Review: The Colonel's Bequest

As a child, I was what you would call a gamer. We owned dozens of floppy disks that ran adventure games designed by Sierra On-Line, many of which fell under the various “quest” titles: King’s Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, Hero’s Quest (later called Quest for Glory) and the two Laura Bow mysteries: The Colonel’s Bequest and The Dagger of Amon Ra.

Released in 1989, the inspiration for The Colonel’s Bequest is fairly obvious: storywise it’s based on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, what with a group of disparate characters brought to an island where they one-by-one fall victim to an unseen murderer, but there’s a dash of Cluedo in there too – specifically some of the characters’ colour-based names (Colonel Dijon is obviously a nod to Colonel Mustard) and the setting of an opulent but remote mansion.

It's also a much more sophisticated remake of Sierra’s very first game from 1980: Mystery House, which also involved the player investigating a series of murders that take place in a singular location, and which is considered the very first graphic adventure game ever. Like, the very first ever. Did I mention that it was conceived, designed, written and illustrated by a woman, Roberta Williams? She literally came up with the idea to combine a story with visuals for a gaming format.

She also wrote and designed The Colonel’s Bequest, and was further inspired by her most recent instalment in the King’s Quest series, The Perils of Rosella, which in 1988 was the first graphic adventure game to feature a playable female protagonist (this is somewhat contested: there had been playable female characters before, but Rosella was the first in an adventure, rather than an arcade game).

In any case, Roberta Williams had created Rosella, was pleased with her reception, and wanted to follow up with another heroine. (Here’s a direct quote from my gaming manual: “I was on a roll with Rosella as the female lead in King’s Quest IV; my next game had to try this again, but with a different theme.”) The result was Laura Bow, and unlike Rosella, who was part of an ongoing series that largely focused on male protagonists, she was the undisputed main character of her own offshoot of computer games: the interactive murder-mystery.  

Set in 1925, Laura Bow is a twenty-year-old student at Tulane University when she’s approached by her friend Lillian Prune and invited to spend the weekend at her grandfather’s old plantation house in the bayous of Louisiana. Who wouldn’t leap at that chance? The two are taken there by ferry, the plantation having long since receded into the swamps and rendered the homestead of Misty Acres an island that’s inaccessible by road or foot.

The house party has been arranged by its owner, Colonel Henri Dijon, so that he can share the contents of his will with his family members and close associates. They are the Dijon family, comprised of Gertrude (Henri’s sister-in-law) and her adult children Rudy and Gloria, and the Prune family, Ethel (Henri’s sister) and her daughter Lillian. Also included in the will is the Colonel’s lawyer Clarence Sparrow and his doctor Wilbur Feels.

According to the stipulations of the will, they will all get an equal share of the fortune after his death, though if any of them die before him, the money will be divided among those still living. And if that isn’t a perfect setup for murder, then what is?

Also present on the island are the Colonel’s servants: his taciturn butler Jeeves (yes, really) the French maid Fifi (also yes, really) the cook Celie, and his beloved pets: warhorse Blaze, hound dog Beauregard, and talking parrot Polly. Laura has free rein to go wherever she wants, from the private rooms of the manor house to the outbuildings dotted across the island – though as the night ticks on, people start disappearing...

***

It was actually a while before I was able to play this game; I think I was fourteen or fifteen by the time I finally got my hands on a copy. Long before then, back when computer games came with manuals that advertised what else was on offer, I remember being absolutely captivated with the double-page spread on The Colonel’s Bequest. There was a cross-section of the house with crimes happening in various rooms, plus little boxes strewn about that contained images of the characters and their biographies (I still remember the one featuring Celie: “There are rumours she dabbles in voodoo”, which never failed to send shivers down my spine).

So I probably played this game in my imagination about a hundred times before I ever saw it on the screen, which only occurred after my father bought a boxed set of all seven of the available King’s Quest games (our floppy disks had long since become obsolete by then, and these were on state-of-the-art CD rom) which included, as a special bonus, the two Laura Bow games. I was so happy I cried. For real.

***

The unique thing about The Colonel’s Bequest is that it’s better described as an interactive story than an adventure game, and you could hypothetically finish it in under fifteen minutes without getting at least 90% of the gameplay. One suspects that many impatient gamers ended up thinking it was a waste of money if they churned through it too quickly! I have to admit, when I played it for the first time I was so eager to see what happened next that I hardly got anything done. I didn’t even find the secret passages, and I definitely made the wrong final choice!

