Mansion of Hidden Souls is an adventure game created entirely with full-motion video. It takes place in a pre-rendered mansion that the player explores from a first-person perspective. As they wander from room to room, the action unfolds via video sequences. The player takes on the role of Jonathan, a boy whose sister has wandered into the spooky mansion. When she entered the mansion, she disappeared! What's more, the mansion is full of talking butterflies. The player must search the whole mansion to unlock its secrets and find Jonathan's sister.
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An eerie adventure with a very specific style, Mansion was a fun puzzle to solve. It has an incredibly short runtime, but it works in the title's favor, allowing the atmosphere to stay fresh. Some of the puzzles (door puzzle) are a bit obtuse but the dream-space this game occupies is well worth the fumbling in the dark.
Not really TOO much to say here, it's a pretty standard adventure game with a very simple gameplay structure given that every screen only has one interaction that can be done, and that interaction is always done by pressing up on the D-pad.
I do think the game is much more vibe-focused than gameplay-focused, though. The mansion is rendered in very early 90s CG, and most of the time the single interaction that you can do in each frame is simply zooming in and looking at a particular item in the frame. It's really like the developers spent a lot of time modelling a 3D house with the fancy new CG tools that existed, and really wanted to make a game that allowed players to look around and admire that work. If you take your time looking around and exploring everything, you will rather easily bump into all the necessary items for progression. The mansion isn't big either, so it's actually quite easy to take your time to see the sights, even if they move at a solid 4 FPS.
The game has this really interesting concept about this mansion existing as a place for people to shed their human bodies to instead become these spiritualized butterflies, and each room in the mansion is home to a different character that has their own sorts of reasons to become a butterfly. It's honestly pretty neat stuff but the game doesn't really dive deeply into the concept very much, leaving the NPCs to not really have very much actual bearing on the narrative. I could certainly imagine the concept alone definitely sparking the imagination of like someone renting the game back in the day, but the game does feel a little narratively half-baked in a sense. Doesn't help that the voice deliveries were definitely 90's video game acting, and for some reason the game just loves to have the voices way too quiet and absolutely drenched in reverb to the point where it's hard to make out what people are actually saying half the time. I wonder how much better the game would have been had I played the original Japanese release tbh, might have to give it a go one of these days.
It's neat, certainly a unique entry in the Sega CD library for sure. The game has a super short length of only like 2 hours so if you are even interested enough to be looking at this review then like yea bro go give it a play.
also lmao despite being an adventure game the mega mouse support on this is basically just binding d-pad inputs to mouse movement, which causes way more misinputs than not, it was really designed to be played with a controller i have no idea why they programmed in mouse support for this
I do think the game is much more vibe-focused than gameplay-focused, though. The mansion is rendered in very early 90s CG, and most of the time the single interaction that you can do in each frame is simply zooming in and looking at a particular item in the frame. It's really like the developers spent a lot of time modelling a 3D house with the fancy new CG tools that existed, and really wanted to make a game that allowed players to look around and admire that work. If you take your time looking around and exploring everything, you will rather easily bump into all the necessary items for progression. The mansion isn't big either, so it's actually quite easy to take your time to see the sights, even if they move at a solid 4 FPS.
The game has this really interesting concept about this mansion existing as a place for people to shed their human bodies to instead become these spiritualized butterflies, and each room in the mansion is home to a different character that has their own sorts of reasons to become a butterfly. It's honestly pretty neat stuff but the game doesn't really dive deeply into the concept very much, leaving the NPCs to not really have very much actual bearing on the narrative. I could certainly imagine the concept alone definitely sparking the imagination of like someone renting the game back in the day, but the game does feel a little narratively half-baked in a sense. Doesn't help that the voice deliveries were definitely 90's video game acting, and for some reason the game just loves to have the voices way too quiet and absolutely drenched in reverb to the point where it's hard to make out what people are actually saying half the time. I wonder how much better the game would have been had I played the original Japanese release tbh, might have to give it a go one of these days.
It's neat, certainly a unique entry in the Sega CD library for sure. The game has a super short length of only like 2 hours so if you are even interested enough to be looking at this review then like yea bro go give it a play.
also lmao despite being an adventure game the mega mouse support on this is basically just binding d-pad inputs to mouse movement, which causes way more misinputs than not, it was really designed to be played with a controller i have no idea why they programmed in mouse support for this
It goes a little like this: you and your sister are hanging out in the 3 FPS Meadow and see a mysterious butterfly. Your sister wants to take chase and see where it leads you, but you're a bit of a weenie and protest the idea, saying you'll get in trouble and besides, that's awfully close to where grandma said ghosts turn people into butterflies. Even more excited by the thought, she follows the butterfly anyway and lo and behold gets sucked into the titular Mansion. And so into the mansion you must go in hope of saving her humanity.
