About
A new text adventure for the Tatung Einstein from TatungBytes, in the style of H. P. Lovecraft. England, October 1928. Blackwater Hall has stood empty since the night its household sat down to dinner and was never seen again. The house is to be sold, but the front door is bolted on the inside. You are Keane, a private inquiry agent, sent by the heir's solicitors to find out who is living there.
Out on the Essex marshes, a fellowship once performed a rite at the lowest tide in a hundred and thirty years, and woke something that still lies beneath the house. The house should be empty. It is not.
Play Blackwater Hall in your browser in our Online Player, with nothing to install.
The Game
- 53 places to explore, in the house, its grounds and the marsh around it.
- A full parser: type what you want to do in plain English, such as
EXAMINE THE CLOCK,TAKE THE LAMPorUNLOCK THE DOOR WITH THE KEY. It understands adjectives,ITandALL, several commands on one line,AGAINandUNDO. - A clock and the tides, which matter. Light and darkness. Nerves that fray as the night goes on, and can be steadied.
- Twelve endings, each with its own card, a title tune, ten hidden pages of a diary, and a score out of 300.
- When you are stuck,
HINTgives four hints a night.SAVE,RESTOREandUNDOwork as you would expect.
It is written in Z80 assembly, and the disc is read only when you walk into a new part of the house. Everything in it is original; nothing is taken from Lovecraft's own stories.
The Papers
Like a boxed adventure of the time, Blackwater Hall comes with the papers of the case, as printable PDFs in the Papers folder of the download. Read the solicitors' letter first. They print best on A4, and the tide table matters in play.
| Paper | What It Is |
|---|---|
Pargeter-and-Lowe-Letter.pdf | The solicitors' letter engaging Keane, 10 October 1928, typed on white paper |
Dawe-Report.pdf | The surveyor's report on the house, August 1928, on green grey paper |
Vicar-Letters.pdf | Two letters from the Vicar of Fenmouth, in violet ink on pale blue paper |
Fenmouth-Courier-Cutting.pdf | The local newspaper's account of the household's disappearance |
Tide-Table-October-1928.pdf | The Admiralty tide table for the estuary, with the full moon on the 14th, on buff card |
Keanes-Notebook.pdf | Keane's sketchbook: 46 charcoal sketches of the house and grounds, and his hand drawn maps of each floor (52 pages) |
The pictures above include the first page of each paper and five pages of the notebook.
Running It
In MAME use the MFI image, so that saved games work (MAME cannot write to an Einstein .dsk):
mame einstein -flop1 Blackwater-Hall-v52.mfiAt the 0: prompt type BLACKWAT and press RETURN. If you have not set MAME up yet, see emulating the Tatung Einstein. Or skip the setup and play it in the Online Player.
The DSK image is the same disc, for writing to a real 3 inch disc. An earlier build, version 51, was tested on a real Einstein.
Files in the Package
| File | What It Is |
|---|---|
Blackwater-Hall-v52.mfi | The game disc for MAME, so that saved games work |
Blackwater-Hall-v52.dsk | The same disc, to write to a real 3 inch disc |
README.txt | How to play, and a list of the papers |
Papers/ | The six papers of the case, as PDFs |
A Walkthrough
The download does not include a walkthrough, so the investigation is yours to solve. If you would like one, a walkthrough is available on request: get in touch.
Gallery
