NAME: Bastow Manor (The Secret of Bastow Manor)
AUTHOR: Softgold
EMAIL: ???
DATE: very early 1980's
PARSER: Scott Adams Standard
SUPPORTS: C64 and C64 Emulators (many platforms)
AVAILABILITY: IF archive
URL: download notes

Bastow Manor is one of those old classic Commodore 64 games. In a fit of nostalgia I hunted high and low for this and a bunch of other classic games (see the review of Mystery Island as well), some of which I managed to find with the help of Andrew Williams. Bastow Manor is one of those C64 text graphic games where the C64 ASCII character set is used to its full advantage to draw the graphics. This form of textgraphic was basically confined to the C64 genre of games.
The graphics in this game (and the other Mountain Valley and Softgold games) are some of the best C64 textgraphic ASCII pics you're likely to ever come across. Every location has its own individual picture of about half screen height and full screen width (This changed in later games to half screen height and half screen width).

All the Softgold and Mountain Valley games are very reminiscent of the Scott Adams games. They are very small sized games with few locations and objects. Most every location serves a purpose and every item has at least one use in the game. Bastow Manor uses the standard verb-noun parser.
The story behind the game is err, I don't really know. You're not told in any introduction at the start of the game. Maybe there was a nice lead-in in the manual or documentation but none of that is available, so I shall give you what I assume to be the lead-in. The aim is to get into Bastow Manor and find its secret cache of gold and escape!! Err, yes. Were you expecting something else?
Text in the game is minimal at best and I suspect the picture is meant to explain more about your surroundings than the "You are in a shed" "You are outside the manor wall" descriptions. Objects have no description whatsoever. A knife is a knife is a knife is a knife. An interesting side effect of the game is that it was very poorly programmed, so that you must "look" at an object multiple times to find out all you can about it. Take for example the mail box, you need to look at it twice or you will miss a valuable clue! There are a few other examples of this through out the game.
Some of the puzzles in Bastow Manor are logical and some are stupid. One of the puzzles I'll give away to you here and now, as it's impossible to complete it without looking at the source to the game (an error on part of the programmer), in that there is a panel above the desk in the study. There is no mention of this panel anywhere in the game at all, and thats all I'll give away to you ^_^. Fortunately you don't have to play guess the verb to complete any of the puzzles.
Like Scott Adams' games, Bastow Manor is small and well designed in places. Location exits and the layout of the house are fairly logical, i.e. the mad scientist's laboratory is not connected to the upstairs ensuite. Some of the puzzles are a bit frustrating and death is quick to follow a wrong move. If you don't save often before you try something you will find yourself back at the start of the game. It IS unfortunate that you have to die once or twice before you realise that it's a puzzle that needs to be overcome (re: the puzzle to do with the suit of armour, the apple puzzle).
With exception of one dodgy puzzle (re: panel in the study) the game is fairly easy and can be completed in a few hours. The nostalgia factor is a good reason to play this game, if any, or if you have two hours to spare.
If you already have a copy of this game but you did not get it from the IF archive, I strongly suggest you get the one from the archive as I have patched and bugfixed it so you can save/load at any point and some of the more nasty bugs were removed (the knife/clock bug for instance).
Emulator users: PC64 is not a good choice for this game as it gets the colours wrong, well not wrong just not... right ^_^. Frodo or C64s get the browns and greens the correct shades.
In scoring this game out of 10, note that I am using Scott Adams as a benchmark. I would give this game a 7 out of 10. The nostalgia factor gives the overall score a +1 so its really 6/10.