Inside the mansion you find its inhabitants—butterflies with unconvincing accents and the rooms that represent the interests they had as humans. In the game's best moment, a butterfly tells the player how in her days as a musician she longed to shed herself of her human body. Now, as a butterfly, she just wishes she were able to play the piano again, to be able to do the things that filled her soul. It brings to mind the scene in Wings of Desire where Peter Falk explains to the main character, an angel contemplating giving up his high standing for a permanent return to the corporeal world, his decision to do this very same thing. Being unable to interact with and therefore truly experience the world is an unfulfilling way to exist (to crudely paraphrase one of my favorite scenes in all of cinema). But here in Mansion of Hidden Souls, the words are spoken from someone for whom it's too late. She already made her decision, perhaps hastily in a time of pain, and now she's left in eternal regret of the things she can never experience again. It's a beautiful scene despite the voice actor doing maybe the most insane attempt at a Southern accent I've ever heard.
Unfortunately, that's the first and last time the game succeeds in doing anything emotionally resonant whatsoever. There are other butterflies we meet: an Australian butterfly specimen collector repulsed by the human form but who we never learn enough about to be interesting; an artist who we know is an artist on account of his room having a couple easels in it; a lady whose entire thing is that she's kind of mean and hangs out in bars; and finally a girl who, like, I don't know, is just kinda there.
It's this hasty characterization that makes Mansion of Hidden Souls a mere sliver of its potential. I want to poke around into the lives and minds of complex individuals and find out what made them get entangled in—if not outright seek out—the loss of their human form. What insecurities and sadnesses and ennuis and stubbornnesses brought them here? What brings so many people into wishing they were no longer human? Is there, maybe, a richness to Experiencing and Feeling we often overlook in our misery, like the butterfly who just wishes she could play music again?
Sadly, Mansion of Hidden Souls is largely uninterested in those questions: after all we have a sister to save and only one disc in which to do it.
Inside the mansion you find its inhabitants—butterflies with unconvincing accents and the rooms that represent the interests they had as humans. In the game's best moment, a butterfly tells the player how in her days as a musician she longed to shed herself of her human body. Now, as a butterfly, she just wishes she were able to play the piano again, to be able to do the things that filled her soul. It brings to mind the scene in Wings of Desire where Peter Falk explains to the main character, an angel contemplating giving up his high standing for a permanent return to the corporeal world, his decision to do this very same thing. Being unable to interact with and therefore truly experience the world is an unfulfilling way to exist (to crudely paraphrase one of my favorite scenes in all of cinema). But here in Mansion of Hidden Souls, the words are spoken from someone for whom it's too late. She already made her decision, perhaps hastily in a time of pain, and now she's left in eternal regret of the things she can never experience again. It's a beautiful scene despite the voice actor doing maybe the most insane attempt at a Southern accent I've ever heard.
Unfortunately, that's the first and last time the game succeeds in doing anything emotionally resonant whatsoever. There are other butterflies we meet: an Australian butterfly specimen collector repulsed by the human form but who we never learn enough about to be interesting; an artist who we know is an artist on account of his room having a couple easels in it; a lady whose entire thing is that she's kind of mean and hangs out in bars; and finally a girl who, like, I don't know, is just kinda there.
It's this hasty characterization that makes Mansion of Hidden Souls a mere sliver of its potential. I want to poke around into the lives and minds of complex individuals and find out what made them get entangled in—if not outright seek out—the loss of their human form. What insecurities and sadnesses and ennuis and stubbornnesses brought them here? What brings so many people into wishing they were no longer human? Is there, maybe, a richness to Experiencing and Feeling we often overlook in our misery, like the butterfly who just wishes she could play music again?
Sadly, Mansion of Hidden Souls is largely uninterested in those questions: after all we have a sister to save and only one disc in which to do it.
Incredible vibes. The puzzles are barely puzzles, just excuses to wander around the mansion, but the space is interesting and well-defined enough that I didn't want to be thinking about puzzles instead of wandering. It occasionally falls apart, especially in the late game, when you do need to think about the puzzles but what you're expected to do is completely out of nowhere. But when it works, it works.
I don't have enough context on the gaming scene in 1993 to say anything definitively, but in 1993 I have to imagine this stood out (forgive my PC ignorance, I'm sure something got made there!).
In the period of time that people seemed to think FMV games were where games were headed (and were so so wrong), this feels surprisingly fresh. Everything that is enjoyable about old FMV games on the Mega CD is present here with less fuss, and it also represents the blueprint of System Sacom's future work on Torico, a genuinely wonderful game on Saturn. Worth revisiting, and worth playing blind, if you can put up with the dub. Immaculate vibes.
In the period of time that people seemed to think FMV games were where games were headed (and were so so wrong), this feels surprisingly fresh. Everything that is enjoyable about old FMV games on the Mega CD is present here with less fuss, and it also represents the blueprint of System Sacom's future work on Torico, a genuinely wonderful game on Saturn. Worth revisiting, and worth playing blind, if you can put up with the dub. Immaculate vibes.
The vibes here are incredible but it doesn't really work as an adventure game beyond that. The "just show me the next puzzle" room feels like a game that lacks confidence in its puzzles, and I can't say I really blame it. There's some real adventure game nonsense going on in here and my goodness is the audio mixing bad.
Definitely go spin this one up for a few minutes, though. It's too interesting a view into a very brief period of game history to miss.
Definitely go spin this one up for a few minutes, though. It's too interesting a view into a very brief period of game history to miss.