Roberta Williams is regarded as the First Lady of adventure games with very good reason: her King’s Quest series was instrumental in bringing the genre out of the purely text-based realm, and her other work helped play a leading role in continually evolving the genre.
One of her games has had markedly less attention over the years, though, and that’s a real shame, because it’s probably one of her most interesting, experimental titles. I refer to The Colonel’s Bequest, the first of the short-lived Laura Bow series, which first released in 1989 for MS-DOS PC, and which was ported to Atari ST and Amiga in 1990.
The Colonel’s Bequest is not a perfect game. Not by a long shot. But it most certainly is an interesting game. So we’re going to take a closer look at that today. Hit the jump to find out more.
In The Colonel’s Bequest, the year is 1925, and you take on the role of Laura Bow, a 20 year old journalism student from Tulane University, New Orleans. As the game opens, Laura’s flapper friend Lillian has invited her to come to her uncle’s creepy old mansion to provide moral support while she attends a family reunion. A curious, inquisitive sort, Laura agrees to go along because she thinks it might be an interesting experience. And it most certainly turns out that way.
Upon arriving at the mansion, which is an old plantation in the depths of a Louisiana bayou, Laura and Lillian discover that the other guests are already sitting down to dinner, so they join the party. Once the entire group is assembled, the titular Colonel, Lillian’s uncle Henri, explains that he has written his will, and in it he has divided his considerable fortunes equally between everyone present (except for Laura, naturally).
Rather than thinking “cool, we each get a portion of several million dollars, which is a hell of a lot of money in 1925, the year in which we live”, the assembled guests are immediately at one another’s throats, insulting one another and calling Henri a “skinflint”. Somewhat bewildered by all this, Laura retires to her room with Lillian, and thus begins a rather curious adventure.
The Colonel’s Bequest is set up as if it’s a “play” of sorts, and the way the game unfolds is not dependent on Laura, as the protagonist, really doing anything as such. Indeed, it’s possible to make it to the end of the game without really doing anything at all, though you’ll miss out on a lot of context by doing so. Rather, Laura’s role is that of a representative for the play’s “audience”, determining the perspectives from which we see various happenings — and, indeed, if we see various happenings at all as the evening unfolds.
The Colonel’s Bequest is split into eight “acts”, each covering an hour of in-game time. This isn’t a real-time game, however; instead, time advances by 15 minutes when Laura sees something important. Sometimes these important things are self-evident, such as when dead bodies start turning up at the mansion (and almost immediately after, start disappearing without a trace), while at other times it might be something seemingly innocuous, such as coming across another character seemingly by chance.
Laura’s role in The Colonel’s Bequest is not to solve the mystery or bring anyone to justice, but rather simply to observe. The game lacks the conventional scoring system of most other Sierra games from the time, instead only grading your sleuthing skills upon completion of the game, dependent on how many of the possible “notes” Laura took over the course of the game as a whole.
Laura makes notes automatically when she witnesses, overhears or otherwise discovers something, and thus to get the best rating at the game’s conclusion, you need to have uncovered every relevant plot point, found your way into every place you’re not supposed to be in, solved the few actual “puzzles” of the game and, of course, found all the dead bodies, of which there will be plenty by the conclusion.
It’s a curious thing, to play a mystery game where you job is specifically not to solve the mystery in question, but instead to simply see as much of the mystery as you possibly can, but once you get your head into the correct mindset for achieving this, The Colonel’s Bequest is rather entertaining. There’s a certain perverse, voyeuristic pleasure in snooping on what everyone in the house is up to — particularly if and when you discover a means to surreptitiously observe them without their knowledge — and each character has their own little plot arc to follow through.
This being a game from 1989, the overall narrative isn’t especially complex, and as modern-day critics of Roberta Williams’ work are usually quite keen to point out, the characters themselves aren’t particularly ambitious, either; most of them fall into the exact tropes you’d expect from a period thriller of this sort. There’s the grumpy old man, the scheming lawyer, the manipulative starlet, the sexy French maid, the silent butler hiding a secret, the lecherous middle-aged man, the drunken old woman… every character in The Colonel’s Bequest is one you will have seen in some form of mystery fiction in the past, to be sure.
But this doesn’t mean The Colonel’s Bequest is a failure, by any means. It’s worth remembering that 1989 was still relatively early days for games attempting to tell a coherent narrative, and a lot of titles attempting to tell a story were still doing so in a completely linear fashion. The Colonel’s Bequest, meanwhile, comes along with non-linear elements and the ability to completely miss chunks of its narrative if you’re not in the right place at the right time — something that would be unthinkable in a lot of today’s narrative games — and stands out as something bold and experimental.
Sure, looking back on this game from 2024, we can see that there are a lot of things it doesn’t do brilliantly. We can tell that its characters aren’t particularly imaginative, and that its narrative is relatively predictable for the most part. But, again, in 1989, this would have been on the cutting edge of interactive storytelling, and a bold experiment for Sierra.
And Sierra’s approach to adventure games was somewhat in flux at the time, too; The Colonel’s Bequest was one of several games to use an early incarnation of the company’s SCI engine; it featured considerably improved graphics, animation and sound over earlier AGI-based games, but still had a text parser, as the company hadn’t yet shifted over to the point-and-click interface it used throughout what many folks regard as its “golden age”, and was still limited to 16 colours on screen at once.
