Lucas Pope, creator of the instant classics Return of the Obra Dinn and Papers, Please, may have just created the first LCD game in… decades? Well, except Other The LCD game he created last year to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Papers, Please. With two of these things under my belt, I’m ready to crown Pope as the leading authority on state-of-the-art browser games designed to replicate toys running on 40-year-old 4-bit microcontrollers.
If you grew up in the 80s or 90s, you know the type: low-cost “electronic games” like Nintendo’s Game & Watch series or Hand tiger adaptations of films such as Batman & Robin and Terminator. Instead of addressable pixels, these liquid crystal displays merely illuminated pre-drawn segments of graphics, creating the illusion of movement, combined with shrill beeps and hums that barely passed for sound effects. Most of them were terrible!
Anyway, Lucas Pope made one of these as a Halloween surprise and you can play it for free in your browser now. Fortunately, it’s nothing terrible! Like all of Pope’s games, including this year’s Playdate Mars After Midnight, the “liquid crystal electronic game” Moida Mansion does a lot with a little, turning a few very straightforward buttons into a surprisingly clever riff on escape rooms.
Your friends went to the Moida mansion (where Moida is said to happen) in search of their turtle, then went and got locked in closets, chests and secret rooms by the monster. You have to go from room to room looking for them; pressing the search button allows you to switch objects in the room to search, which sometimes reveals something useful, such as a key, secret code, or trapdoor. Searching also attracts the monster’s attention, so after each attempt you have to escape to another room.
Moid’s residence isn’t much of a challenge – as soon as you realize that you have to run two or three rooms away from the monster between searches, you won’t die. However, the layout of the mansion is randomized each time you play, and trying to find clues in each room ends in a fun, 1-bit version of an escape room, only with much more beeps (the sound effects are suitably grating after a while). I escaped a few times and was impressed by the variety of puzzle interactions given the simplified controls. For the second run, I had to gather all my friends and then find four little buttons scattered around the mansion, leaving one friend in each place to press them at once to save our indigent escaped turtle. Finding the code to open the locked chest required following the ghost’s trail through many rooms until it led me to a bed where someone had hidden the code in the sheets.
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However, I must admit that I had an argument with Adventure Club member Ace. Every time I saved my friend Bek, she had something useful for me – like a clue where to find Ace, or a key to open a door. But Ace? He just said, “Let’s get out of here!” and if you listen to him, you will finally leave your turtle Dota. This isn’t the Cowards’ Club, Ace. Don’t be afraid of a little fad.
Moida Mansion is a lovely little browser game, but I also think it would be absolutely perfect for Playdate with its single action button and black and white graphics, so I hope Pope plans a post-Halloween port.
One feature is missing, however: some sort of public shaming mechanism, such as tweeting a Wordle output consisting entirely of gray squares to call you (yourself) out if you escape the Moid mansion without rescuing Dot first. No corner of the Internet should be sheltered for half-hearted adventurers.
