It's Halloween, and there's few things I love more on the calendar than the spooky season. On occasion, I reserve this time of year to review something in the vein of survival horror, and over the decades, video games are flooded with software featuring things that go bump in the night. Maniac Mansion is one of the earliest I remember in the horror genre, and it was certainly different. As an adult, I think I appreciate it more.

Designed by the team of Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, Maniac Mansion was published and released on the NES in 1987. It felt like an homage and spoof of 1950's B-movies like Teenagers From Outer Space, Plan 9 From Outer Space, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Dr. Fred, the patriarch of the Edison family, which includes his wife, his son Weird Ed, and Nurse Edna, are brainwashed by a sentient meteor.

The scientist and family are ordered to harvest human brains for experiments, and one of these humans include Sandy Pantz, the girlfriend of the protagonist Dave Miller. Dave, along with Bernard, Jeff, Michael, Razor, Syd, and Wendy, plan to break into the mansion and rescue her. Along with uncovering the heinous secrets, you must find a way to stay alive. 

While originally a staple of home computers, point and click games were experimented with on console more often than I realized. It took a little bit to get used to the nuances, but it's not too difficult for me to get a hang of the prompts. In hindsight, it's certainly easier to comprehend than all of the variables in Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures, while being a bit ahead of its time. Each of Dave's friends have different skills to help progress through the story more effectively by solving puzzles. This also affects what endings you get, depending on who survives. There's five possible endings, some I don't believe I've earned.

Maniac Mansion is non-linear, so events just...happen. Knowing who is where at any given time really puts me on pins and needles, and getting chased by Edna or Dr. Fred really is a jump-scare I didn't think the NES was capable of pulling off. The plot gets sillier and more harrowing the further you dig into the plot of the aliens (which include disembodied tentacles and prototypical martians called the Meteor Police), and it can be quite addicting to play through, just to see what happens.

Another thing that keeps me playing is how cool the music is, probably some of the more memorable tunes. Dave, Bernard, Jeff, Michael, Razor (my personal favorite), Syd, and Wendy each have their own themes that can play throughout the gameplay, which gives Maniac Mansion more of an identity. By this point in my video game playing in the 90's (the RPG bug didn't get me until about '93), it didn't occur to me that complex characters waw something software was capable of doing. Sure, it's nothing Ingmar Bergman caliber, but to see unique personalities fleshed out is a break from the space shooters, platform games, and brawlers that took up 84.7% of my play time. It adds some gravity or stakes when your characters get potentially kidnapped and killed off. 

Maniac Mansion has a special place in my history. It's one of the first games I played with detailed cutscenes, the first point and click, and considering my love of old sci-fi horror films that developed as I got older, it gets even better. This genre has seen leaps and bounds, but during the golden age of point and clicks that birthed Sierra Entertainment's King's Quest, Maniac Mansion explored a fantastic theme that I think holds up, especially in the age of ironic self-awareness.