The game is laid out in seven distinct acts and the story unfolds across the hours of 7pm to 2.15am, with each hour being divided into quarter-hours, triggered (usually) by Laura witnessing an interaction between two other characters, at which point the clock will advance. In the final few chapters, by which point most of the other characters are dead, it’s simplified to either seeing another character or discovering something important.

Naturally the environment changes as the night goes on; not only do people move from place to place, but some things can only be achieved after a certain point (for instance, the playhouse is locked for the first two acts, and there’s an entire subplot that involves Laura finding a Civil War-era treasure on the property which can only be accessed when one is in possession of the matches found on the body of the second-to-last murder victim. Obviously this is designed to happen quite late in order to beef up the gameplay of the last few acts).

To make things more complicated, not every interesting or important occurrence on the island will trigger the clock, which means that it’s very easy to miss some of the more minor interactions. Things like Gloria confronting Wilbur on her undisclosed medical secret in the library or Jeeves going about his nightly ritual of feeding the animals and lighting the candles in the chapel don’t win the player any points, but add to the ambiance and lived-in feel of the story.

In fact, I watched a playthrough of the game on YouTube in which the player achieved the highest possible score, and was surprised by how much they missed seeing – the ghost of Sarah Crouton in the graveyard, the muddy/bloody Civil War clothes in the attic, and most of the responses from Polly after feeding her a cracker (she provides a different reply in each act).  

***

SPOILERS

There are eleven characters on the island at the start of the game, not including Laura herself, and as such they embody very broad archetypes in order to make them memorable: Gertrude is the aristocratic snob, Rudy the wastrel, Gloria the glamourous actress, Wilbur the sleazy doctor, Ethel the drunk, Fifi the slutty gold-digger, Jeeves the strong, silent type (and the only character Laura can’t have a conversation with) and Celie the gentle cook. The only three characters with more than one dimension are Lillian, Clarence and the Colonel himself, each one getting a degree of development – or at least some hidden depths – over the course of the night.

As it happens, the central mystery of the killer’s identity is not all that compelling. Despite all the various motivations the guests are given for potentially offing one another (covering up embezzling, romantic jealousy, refusal to sell land, inheriting the Colonel’s fortune) none of them end up meaning a damn thing. Instead, the killer is revealed as Laura’s friend Lillian, who kills the rest of the guests (including her own mother!) after deciding that they’ve stolen her uncle’s love and attention away from her.

Heck, even the game’s title is a red herring, since the Colonel’s bequest has nothing to do with Lillian’s primary motivation (perhaps that was the point? The dramatic irony?)

Her impetus is misplaced revenge, as the Colonel makes it clear he doesn’t particularly care for her (telling her at one stage: “I was just trying to help my sister. To me, you were just her insecure, whiny kid”) and it becomes obvious very quickly (perhaps too quickly, as the reveal occurs in the third act) that Lillian is mentally unhinged when Laura discovers her talking to dolls in the playhouse.

Later she’s discovered inspecting the Colonel’s weapons cache and a diary entry pretty much spells out what she’s been up to. Though you never catch her in the act, she spends the night dressing up in her uncle’s old war regalia (which Laura discovers in the attic, both before and after it becomes bloodstained and mud-splattered) and killing those she believes have come between her and her uncle.

The biggest red herring suspect up till this point is Clarence Sparrow, who is given reason to kill the first three victims and is the last one to die in Lillian’s murder spree, but the game cheats quite a lot when it comes to the crime scenes. Why would Ethel’s handkerchief be outside Gertrude’s bedroom door? Why would feathers from Gloria’s feather boa be in the library where Wilbur is killed? Why would Ethel be killed with Celie’s rolling pin? Are we meant to infer that Lillian was trying to frame these people, or was she just using the weapons that came to hand?

Likewise, Lillian is bestowed with superpowers when it comes to the timing of these kills and the speed with which she disposes of the bodies. It’s especially egregious at the end of Act I, which will usually end with the player entering Gertrude’s room and seeing her asleep on the bed. This is one of the four triggers of the hour, and if you do it last then it’s possible to leave the room and immediately re-enter to find that Gertie has been pushed out the window. How on earth did Lillian pull this off?

She’s also remarkably quick in moving the bodies: after discovering them you only get one chance to inspect them as they’ll disappear once you’ve left the screen. And since many of the bodies are killed in one location and moved to another before being deposited in the basement, we’re left with some bizarre assumptions: like the fact that Lillian must have killed Wilbur in the library, moved him all the way to the chapel, then dragged him all the way back to the house in order to shove his body down the laundry chute to the basement.

