Hugo's House of Horrors
Hugo's House of Horrors is an graphical adventure puzzle game developed and published by David Gray and released for MS-DOS on 1990-01-01 and later ported to Windows. It uses a game engine similar to those used by Sierra On-Line years earlier. It is the first game in the Hugo series of games and followed up by Hugo II: Whodunit? The story is rather typical: the girlfriend of Hugo has been kidnapped and taken into a mansion. The game uses a haunted house theme with various Halloween and horror movie tropes.
David Gray began programming Hugo's House of Horrors in 1989 writing in Quick C, and drawing graphics in PC Paintbrush.
I believe my mother got me this game at a shareware game swap. I played the game so much that I not only beat it, but made a hand-written full-score walk-though, complete game script, and documented various game bugs.
Contents
Status
I do not own the game, but I have beaten the game with a full score, without hints.
Review
- Overall: 3/10
- Best Version: DOS
Good
- The game gives a charming, if typical, adventure.
- There is a decent variety of puzzles and none of them are unfair.
- I like the trivia section which includes references to The Hobbit, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Bad
- The graphic and sound fidelity was very dated (King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! came out less than a year later). The art and music production is also clearly amateur.
- All of the puzzles are pretty straight-forward. There aren't really any alternate methods of defeating them.
- There are a couple bugs in the game that can be exploited, but they're minor.
Ugly
- The story is lacking, the theme is tired, the game is too short, and the ending is unfulfilling.
Media
Maps
Screenshots
Design Notes
Videos
- youtube.com/watch?v=UijhBRheB8k - Longplay.
Download
This is all of the shareware versions of the Hugo games I could find including Hugo's House of Horrors for DOS and Windows. You can still buy the game from the author.