, this is an early graphic adventure game, and really is worth
playing through. Laura Bow's inspiration comes from the actress
Clara Bow, who rose to fame during the 1920s in silent films. Clara Bow was a symbol of
sex during the roaring two's being called Hollywood's "It" Girl after starring in a
silent film of a similar name. Clara Bow's appearance and name are the main influences
for Laura's design, as the only naughty thing she does in the game is this.... And well,
Clara's life was a good bit different. Laura would later become more of a polite Southern
Belle in her second and final game, The Dagger of Amon Ra, further stretching the difference
between her real life inspiration and her actual character design.
The Colonel's Bequest is not as important to the industry as King's Quest may have been,
but for those looking for a different type of graphic adventure game that offers a mystery
to solve and a creepy atmosphere, then this is the game for you. If you're looking for
the traditional, well, Roberta Williams' and her husband have several for you to choose
from.