The archetypical "find treasure hidden in an old mansion" game, but quite detailed and full of things to do and investigate. If you get into the mood it can be fun to play, and not that difficult. All PC versions (there are a few) seem to be affected by a very strange bug where on occasion the command is parsed as a completely different thing and executed, with random consequences; also come map connections look too odd to be right. It's finishable in spite of the wobbly coding.

As has been previously observed this is an interesting and entertaining "claim your inheritance" romp through a large mansion. How you arrived at Durham Airport though is anyone's guess as a. Durham isn't in Scotland and b. there is no airport there anyway.

There are bugs but none will place you on a life support machine. In one location in the large mansion grounds heading NE puts you on a window ledge outside a top floor bedroom window. Some objects that you find are parsed as "added to your inventory" automatically but they are still on the ground. If you dig for the first time in virgin lawn you are told that you "have made your hole bigger." There are a couple of other similar faux pas but the game is good enough to forgive them.

Aside from these annoyances I have only encountered one spelling mistake.

The game now crashes when attempting to re-enter the mansion from any external location with a message about a disk read error in the drive.

I suspect this is primarily due to the large number of saved slots I am using within DOSBox-X. It never occurred before the move counter reached 1,000 moves. There is another odd bug in that using DIG and TURN among other verbs occasionally produces strange responses such as "there is no bathroom in the mansion."

Another bug revolves around two objects you can take from the garden. If you drop either of them they disappear. You can however eat them. Oner kills you and the other tastes horrible. The longer I play this the more bugs appear.

Hmm I have found ten of the twelve gold bars but at around 700 moves the game seems to re-exhibit an error message about mcmurphy.dat being missing when I re-enter the mansion from outside and the game crashes. I have restarted and managed to get back to my most advanced position inside 350 moves. This effectively gives the game a quasi time limit as it appears the counter triggers the error rather than any particular command or sequence of actions performed. This is a shame as the game itself is one of the better examples of its kind.

I finally gave up on this. I had collected eleven of the twelve gold bars but gave up on trying to find the twelfth. In the end I looked at the solution provided by Dorothy Millard and besides making no sense it doesn't work. She claims you have to turn the puzzle cube until one side is blue and then put it in the sink then filling the sink with water. I had tried this some time ago but nothing happens; it is evidently meant to dissolve revealing the fourth object to put in the slot. I tried using an old save slot but it doesn't work there either.

Among many other frustrations the board which you utilise to cross the gap on the window ledge works for the first moves of the game but if you leave it too long a bug kicks in and you fall to the patio below. This makes the game unwinnable as you need to be able to reach the ledge. Together with random crashes complaining about the missing mcmurphy.dat file and a strange error where random commands produce "there is no bathroom in the mansion" it makes the game a nightmare to play. This is a shame as there is a very good game lurking in here if the creases are ironed out.

I have no idea if the Commodore 64 version exhibits the same bugs or not but I haven't the patience to restart yet again. My advice is avoid the DOS version at all costs.

I'm afraid your problems may be due to a known DOSBox-X problem with save states which can corrupt the emulated memory. I can confirm that the game version v1.6 (from 1989) runs fine in both 86Box and MAME under PCDOS 2.1 and can be finished all right, despite the game's own bugs. I didn't follow DM's walkthrough so I can't attest to its accuracy.

DOSBox-X corrupted save game files states in Quest I remember but in general I have found it stable.