Even weirder, Lillian is prepared to kill Laura at certain points. Go too far into the secret passages, walk into the shadows of the attic or open the cupboard door on the first-floor landing and a shadowy figure will drag you to your death. The funniest one is if you chose to take a shower, something you can do at any point of the game (including within the first few seconds) in which Lillian will sneak in and stab you to death in a pretty cool Alfred Hitchcock homage. Perhaps these aren’t meant to be canon (as if you win the game, you’re clearly not killed) but it’s still an odd addition.

There is a last-minute twist in the final hour that throws a wrench in the proceedings, making it impossible to deduce the killer by narrowing it down to the last surviving character. Before the night is over, Lillian herself is killed. Hers is the last body found, and when Laura returns to the house after its discovery in the hedge garden it’s to hear scuffling from upstairs in the attic room. There the Colonel and Rudy are having a fight to the death with a hypodermic needle between them, and the player has the choice (if they’ve picked up and loaded a gun earlier in the game) as to which one they’ll shoot.

Shoot the Colonel and he’ll end up dead, with Rudy pinning all the deaths on him and telling Laura he lured the family to the island with the deliberate intent to pick them off one-by-one. This is the bad ending, which clearly contradicts all of the evidence that’s been pointing to Lillian this whole time and finishes with a very confused Laura hoping that the police will figure it out.

Shoot Rudy and he’ll be injured, with the Colonel giving you the truth: Lillian picked off most of the guests and then tried to kill Rudy, who ended up shooting her in self-defense. Seeing that the other beneficiaries of the bequest were already dead, he decided to finish the job by killing the Colonel with the hypodermic needle and inherit all the dosh.

This is the good ending, with the police called, Celie being bequeathed the house and fortune on the condition she remains to take care of the animals, and (provided you found it) Laura being allowed to keep the treasure from the Crouton tomb as a reward for saving the Colonel’s life.

Back when I played the first time, I ended up picking the wrong ending, which is annoying since no matter how many times I’ve played it since, that will always feel like the “real” one. And it’s annoying since the game gives us a lot of reasons to find the Colonel suspicious – as I vaguely recall my decision to shoot him was based on his cruel treatment of Lillian, his consistently rude and unpleasant demeanour, his dirty old man qualities when it came to Fifi, and the fact he was faking his own infirmary. Twice we see him get out of the wheelchair and move around the place.

Rudy in comparison... isn’t that bad? Okay yes, he forces two kisses on Fifi, so red flags there. But for the rest of the game he’s friendly enough and is one of only three characters to go investigate the dead bodies if Laura tries to raise the alarm about what’s happening (the other two being Gloria and Lillian). He even gets a literal Pet the Dog moment when he’s seen patting Beauregard halfway through the night. I guess I was wrong to trust the dog-lover.

***

By today’s standards, there are some rather infuriating limitations to the game. For instance, you can discover various murder weapons but do nothing with them. Ditto the fingerprints you find on multiple objects by peering at them through a monocle. So... what’s the point of having Laura discover them in the first place? They add nothing to the completion of the game or the solution of the murders.

Likewise, questioning the other guests is time-consuming and ultimately rather pointless – you don’t, for example, really need to get Gloria’s opinion on Celie, or Jeeves, or any of the other characters she doesn’t interact with. The game’s point system is a thermometer that ranks you as anything from “barely conscious” to “super sleuth”, and once things have wrapped up you get the chance to read the notebook entries that Laura has been automatically taking throughout the game. This holds plenty of clues as to what you may have missed out on (for example, pages are marked “character with a surprising secret” or “religious artefact found” and if you saw who/what this relates to during the gameplay then the answer will be underneath).

It's not a hugely intuitive system, and how on earth would Laura know what page headings to write? What the game really needed was a sequence like the one that occurs at the end of The Dagger of Amon Ra (the sequel) in which Laura/the player is questioned by the police and made to provide answers or provide evidence regarding the events of the night. It would have made the player feel like they had more of an impact on the fallout of the murder spree and the wrapping up of the plot. As it stands, you can’t really DO anything with all the information and evidence that you gather throughout the game.

And yes, there is some dated stuff. Fifi the French maid (complete with French Maid Outfit) is depicted as a promiscuous gold-digger, carrying on an affair with Jeeves while making the Colonel believe she’s desperately attracted to him. At one point you can perve on her while she’s changing her clothes (why would Laura want to do this?) while another sequence has Jeeves break the fourth wall in order to point at her backside while she’s leaning over.