Despite the limitations, though, The Colonel’s Bequest is an enormously atmospheric game. Relatively minimal use of sound — a hallmark of these early SCI titles — means that the few bursts of music are meaningful when they do show up, and some subtle ambient audio such as the ticking clock in the mansion’s hallway and the sounds of the bayou by night when you’re outside really help draw you into the game’s world.
The writing, generally, is good, too. There are some who accuse Roberta Williams of being incapable of cracking a joke, and for sure, The Colonel’s Bequest is pretty light on the comedy. But here’s the thing: not everything has to be a comedy, and I wish more people would realise that. There seems to be this unspoken assumption that adventure games have to be “funny” in order to be effective, largely due to LucasArts’ run of successful comedic titles, but it simply isn’t true. The Colonel’s Bequest is, at heart, a story about the bitterness of a family squabbling over its potential inheritance; while you probably could turn that into a comedy, it works just as well when it plays things straight.
And that’s not to say there’s no silliness in the game whatsoever. While The Colonel’s Bequest is relatively light on ways for its heroine to die — particularly compared to other Sierra games from the period — there are a few ways to go, most of which are inherently rather absurd. They’re usually punishment for doing something obviously stupid, such as jumping down a pitch black laundry chute, or oiling the axe of a rusty suit of armour while you stand directly in front of it, but at times they’re a wry nod at popular culture, such as how instructing Laura to take a shower results in her immediately getting Psycho’d, even if no-one else has been murdered yet.
The relative lack of opportunities to die goes hand-in-hand with the game’s unconventional structure. Since we’re talking about a game that is obviously designed to be replayed, and one in which it’s possible to “finish” it without really understanding anything that just happened, it simply doesn’t make sense to provide lots of opportunities to mess things up. And it’s also worth noting that, although Laura can die in a few different ways, there is no situation in the game where forgetting something important hours ago makes the whole thing unwinnable. This alone is a marked contrast from the company’s other titles from the period, and is absolutely worthy of celebration.
Sure, the fact that you’re not really “solving” anything as you progress feels a little bit weird and can, at times, seem like making your way through the game is just a case of systematically revisiting every possible location to see if anyone is up to something nefarious. But I respect The Colonel’s Bequest enormously for brazenly refusing to conform to the conventions of adventure games, as they existed in 1989.
It’s particularly interesting to contrast it with other, similar titles from a little earlier. The two that spring most readily to mind are Sierra’s own Mystery House from 1980, which The Colonel’s Bequest is often described as a reimagining of, and Infocom’s Moonmist from 1986, which isn’t a murder mystery as such, but has a similar setup of a bunch of tropey characters all wandering around a creepy old mansion while you attempt to get to the bottom of what is going on.
Both of those games could be solved, though; they had a correct sequence of actions to take in order to complete them, and not taking those actions would result in you either dying or getting stuck. Technically you can reach the end of Moonmist without solving anything by letting its time limit expire, but most players will have uncovered at least part of its core mystery by then, by actively participating in proceedings, and the actual time limit is so generous that only the most oblivious adventurer will ever run up against it.
With The Colonel’s Bequest, though, there are only a few parts of the game that involve what we’d call traditional “puzzle solving” — i.e. using items or interacting with scenery elements in a way that specifically causes something advantageous to happen. The rest of your time is spent simply observing and reflecting on what you’ve seen rather than specifically pushing the game onwards towards its conclusion.
There are times when you’ll find evidence such as fingerprints or footprints, and your natural reaction will be “what do I do with this to prove whodunnit?” and the answer is, simply… nothing. You don’t do anything with it at all — or, perhaps more accurately, Laura doesn’t do anything with it at all. You, the player, meanwhile, can draw some of your own conclusions, but there’s no need to make Laura understand anything that you might have figured out in your head. So long as she’s seen the evidence and recorded it in her all-important notebook, you’ll get “credit” for it at the end of the game. There are no logical deductions that it’s necessary to make, no need to pin the game’s various crimes on anybody and no need to establish a motive.
One could be charitable and say that thematically, this makes sense. Laura Bow is a journalist, not a detective, and as such one could argue her role is simply to chronicle what happened, not to interfere with it. That goes against everything adventure game players have been traditionally conditioned to accept, however, and as such I wouldn’t blame anyone for finding The Colonel’s Bequest a little unsatisfying in terms of how everything is resolved come the finale.
But I really enjoyed it. It’s intriguing and exciting to see developers trying out unconventional ways of presenting an interactive narrative as early as 1989, and while the second Laura Bow game, The Dagger of Amon Ra, isn’t quite as experimental as this first one, it still tasks the player with making logical deductions and inferring things to a much greater degree than many other adventure games from the same period.
I’m looking forward to giving it a try for myself — and then hopping on board with the modern-day spiritual successor, The Crimson Diamond, which seems to have gone down very well with Laura Bow fans so far. For now, though, I’m glad to have finally experienced The Colonel’s Bequest, and feel it’s definitely a title from Sierra history that deserves a little more attention than it’s had over the years.
So if you’ve never given it a shot and think it sounds cool, you’ll be pleased to know that it’s readily accessible over on GOG.com, packaged up with the excellent ScummVM utility that makes it run flawlessly on modern systems. Check it out!
More about The Colonel’s Bequest
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