The reigning Pope of 1-bit mystery games is back with a Halloween treat: a haunted house game you can play in your browser
Lucas Pope, developer of instant classics Return of the Obra Dinn and Papers, Please, may have just made the first LCD game in… decades? Well, except for the other LCD game he made last year to celebrate Papers, Please’s 10th anniversary. With two of these things under his belt I’m ready to crown Pope the leading authority on modern browser games designed to replicate toys that ran on 40-year-old 4-bit microcontrollers.
If you grew up in the ’80s or ’90s, you know the type: cheap “electronic games” like Nintendo’s Game & Watch series, or Tiger handheld adaptations of movies like Batman and Robin and The Terminator. Instead of addressable pixels, these liquid crystal displays merely lit up pre-drawn segments of artwork to create the illusion of movement, paired with shrill beeps and boops that barely passed for sound effects. Most of them were terrible!
Anyway, Lucas Pope made one of those as a Halloween surprise, and you can play it for free in your browser right now. Thankfully it is not terrible! Like all of Pope’s games, including this year’s Playdate treat Mars After Midnight, “electronic liquid crystal game” Moida Mansion does a lot with a little, turning a few very simple button inputs into a surprisingly clever little riff on escape rooms.
Your friends have gone into Moida Mansion (a place where, reportedly, moida happens) looking for their pet turtle and gone and gotten themselves locked into wardrobes, chests, and secret rooms by a monster. You’ve got to go from room to room looking for them; tapping a search button lets you cycle through objects in the room to search, which occasionally reveals something useful like a key, a secret code, or a trap door. Searching also draws the attention of the monster, so you’ve got to scurry off to another room after each attempt.
There’s not much challenge to Moida Mansion—as soon as you realize you have to run two or three rooms away from the monster between each search you’re not going to die. But the mansion’s layout is randomized each time you play, and trying to find clues in each room ends up feeling like a fun 1-bit version of an escape room, only with a lot more beeping (the sound effects are period-appropriately grating after a while). I escaped a couple times and was impressed by the variety of puzzle interactions given the simplistic controls. On my second run I had to collect all my friends and then find four small buttons scattered around the mansion, leaving one friend in each location to press them simultaneously, to rescue our poor runaway turtle. Finding a code to open a locked chest required following a ghost’s footsteps through multiple rooms until it led me to a bed where someone had hidden the code in the sheets.
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I gotta say I have some beef with Adventure Club member Ace, though. Both times I rescued my friend Bek, she had something useful for me—like a clue on where to find Ace or a key to unlock a door. But Ace? He’s just like “Let’s get outta here!” and if you listen to him, you’re gonna end up leaving your turtle Dot behind. This isn’t Coward’s Club, Ace. Don’t be scared of a little moida.
Moida Mansion is a cute little browser game but also feels like it would be absolutely perfect on the Playdate with its single action button and black & white graphics, so I hope Pope has a port planned post-Halloween.
It is missing one feature, though: Some sort of public shaming mechanism, like tweeting a Wordle score of nothing but gray squares, to call you(rself) out if you flee Moida Mansion without rescuing Dot first. No corner of the internet should be safe for half-hearted adventurers.