Granted, a lot of the Sierra games featured Easter eggs that were a bit naughty or risqué (heck, these are the guys who designed Leisure Suit Larry!) but it was always in a way that catered to the male rather than the female gaze.

Then there’s Celie, who is indisputably a Mammy figure, from her appearance to her speech patterns to her devotion to the family (it’s established that her parents were slaves on the plantation and she lives in what is described as a “shack”). All that said, she is portrayed sympathetically, is the only unambiguously good person in the entire cast, and she survives both possible endings – and if you chose the good one she’s set to inherit the entire estate.

It's not hideously offensive, but... well, it’s there. Your mileage may vary.

***

Those are my complaints, though ultimately the good of The Colonel’s Bequest far outweighs the bad. Even over thirty years later, this is a stunningly beautiful game; so rich in detail and ambience that is all the more impressive given the limited technology of the day. Keep your meticulously rendered hyper-realistic three-dimensional graphics – I’ll take pixelated art EVERY time!

To create such a vivid atmosphere with a fairly limited spectrum of blues, purples, greens and greys is an incredible achievement, and the ambience is something that has to be experienced to be fully appreciated, from the hooting of owls and chirping of swamp insects to the faraway rumble of thunder and sporadic flashes of lightning in the distance. Playing this in the dark can be quite harrowing!

The mansion is particularly beautiful: dilapidated and yet still grand. There are beautiful details everywhere, from the cracks in the façade to the crooked railings on the second-floor balcony. A disturbed bat flies from the top of the belltower when Laura climbs up the adjacent ladder. You hear the sonorous ticking of the clock in the downstairs hallway.

Look at the shadows of the tree branches on this wall. Beautiful!

Or the moonlight stretching across the floor of the attic room. Gorgeous!

Or the silhouette of the owl in the foreground of this image. Stunning!

More than anything, the game excels in creating a vivid sense of history for this place. Everywhere there are portraits, newspapers and other relics of the past that paint a picture of its former inhabitants, not only the Colonel in his younger days, but the Crouton family who lived there during the American Civil War. A crypt with their name on it still stands in the cemetery, and there are clues in the house and outbuildings that point the way to a treasure hidden somewhere on the grounds.

Everywhere there are echoes of busier, happier days, from the small rowboat called “Minnow” in the carriage house to Laura’s musings on the playhouse: “seeing these long-ago things makes you wonder about the children who used to live here.”

There are plenty of intrigues here and there as well, such as the heart-shaped rose garden, described thusly: “this is a wonderful little garden. You wonder who planted this, certainly not the Colonel!” But if not the Colonel, then who? We never find out. We also hear that Blaze somehow saved the Colonel’s life during the Spanish-American war, but never get any details. Ditto the reasons behind Lillian’s father’s suicide. All of it simply serves to paint a rich backdrop to an-already compelling setting.

This game also deserves all the awards for its sound design, which is filled with wonderful noises and musical cues. Where do I even start? The triumphant BRRRRING! whenever you pick something up, or the jabbing, precarious notes whenever Laura discovers a corpse. The cheerful brrkk of the doors opening or the solemn organ music when you enter the chapel. The adorable (and indescribable) sound whenever Polly is fed a cracker or the soft friendly whickering of Blaze the retired warhorse.

But my favourite would have to be the way the first murder is staged, in which Laura enters Gertie’s bedroom to find that she’s missing and the windows wide open, the curtains billowing in the wind. If Laura ever returns to the room after this, it’s to find that everything is back to normal... which is in itself rather eerie, as noted by the ever-so-soft ominous note on the soundtrack. Well played, sound designer. Well played.

The Colonel’s Bequest is a delight, like a box of chocolate truffles lined in velvet. Its capacity for replay feels endless, as even after all these years I still seem to pick up on something previously unnoticed every time I return to it, and the feeling of delicious dread it instils in me has yet to lose its power. The characters may be stereotypes, but they’re real enough to feel as though they have (or had, in many cases) lives outside the confines of the game, and Laura herself is an understated feminist achievement given her leading role in a brand-new kind of graphic adventure game.

Miscellaneous Observations:

The game’s title is obviously a nod to the other “quest” games designed by Sierra that were so popular in the late eighties/early nineties, while Laura Bow is based off the famous silent film actress of the 1920s, Clara Bow. They even have the same hair!

