Truly my life continues to be run by anime RPGs but I’m breaking my head above water for only a moment to take one evening and return to Sierra On-Line a company whose work I admire probably more than I have liked so far (I looooove King’s Quest III but I could really take or leave those first two games). That all changed tonight though because The Colonel’s Bequest is one of the most charming little things I’ve ever had the joy to tinker around with for eight hours.

It’s a game of mixed identities – somewhere between the classically devilish, borderline bullying puzzles of the Sierra moment it actually belongs to and the more narrative focused, puzzle agnostic adventure games of the genre’s modern revival period; somewhere between an overtly parodic sendup of Agatha Christie-type adventures at large and And Then There Were None in particular and a sincere and spooky homage to it. In a company that was cranking out multiple series that were often differentiated largely by aesthetic sensibility, Laura Bow’s hell night stands out as structurally remarkable, even as it retains almost every core element that made Sierra famous.

It goes like this: reserved 1920s college student Laura Bow has been invited by her outgoing flapper friend Lillian to visit Lillian’s ancient rich grandfather’s estate on a shitty old plantation in the swamps outside New Orleans, where a weekend long family reunion will be taking place. Laura goes because this is a wild thing to get invited to, and indeed once everyone arrives the titular Colonel announces that when he dies his fortune will be split between all the present family members, unless of course any of them should die before he does, in which case everyone else’s shares will increase in size, a thing that is absolutely wild to say if you’re not planning on starting a death game, which he isn’t, but this doesn’t stop murders from immediately and mysteriously plaguing the evening.

So as Laura you’re in the lion’s den with a bunch of awful, shitty little people who all hate each other’s guts, trapped overnight in a swamp island with a killer that nobody else will believe is around and who is very good at hiding bodies after you find them. What you do in this game is Gather Evidence. And the way you gather evidence, almost exclusively, is by Eavesdropping and Spying. Everyone’s got their own rooms, and moves about the grounds and the manor on their business, and everyone has a web of twisted relationships with everyone else, and as Laura all you really need to do is Not Get Murdered for long enough to make it through the night, but if you have enough context for who is doing the killing and why to make some important decisions at the end of the game, well, that’s nice too.

That’s kind of the wild thing about Colonel’s Bequest: you could absolutely get through the entire game by fucking around and then arrive at the ending by accident, clueless, and come out on top. Laura is an extremely passive character, narratively speaking, and the main conflict is actually resolved offscreen for her to stumble upon sadly with a full chapter of game left to go. Her only lasting choice comes right at the end, where she decides which of the two other survivors to shoot as they try to kill each other, and one of them is distinctly innocent and while the other is NOT, they aren’t The Killer. The Killer’s been dead for over an hour. Nothing to do with you. In the bad ending, if you shoot the wrong guy, there’s nothing really that Laura can do about it but go along with how things have shaken out, and on the final screen of the game, as she’s being ferried back to her normal life she thinks to herself that this sucks, that this whole thing is so sad. “Poor Lillian,” she thinks. “Poor everyone.” But that’s true in the Good Ending too. Laura doesn’t do almost anything differently, and there’s not really any justice served that night. Just one act of petty selfishness prevented. It’s not nothing, but I wouldn’t be proud of it either.

There’s not a traditional Sierra style points system here, but rather a little meter that tells you how good of a detective you were with labels like “absent-minded” and “seasoned P.I.”, and then a little notebook that contains a checklist that really is a hint system telling you where you can look to dig into more of the game’s secrets and intricacies. The thing I kept coming back to was the classic Her Story Steam Forums “how do I know when I’m satisfied” post, because there’s literally no reason to investigate the game beyond your own interest, your own drive to uncover What Might Really Be Going On Here. There’s not even really a mystery to the game: the idea that the killer’s identity could even possibly be a mystery is ridiculous by the midpoint, so that by the time you get to any of the number of scenes that might constitute a big Revelation closer to the end, it’s more the culmination of a sickening feeling that’s been building in your gut, an understanding that you’re about to get closure. Laura can’t act on this obviousness, on knowledge that she has because you have it, so you’re just hurtling towards a conclusion that you know’s gonna be sad for everybody, and it is.

And when you go back for your second playthrough with a better understanding of all the secret areas and how best to interact with certain characters and what people’s schedules are like and when to spy on whom to ferret out the best secrets and get the most context for how things might have turned out the way they could have, you get the only answers you were ever possibly going to get: that these people are normal, and mean, and sad, and their stories are all mundane, and mean, and sad. And it sucks that they were murdered for this.

It’s such a weird feeling to have to sit with in a scenario where the guy the game is named for is also named after Colonel Mustard from Clue.

The vibe is really boosted by the presentation though. CB came out in 1989 and it’s easily the most beautiful 4-bit game I’ve ever seen. All sixteen colors are being utilized in the fullest, cleverest ways at all times – no object is every just a solid one or even two shades, but colored in with three or four colors to get depth and character, blended in ways you’d never expect them to be, ways that only a real master of the format would think to use. Basically everything is dithered, too, there’s dithering all over the damn place on every single screen, very few big flat textures here like you’d see in King’s Quest, which really helps sell both the ramshackle nature of the run down plantation house and the encroaching nature that surrounds its grounds. There are a few screens in the game that ditch the traditional perspectives and go for a zoomed in look at an object or location, like the controls or an elevator or a first-person perspective into a deep, dark well and these are highlight screens, always evocative of place, always full of feeling. Usually dread.

The soundscape is another thing that’s just nailed, usually by being totally silent. That’s not new for these games, for music and sound effects to be very selective, but here it feels purposeful rather than utilitarian. There COULD be more going on here sonically then there is, but Laura is in a strange place with strange people and one of them is a murderer. You don’t know their schedules, you don’t know where anyone is at a given time. It makes moments where you’re spontaneously grabbed by the killer or stumble into a corpse all the more shocking, and the silence in between ratchets up the tension. It starts bad and never ratchets down.

And of course, being a Sierra game, there are so many greebly little details, be they expressed via the absurd number of little quirks in the text parser, the outrageous attention paid to the tiniest details in the visual design, the scope of possible interactions you can both witness and instigate between the other guests even without Laura’s direct participation. And even the fact that every single guest has such a meticulously programmed schedule that they’ll stick to regardless of whether you’re there to see them doing it. Majora’s Mask a decade ahead of time and infinitely more complex in scale of interaction. Of course the game is buggy as shit but not as much as you might expect! It’s wild!

I don’t even know how much of the surface I’ve scratched with it. It’s such a gorgeous little thing, a puzzle box I’m having so much fun turning over in my head. I hope that I’ll search it up and find articles and documents and all kinds of shit digging into everything this game has going for it, how it all fits together. I’ve enjoyed the classic Sierra games I’ve played but compared to other adventure games they haven’t really been my cup of tea but bro I’d play fifty of this. I’d play a hundred of this. Laura Bow my beloved. Cannot believe they only made two of these.