A mysterious dark figure cuts through the fog blanketing the lonely country road, causing you to send your car careening into a nearby tree. Awaking from brief unconsciousness, you find yourself sitting in your newly totaled car. Your sister is nowhere to be found. You head inside the nearby Crowley mansion in search of her, but the heavy double doors slam shut behind you. Countless horrors await trespassers who are…UNINVITED! OoOoOoOoH!
The MacVenture series consists of four point ‘n’ click adventure games released for Mac computers throughout the 80’s. They’re notable for being some of the very first adventure games to boast a graphical user interface, instead of using text-only parsers. These titles have been remade and re-released more than a few times over the years as a testament to how neat they are. The most famous set of remakes was on the NES, with three out of the four games being ported to the big gray box (with the fourth being developed, but ultimately unreleased). These ports received quite the facelift from their black-and-white Mac counterparts, sporting full-colour graphics, vastly different scripts, and all new soundtracks where there was originally no music at all. Quite the valiant effort by Kemco!
Uninvited is the only horror-themed title of the quadrilogy, making it perfect for the Halloween season; as you may have guessed, the mansion is haunted as shit. The gameplay is as classic as they come – if you’ve played an adventure game in the last 40 years, you’ll understand how this one works right away. The groundbreaking PC interface being retooled to work with a five button controller feels a little awkward at first, but it’s something I got used to pretty quickly. As this is an adventure game from the 80’s, there are a few things about it that are quite cumbersome by design. For example: to get rid of the infamous Scarlett O’Hara ghost, you need to use a bottle of “No Ghost” on her. Simple enough, but if you try to use the bottle on her without first “opening” it, you’ll be treated to one of the most well known game over screens of the era. I guess they were going for realism with the “open” command, and while it is a pain in the neck, it’s by no means a deal breaker. One great change exclusive to the NES is that the time limit present in the original is gone, so you can take your time exploring the mansion at a relaxed pace. That’s nothing but a good thing when it comes to building tension!
Though the NES version is an improved and enhanced port in some ways, in others, it’s a grossly inferior one. The original Mac script reads like a proper choose your own adventure novel, complete with bone-chilling prose to fill your head with disturbing imagery to set your teeth on edge. Of course, NES games are itty bitty little things compared to their computer contemporaries, so the script had to be scaled back significantly to get it to fit on a cartridge. Even so, the NES version does a good version of cherry picking the best and most important parts of the text to put on display, so it still manages to set a bit of an eerie atmosphere to mess with your head. The poppy, upbeat music might detract from that atmosphere some, but the actual compositions of the songs are really solid. In any other game they’d be great, but a lot of them don’t fit the horror-themed tone of Uninvited at all. This might be the first horror game I’ve ever played where I was tapping my toes to the tunes.
Sadly, the North American version of Uninvited got beat over the head with the kid-friendly stick thanks to Nintendo’s censorship policies, making the finished product feel a little limp in the horror department overall. Gone is the underlying occultist theme of the original, with the pentagrams and demons being replaced by non-threatening stars and vaguely silly looking ghosties. How do you get rid of the demons ghosts? By throwing a crucifix goblet full of holy water Aquafina on them, how else?
To be honest, I didn’t even realize they were going for an occult slant while playing the NES edition until stumbling across the off-the-cuff mention of “master Crowley” that managed to squeak past the all-seeing eye of the Big N (that being a reference to the infamous real-life occultist of the same name). I just took it as a typical haunted house mystery up until that point. Oops? While it’s a shame that this game’s fangs had to be shaved down considerably, it’s understandable. Can you imagine the moral panic an uncensored Uninvited on the NES would’ve sparked amongst early 90’s American parents? That’s almost as terrifying of a thought as the Scarlett O’Hara ghost.
All in all, the NES port of Uninvited is a fun and engaging adventure game with some cool locations and puzzles to unravel. The clunky UI and general simplicity of this near 40 year old game definitely won’t be for everyone, but I’d say it’s worth muscling through for the game beyond all that. Just don’t expect Uninvited to scare the pants scared off you, because those trousers will be staying firmly on.
NESJunk 