The Haunted Hoard: The Lurking Horror (PC)
When playing a text adventure, it’s easy to find yourself wondering if the game might have been better if it was able to include some graphics or if interaction was made easier than actually typing in your commands and hoping the game will understand them. On the other hand, when you’re making a game that’s trying to terrify the player, sometimes horror can be found lurking between how much detail the words provide and how much they leave out. The Lurking Horror makes good use of its nature as a game without images, looking to provide just enough detail to unnerve you while still trying to make sense of monsters you can only partially comprehend.
The Lurking Horror takes place at the fictional G.U.E. Tech, and on the surface, it doesn’t seem a far cry from real universities like MIT. Beyond the strange inclusion of a Department of Alchemy, the rest of the building is devoted to scientific pursuits, plenty of computers and labs available and its intelligent students prone to dorky jokes and nerdy pursuits. While this can lead to a few bits of comedy like an over-the-top hacker character you meet, its closeness to reality and a layout you can become familiar with quickly is what helps The Lurking Horror establish a setting that is more interesting to disrupt with curious supernatural elements.
It all begins on a night where you stay late at a G.U.E. computer lab trying to get a paper done only to discover it has been overwritten with something ominous and unnatural. Whatever is going on in secret at your college, you’ve now been pulled into it, and with a blistering blizzard outside and a crucial assignment likely in the hands of those same people up to no good, you have little choice but to try and learn more to save your skin and your college career. The campus hides its peculiarities well though, requiring you to poke around in basements, unearth hidden passages, or break the rules to get closer to finding out what dark forces are at play, but perhaps appropriately, you won’t get full answers to your questions after just one go at scouring the campus. The Lurking Horror isn’t really about a triumphant fight against evil, it’s about a college student who has been forced into a side of the world they barely understand, but the mystery around what you’re witnessing is often well-framed. The game won’t come out and explain where a strange monster came from or the purpose of a dark ritual, but you’ll still have enough details to ponder them and make inferences. The Lurking Horror is foremost a story about your survival rather the a deeper look at the dark plot afoot, and while that can make some moments feel like they actually lack deeper substance, others feel more unnerving because you’re left to fill in the gaps on why you’re witnessing such things at an institution with some apparently deep secrets.
Where The Lurking Horror works best in regards to giving you enough to understand what you need to but not so much it destroys the air of mystique is with how it chooses to describe a good deal of what you find. At times, The Lurking Horror can sometimes be a little sparse in its description of an area, not wasting words on a place that might not have much importance or dressing up a place that is deliberately plain. However, when you start to run into trouble or find yourself in a supernatural situation, that’s where The Lurking Horror’s writing shines. It knows you want to better understand what you’re finding that is out of the ordinary, but it’s careful in not giving away too much. You’ll get some vivid descriptors and more advanced vocabulary to sell how gnarly or unnatural something might appear to be, but many times it will leave out certain specifics about the monsters you encounter so you’re struggling just as much as your in-game character when it comes to making sense of what’s before you. The application of detail can lead to some evocative scenes and strong imagery despite your mind still trying to piece together certain details, and The Lurking Horror avoids having its prose dip into anything overwrought. It whips out those stronger words and extra bits of elaboration to add impact to scenes, meaning a pack of rats can be just as disturbing as something clearly not of this Earth.
Your exploration of G.U.E. Tech will be done entirely through text commands you type in yourself. Over the course of the adventure you will find items you need to use in specific circumstances, including in battle against the horrors lurking in the dark corners of the college, but figuring out how to perform some actions can be said to be a puzzle itself. One crucial element in understanding this text adventure is thinking less of the action itself you wish to perform and how your character would actually need to move to perform it. For example, using a microwave isn’t as simple as putting in a time to cook it, you need to press each button individually. The Lurking Horror does have a somewhat decent parser for actions, including an “oops” function that lets you correct a typo without entering a full command again and the ability to type single letters for specific actions like “w” or “s” to go west or south respectively. It will require some wrangling at times or persistence, like one point where you need to repeatedly move junk aside rather than performing the action once like you do elsewhere when performing what could have been the similarly tedious action of digging.
