The makers of the upcoming game Zeno Clash released a lovely little point and click horror adventure game yesterday. The Malstrums Mansion contains between 30 minutes and a few hours of gameplay, depending on how good your adventuring skills are! *hint* You can click on ‘Operate’ and then click on inventory objects to use them with other things.*unhint* It has a cool retro feel even including old school style DRM where you had to look up word x, line y, on page z of the manual in order to start the game.

Unfortunately, this game does not have a save feature. Half of the fun from adventure games is experimenting and discovering all of the stupid ways you can die. Not having a save feature means that game actions are thought through more carefully, but making a mistake is infinitely more frustrating if you have to go back and play back through the game up to that point. I enjoy experimenting in adventure games, especially ones like this where the items and scenery have a very high level of detail to explore and play with. Not being able to explore the game to its fullest extent without risking total failure makes me a very sad panda.

However, I still had a lot of fun playing this game, even if I couldn’t go around hitting everything with a shovel “just to see what would happen.”

Play! - The Malstrums Mansion

Source - Indie Games Weblog