I had the same problem as a kid. My cousins had beaten it and given me some tips, but I could never figure it out. I also tried again a few years ago on an emulator but didn't have the patience to make it very far! Fun game though.

I need to play this again!

Accidentally fall down?

Sure, but it sounds like every player would need to fall in the same hole or they couldn't progress.

I'm sure they managed, but that's not a great design.

The Legend of Zelda was a game I absolutely loved as a kid. I could never get much past a certain point but never really knew why. I’d look everywhere, do everything I knew I could do, but always got stuck.

Years later I looked up a walkthrough out of curiosity. Turns out you can burn down bushes in the overworld with the candle. I don’t recall this ever being mentioned or even hinted at as a thing you could do. I was unable to progress because one of the dungeons was locked behind one of those bushes.

There's a remastered version on steam that plays pretty well.

I said time to boot up scummvm. If I want to play on my phone I'll play on my phone.

I think that was a shortcut. Not the only way to beat the level.

Maniac Mansion 2 (DOTT) was way easier (and even came with Maniac Mansion 1 as an in-game easter egg)

LucasArts has plenty of moon logic in their games, sometimes even mocking it with humor. DOTT was a lot of this. It just did not stick your save game to a point of no return where you have to restart over.

There were also the "feelies", which were a secondary line defense of copy protecion method. They sometimes were a clue to those puzzles.

yes 80s adventure puzzle games were shit

Yeah Curse of Monkey Island does have a few "Oh come the fuck on!" Moments.

Up to the late 90s at least, Metal Gear Solid had a moment where, in order to progress, you had to enter a codec frequency that was in the back of the CD case.

Yep. That's how I played Maniac Mansion!

IFNKOVHGROGHPRM! It was IFNKOVHGROGHPRM in the original AGI version!

i spent too much time trying to figure that out. I thought it was ROT13 or something but that was meaner.

If you want a modernized remaster of Maniac Mansion (the game pictured in OP), you can play MM Deluxe. It is modeled after Day of the Tentacle's interface.

Maniac Mansion Deluxe

Oh, for fans of Sierra, there is now a talkie VGA version of KQ4 - Rosella's Peril. It came out in late 2025, so I figure those who want to experience that game without parser, that is an option.

Lol King's Quest was a funny journey for me. I started with KQV as a kid and was always curious about the previous games. It wasn't until I got them all via abandonware sites as an adult that I realized 5 was the perfect one to start on because the previous ones all relied on vague text parsers to handle all the actions, ones where typing "grab stick" instead of "get stick" could be the difference between having a fun or frustrating time.

So you're saying there's now a version of KQIV that has an interface similar to KQV and involves no guessing which verb/noun they want specifically?

Though my record with point and click adventure games hasn't been great since KQVI. I did beat both 5 and 6 on my own as a kid (getting the 100% win on 6 with no help still gave me a pang of pride when I thought of it just now, when all those pieces start fitting together), but find I don't have the patience to solve similar games these days (even without the "sometimes punishes clicking the wrong pixel with death" that KQ liked to do). I never did finish KQVII, even. Action games were just more engaging.

I grew up with Maniac Mansion on the NES and never used a guide for it as a kid while managing to beat it. I'd also fail this test, probably. 🤷‍♂️

It goes even farther than that: games in the 80s didn't even necessarily have consistent designs that could be trained in the first 30 minutes. Especially the adventure games. They were also perfectly willing to let you lose the game in act 1 but not tell you about it until act 3, where the way they do "tell you" is you don't have any possible solution for a problem.

Like if you don't get that delicious pie plus another food source early on, you'll either die of starvation or the yeti will eat you later in the game.

But if you know what to do, the game becomes trivial.

I have absolutely zero clue about this Manic Mansion since this is the first time I've ever heard of it, but I am definitely gonna give it a 4 hour challenge, if I can find a copy online. Probably gonna find one on the wayback machine web archive.

I'm genuinely curious if I can beat an old game I have zero clue about in under 4 hours, which I doubt I can. Gonna be a late night, as usual, for me.

Use the staple remover on the gopher, duh

Most - or now all, of the point & click series received fan-remakes that modernized the series up to KQVI standards, with voices, graphics, and interface.

Also, if you want more action while still doing adventure gaming stuff, give the Quest for Glory II remake a shot. It has RPG mechanics, a battle system, while still having King's Quest style stuff. The parser is optional there, but helpful when you want to talk with NPCs.

AGDI: KQ1, KQ2, KQ3, and Quest for Glory II.

I'll save you the bother, there is zero chance you will complete it in 4 hours, there is an approaching zero chance you will complete it at all

The way I suspect some of them were made: get 10 random people, present the problem to them and ask each person what they think the solution is. Say no to the first 9, then say yes to whatever the 10th person guesses. If they guess something previously guessed, then keep prompting for more information until the solution is so specific even people on the right track will be confused by it.

Also add endless segments where several specific squares of the grid have mandatory items, something prevents you from systematically searching the entire grid, and if you go too far, you die.

We had a Mickey game that came with a dark maroon piece of paper with a bunch of Mickey poses on it, each one had a number or letter code (it would show a pose and you had to give it the code for the pose to start the game). The black ink on dark maroon paper was intended to prevent photocopying.

We also had this F1 racing game that had a bunch of F1 history in its manual and would ask F1 history trivia to get into the game.

Lol only 4 hours given? Sounds like the study runners also didn't have enough patience to really study this. Or designed the study for the conclusion.

Make sure to use ScummVM to play it! DOSBox is a great way to play a lot of classic PC games but ScummVM is better for any games it supports. This is because ScummVM is a modern engine that runs old adventure games which are written as scripts that run on an interpreter. This beats running an old engine on DOS through DOSBox!

For the game itself I recommend the Internet archive! You can find it as part of the ExoDOS collection or standalone!

I had planned on using ScummVM after seeing a comment about it here but this actually really helps. My search for the game was leading me towards getting it on GoG, but I'm trying my hardest to save money, so this helps a lot.

Thank you so much!

Don’t get me wrong, I love GOG, but I love the Internet archive and projects like ScummVM and DOSBox (as well as all the console and arcade emulators). These are long-term projects carrying the torch of preservation of all these classic games.

After countless Golden Age Hollywood films were lost, I don’t want to see the same thing happen to video games.