Rosio Pavoris

Alright, so it’s almost a month ahead of schedule. After three days of playtesting, I think it’s ready for its first release.

About

The Mansion is a text adventure in the style of Zork, perhaps, except shorter and not intended to be funny.
You are the unnamed protagonist. You went camping with your friend and/or loved ones, and got lost in the forest in a storm. You slip, hit your head, and lose consciousness. When you wake up, you find yourself in a mysterious mansion.
Your goal, obviously, is to escape.

Warning for the lolis: this game touches on some “mature” subjects, including suicide, rape, murder, infanticide, pedophilia, and—gasp!—video games.
I would like to think this game is horror, but I doubt I actually achieved that.

You can find the game here. Right now, there’s only a Windows version, though it will work under Wine (for Linux users) or Darwine (for Mac users; though if you’re on an older Mac, finding the PPC version of Darwine can be a problem).
I intend to add a Linux version soon, but unless I find a decent cross compiler, a Mac version might be problematic. If you know of one (that would work under either Windows or Linux), do let me know. (I could send the source to someone who owns a Mac, for them to compile, but I really don’t want to do that at this point. Maybe in a month or so.)
If (when) you find bugs or typos, please do report them (either as a comment here or in some other way; my contact information is on my About Me page), so I can fix them.

Edit: Version 1.0.1 now. About a dozen mostly very minor bugs (and maybe one or two significant ones) have been fixed. If you downloaded the game more than a day or so ago, it’s probably a good idea to download it again.

The maps in that folder have been created by Terras, and are pretty awesome. Feel free to use them to guide your imagination, but if they conflict with it, ignore them, of course.

Controls

It should be pretty straightforward to use.

Commands should be in lowercase (because I can’t be bothered to convert, and it’s not worth the extra cycles), except for names, which should be properly capitalised.

inventory (or inv) is a pretty important command. Without arguments, it lists the items in your inventory. With an argument (inv pajamas, for example), it gives you a detailed description of the item (look pajamas won’t work; this is done to avoid too much ambiguity with similarly-named items in the room you’re in).
It usually only looks at the first word of the argument (inv tiny does the same thing as inv tiny silver key), except in case of ambiguity. Often, just the noun in the item name will work (inv bible instead of inv worn bible), except, again, in case of ambiguity (mostly for keys and diaries).

Moving should be straightforward, if you’ve played these games before. go west or move west goes west. So does west or w. Don’t forget up and down can be valid directions as well.
There are a few cases where you have to be more specific, but it shouldn’t be terribly hard to figure out.

For the rest, look at stuff, and get or take it.
save foo will save your game to a file called foo.sav, but it’s possible you have to create the blank file manually first. I don’t know what’s causing that, and it doesn’t particularly bother me. The game is short enough to finish in one go, anyway.
To load the game, load foo (without the extension).
quit or exit quits the game (without asking for confirmation). leave does not, but it will generally get you out of a room if there’s only one exit.

Trivia

I thought about calling the game Catharsis or Ego instead, but I decided against it because of connotations.

The game is written in C++, and the source is about 142 KB in 36 files. Because of preprocessor trickery and an unwillingness to sacrifice readability for efficiency (and the odd inability of my compiler to optimise string use), the executable is considerably larger. Though it still fits on a floppy, so that’s okay.

There are eight possible endings, one of which is happy.
I didn’t intend for there to be any happy endings, originally, but meh. I’m too nice.

I intend to release more versions of the game in the future, which add content and build on the storyline. In particular, I intend to work out the maid’s story in version 1.1.0, and let people in the garden shed (which is the only inaccessible area at this point).

You should make fan art and send it to me. O\__/O