The game is framed as a theatrical performance, with the first question asked of the player being: “have you attended a performance of The Colonel’s Bequest before?” before announcing: “the curtain is about to go up, please be seated.” When we’re introduced to the cast of characters, they’re depicted on a stage with the curtains drawn back.

As mentioned, there’s an entire subplot that Laura can play involving a Civil War-era treasure hidden somewhere on the grounds. Once you’ve befriended Celie she can fill you in on the backstory: before the Colonel bought the mansion it was the home of the Crouton family, most of whom were killed in the war while their youngest daughter Sarah was away at school. She returned after the conflict but was unable to find the treasure they left behind, and now her ghost is said to haunt the cemetery after dark.

As it happens, you can enter the cemetery at certain times and indeed see the ghost of a young woman rise from the grave and point to Laura. It’s suitably eerie and spooky, though unfortunately you can’t interact with her in any way. Oh the hours I spent trying to return the missing pouch of jewels to her.

Here are some more details I love: the tiny pixelated smoke that emits from various cigars, the way Lillian taps her foot when she’s impatient, how Beauregard lifts his head and starts to wag his tail whenever you approach, the fact that Laura automatically washes her hands if you make her use the toilet, the 1920s-style flapper outfits and headbands – and of course the way Laura sashays as she walks. Just watch her hands! It’s adorable.

Another subtle detail: the pouch of jewels is found in the vault marked “Ruby”, who is not listed in the family tree found inside the hidden Bible. Because she’s not a real person, just another clue as to the treasure’s location.

As with most Sierra games, there are plenty of death scenes that run the gamut from gruesome to hilarious. You have to try out the shower scene at least once, but Laura can also fall prey to falling chandeliers, roaming alligators and darkened staircases. Remember to save your game.

There are also some fun little Easter eggs. Among other things, Laura can spin the globe in the study, crank the automatic barrel piano in the billiard room, use the swing outside the playhouse and pray in the chapel. Sporadically the silhouette of the killer can be seen walking past the windows in the background.

And inevitably, some glitches here and there. At one point you can come across Lillian while she’s reclining on her bed, but for whatever reason the game won’t recognize her presence, insisting: “you must be confused, Lillian is not here” whenever you try to talk to her. There’s also a boot print that appears in one of the upper floor’s secret passages that you just can’t look at closely no matter what you type in.

There’s also an odd Easter egg that goes wrong sometimes: on very rare occasions you can step outside at the back of the house and a low-flying plane will whizz across the screen. But then something weirder happens: a double of the satyr statue that’s right in front of you will also fly through the air from left to right. It’s clearly a glitch in the programming (especially since it goes by making plane noises) but it’s downright spooky in how completely random it is!

If you have never played The Colonel’s Bequest before, then here’s a link to an on-line site where it’s freely and legally available. The security question requires you to match a fingerprint with the corresponding character, but in this download of the game the answer is always CELIE.

Before writing this post up I played the game through from start to finish. But even having played it dozens of times before, even having read various cheat-sheets and watching dozens of walkthroughs and being determined to see and do everything this time around – I still didn’t manage that elusive perfect score. I didn’t catch the Colonel getting out of his wheelchair or get to the attic early enough to find the murderer’s disguise before it gets stained with mud and blood or apparently examine enough stuff through the monocle.

So if you want some advice, know that it’s very difficult to see and do everything, especially during your first gameplay. The earliest acts are a particular handful as everyone is still alive and tend to move around a lot. In the first act for example, Jeeves will appear in three different rooms to offer drinks to the guests, while said guests have the tendency to have a conversation with someone and then move elsewhere. There’s also the chance that you can be tailing someone, chance upon someone else, and then be forced to choose which one to follow. Don’t just save when you feel your life is in danger, but when you think a choice or time-trigger is imminent.

The fourth act is particularly confusing, as both Clarence and Rudy’s circuits around the grounds will trigger the quarter hour, as will their physical confrontation in front of the house if you chose to follow one of them. If you don’t, then there’s a chance that their fistfight will advance the clock by half an hour. Plus Ethel is also staggering drunkenly around the garden and will also trigger a time advancement – usually when you least expect it.

But rest assured, no one ever appears in the hallways, either upstairs or down. Consider that your “safe space” if you ever need a breather from the stress of wandering around an opulent yet crumbling mansion on an inaccessible island while a killer is on the loose.

And if you give it a try, yet me know it went!