Mortville Manor

Mortville Manor is an excellent and highly underrated murder mystery game from French developer Lankhor.

Aside from offering a solid plot, the game introduces many features to adventure genre, most notably random factors (that, like the board game Clue!, leads to a different culprit each time you play) and digitized voices (which sound better than Access Software's "RealSound" technology used in Mean Streets, which came out after this game). You played Jerome Lange, a private detective who is tasked with investigating a murder that occurred in a remote manor. Your job, naturally, is to interrogate all potential suspects and go through their possessions to find clues and evidence.

Random factors give the game replayability unseen in other games: the killer's identity changes each time you played. Although the mystery takes only about 2-3 hours to solve, the random element keeps replay value high, and solid writing makes the game much more interesting than Clue!. Like most great murder mystery games, almost everyone has something to hide and motive to kill the victim, and therefore it is fun to reduce the possibilities one by one until you figure out the killer.

Since the PC version was never released in English, I decided to upload the Atari ST version (which has better graphics and voices) instead. Recommended for fans of adventure / detective games.

Review By HOTUD