The Lurking Horror does have a move counter that ticks up every action you take so long as it is valid, and this can be important since there are two failure states beyond dying to any creatures you encounter. One involves the fact you are just up late, and at some point your character will get weary and potentially pass out if you don’t find the way to top them off, although thankfully this is somewhat easier to avoid. The other involves being in a dark place without a light. Your flashlight has limited batteries and there are a few dark places to explore, so you need to make sure you turn it off when not in use. Turning it off in the wrong place is an instant death though, but the game usually has some detail to warn you when you’re entering or leaving darkness. Instant deaths may sound cruel, especially in a text adventure where you’d need to go through and type all the same commands again to get where you left off, but The Lurking Horror does have a save function that allows you to better explore and experiment.
In fact, that save function feels pretty crucial to clearing The Lurking Horror, since there are times where logic isn’t exactly the strongest. Perhaps the clearest case involves moments where you can only know to perform the right action in key situations through failing or taking alternate paths in other playthroughs. You need to carry over knowledge from failed runs, your character’s only hope of survival at a point or two knowing about hidden elements or specific interactions that they had to learn the hard way elsewhere. Saving before something dire can let you learn some of these, but others might require exploration that can wear down your character or flashlight battery and make it near impossible to win in that run. The save system does allow you to have more room to figure out things though, especially since your opposition can sometimes be deliberately unknowable. How do you contend with a shadow beast with no clear features? Well, you save, then start considering what inventory items are on hand and what is in the area, the player able to work out a solution through experimentation. Oftentimes the puzzles aren’t particularly deep provided you have the right info or picked up what is required, but by not having certain encounters be straightforward and having death as punishment, you can at least steep yourself into some appropriate panic despite time never advancing in the game until you’ve put in a command. However, since you are essentially stumbling into this dark side of George Underwood Edwards Tech, you can sometimes be left bumbling about unsure what you’re meant to even be doing. There’s no clear giant antagonist to pursue or often a strong direction for where to go next, and with some floors of the university actually having nothing of value, you can be left wandering as you aren’t even sure where this text adventure intends for you to stumble into next.
THE VERDICT: The Lurking Horror makes some superb use of its text only nature when it comes to constructing evocative horror scenes, the details provided giving you a mental image that is vivid yet still leaves it monsters mysterious. Your input commands usually aren’t too obtuse once you pick up on the game’s logic and a save system lets you figure out the deadlier puzzles in time, although having to carry over lessons from failed runs does give the meager plot an inauthentic air at times. The horror steeped in a believable college setting is what will keep pulling you back in though, this text adventure still worth the effort especially since a winning run won’t take overly long to clear.
And so, I give The Lurking Horror for PC…
An OKAY rating. That devotion to unknowable mysteries that makes this supernatural tale feel more grounded ends up leading to some elements that could have used more narrative or personal weight to make the adventure more satisfying to clear, but this survival tale still thrives in the moments where it constructs a scene that aims to be disturbing beyond just the basics of a deadly supernatural threat. It will make the scene feel more visceral by describing your senses reacting to the horrible situation, something that can be helped by its occasional subtle sound effects and even lead to the playful inclusion of a rubber centipede in the box to give you a scare before you even start the game. The Lurking Horror is about terrifying you most of all, which is why some of its puzzles aren’t the deepest and its story prioritizes your personal experience over getting to the bottom of the eldritch conspiracies. The text parser will buck you a few times as you’re trying to interact with these scenes and it can’t quite figure out your intent, but it’s also fairly capable once you’ve learned its limits and vital actions rarely require leaps in logic, although sometimes they do require logic that only arises if you found the right object or went down a doomed path before. G.U.E. Tech is a great setting though both for its reasonable design and how the horror can hide in it so well without having to tear down the believable college facade, and while there is a maze later in the adventure, even it has a way to keep navigation from being a confusing chore.
You can clear The Lurking Horror with some gumption and willingness to experiment, but there are more captivating horror tales to experience and text adventures to invest your time in. The Lurking Horror can be a bit more approachable than some text adventures though, partly because of its good writing at key points and reasonable scope in an easily understood setting. Perhaps it could have benefited from clearer commands, but shifting away from a world described to you to one depicted with images could have robbed it off its main charm and most evocative moments. The Lurking Horror is a good example of why the text adventure format isn’t always a simple case of doing the best with what computer tech could conjure for its time, there sometimes value in reading rather than witnessing what’s going on in a game world.