Review Greystone Developer: Howard Sherman Publisher: Malinche entertainment Genre: Text Adventure Release Date: December 2003 Platform: , Folio Review by Ricardo Pautassi August 11, 2004

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Mental hospitals have been, alongside with castles and university colleges, a recurrent setting for adventure games, either graphical or text-based. From the early Asylum to the more recent Sanitarium, game designers and writers couldn’t restrain themselves from stories based on facilities populated by tormented souls and supposedly sensitive physicians. The game I am currently reviewing continues this narrative tradition by setting up its actions in Greystone, a real-life mental institution located in Morris Plains, New Jersey.

Written and programmed by Howard Sherman, Greystone is the second commercial interactive fiction (IF) game from Malinche entertainment. While Malinche’s first game - Pentari: First Light - relied heavily on the venerable “zorkian” tradition, Greystone clearly belongs to the mystery genre. The playable character is a detective who has entered a decadent mental institution disguised as an inpatient. This unconventional procedure was required due to a series of mysterious and gruesome murders that have occurred in the institution. Since anyone inside the madhouse could be the culprit, you must remain undercover until the case is solved. Your only contact is a state trooper who’ll take care of the evidence and is waiting for you to point the finger at the likely murderer.

So, your goals are quite straightforward: explore the buildings as well as its surroundings while interrogating possible suspects and eventually picking up potential evidence. Whenever you think you have found the instruments as well as the motive that has driven the putative murderer, you can issue an arrest order. Subsequently, the game comes to an end and your accomplishments are assessed in a small epilogue. Quite probably these mechanics are well explained in the folio edition of the game, which encompasses a nice assortment of feelies and additional documents. Nonetheless, the digital delivery version, which is the one I am reviewing, suffers from a rushed start featuring minimal directions. This is not a big nuisance, however, since a little bit of the well-known trial and error approach makes the trick. To give you a more thorough idea, to a certain extent Greystone’s gameplay resembles the one successfully employed in many mystery board games (for instance, “Sherlock’s Holmes Time Machine”, by ToyCo) where, after a short debriefing which states the goals, the player rolls the dice and roams around the board collecting evidence, checking alibis and choosing possible suspects. In those board games you compete with other human players to be the first to identify the murderer. Sure, Greystone has no multiplayer support but time counts since you must arrive to a conclusion in a reasonable amount of time in order to avoid feeling the tight stroke of the killer in your neck (don’t be afraid of the time limit, the number of turns is sensible enough even for the novice player). The game contains few puzzles in the conventional meaning of the term. Nevertheless, strolling around the hospital is a brainteaser in itself since Howard Sherman has done a good job recreating not only Greystone’s buildings but also its surroundings, including streets and woodlands, an abandoned gloomy tunnel system (hey, it wouldn’t be an interactive fiction game without a brass lantern and an underground trip!), a baseball field and even a nearby neighborhood, thus offering hundreds of rooms to explore and examine. The hospital’s old cracked walls also set the scene for potential accidents, so saving your progress often is really advisable. Considering the sheer size of the environment it would have been a big problem if the game map had proven to be troublesome. Indeed, drawing a map helps but it’s neither a must nor a requirement since most of the geographical layout follows the principle of formal symmetry, thus allowing the player to predict how to arrive to a certain place without having to memorize the whole map. Having said that, I must say that a sense of disappoint arose when I noticed that many of the locations are quite empty and void of both objects and non-playable characters (NPC’s). Not only that but very few descriptions are available when you try to perform an in-depth search of rooms. Let’s say, while a room’s description may well state that you are faced with a couple of desks and a pile of debris it’s no use trying to “search” or “examine” these objects, since you will receive the standard reply “you do not see anything like that”. And it’s very probable that whenever you do find examinable items they are unerringly either evidence or clues. While this may help to reduce the game’s difficulty, it becomes very frustrating when the player has to face dozens and dozens of similar and non-interactive rooms prior to stumbling upon the one where leads are awaiting.

As expected in a mystery game, interaction with NPC’s is required and encouraged. But again some flaws make their entrance at this point. Greystone inpatients are very few and display a very rigid behavioral repertoire. Moreover, their personal traits are not as developed as this reviewer expected and the game does not take advantage of these people’s mental condition. Indeed, it would have been very interesting to see specific disorders mirrored in their behavior.

A brief example (be warned, spoilers follow) will illustrate some of the features criticized above. After some exploration I discovered female inpatient’s body stuffed in a vault. This important finding only warranted a brief description of the body and a mild emotional response when mentioning it to the trooper. Every attempt to search the body or look for specific details was unsuccessful. Not only that but sharing the news with both physicians and inpatients triggered replies such as “You don’t know nothing about that” or “He seems to not be listening to you” complemented with a set of NPC’s ordinary behaviors already observed in past interactions with them (end of spoilers).

As you already should have noticed, Greystone is a game especially suitable for novice players and is an excellent starting point for anyone wishing to enter the realms of the text-adventure genre. The author seems to have been very interested in this issue, since here and there “text helpers” appear, aiding in how to manage conversation or stating that certain objects are neither necessary nor relevant for moving on the game. Gameplay length ranges from 8 to 15 hours, depending on your deductive skills, but replayability is highly encouraged (I played it three times!) as multiple endings are available. According to the author, about forty different epilogues await according to the amount of evidence you’ve found and whether or not your data points towards the correct suspect. While I wasn’t able to reach every possible finale I tried at least fifteen of them and should say that this is by far the most interesting feature of the game. Why? Mainly because it works as a natural and organic system to regulate the level of difficulty. You want to solve all the murderers and pin the blame on the correct suspect? That’s a very difficult task, that requires having carefully combed the whole area for evidence while avoiding being killed at the same time. But you can stop the madness as well just by finding a small bunch of supporting proof and a likely suspect. This game design element nearly dismiss the use of a walkthrough by allowing the player to set his/her own standards and goals.

No fatal bugs were found when running the game, even though some spelling errors made their way in the text. Moreover, while walking in the hospital surroundings I found and picked up evidence located in a (sort of) container just to see that the description of the scene did not change at all, still depicting the object as being in the container. Not a proper bug and certainly minor, but these details don’t help improve the overall impression of the game.

So, to bring this review to a close; in spite of the fact that Greystone is clearly inferior to Malinche’s prior release, it is still a good choice for IF beginners and mystery story lovers should find the quest for the murderer addictive enough to overcome its weaknesses. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t recommend it for the more wide-ranging hard-core interactive fiction player.

Final Grade: C

System Requirements:

Windows and a Z-Machine software (its latest release freely available at http://www.ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXinfocomXinterpretersXfrotz.html) for the z-code release here reviewed. Nonetheless, the folio version can be installed in almost every platform available (including hand-held ones).