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![[Mystery House screenshot]](http://www.lauppert.ws/screen1/apple/mystery_house.png "click for more Apple ][ screenshots")
The first ever adventure game to use graphics instead of detailed
description, though actions were still parser-driven; at the same
time, the first game by Ken and Roberta
Williams, and thus in more than one way the ancestor of the
great Sierra adventures.
The irony in this is that Mystery House is by no reasonable standards a good game. The graphics were bad, not bad as in limited platform capabilities, but bad as in done by someone who simply couldn't draw. And it was not just a matter of looks, but of function; the graphics had replaced the detailed description of the rooms, but it was not always easy to tell that the circle in the background represented a hole in the wall you could crawl through and not, say, a barometer.
Some of the puzzles were rather absurd too. A trap door in the ceiling can only be detected through a telescope from the outside, and then there's the infamous forest maze of seven completely identical screens that could only be mapped by dropping an item in each. Add to that a less than sophisticated parser, and you have a less than memorable game.
But it certainly has its place in history.
