Willy’s Manor
Willy’s Manor is a parser game in which we have to solve puzzles in the house of weird rich guy Willy. Wade Clark suggests that the titular Willy is based on Willy Wonka, ‘without the dark parts’. I wonder. Willy Wonka is still a child, but in the sense that he is a creative genius unfettered by what adults have learned about reality. Since the reality principle has no hold on him, he can create his own reality. He’s also a fierce moralist, again, in the way that children can be – with a scary and uncompromising sense of justice. If a kid is greedy and therefore gets sucked into some dangerous machine, that’s fine with Wonka; after all, you shouldn’t be greedy! Willy’s Manor’s Willy is the opposite of this. His idea of humour is a whoopie cushion. He’s a sad man-child who has simply failed to achieve emotional maturity, though that very failure ensures that he himself does not feel the sadness.
This is already to overanalyse Willy’s Manor, though, which brings in the whole idea of an eccentric rich guy only as an excuse to serve us up some riddles and adventure game puzzles, and to set up an interesting, if slightly awkward, joke-puzzle at the end. That’s probably for the best. A game that really delves into the psychology of someone like Willy might be very heavy.
So, we’re here to solve some puzzles! The riddle mechanic works well. You are served nine clues, and for each clue you’ve got to find an object that fits it. The riddles are mostly very easy, and solving them is made yet easier by the fact that the game is fairly linear: every time you solve a riddle, you’ll get a key or a hint that will take you to a new area where you find at least one thing you need to solve the current riddle. There is some non-linearity, though: you can, for instance, find the library at the start of the game (I did) and you can get into the workshop early through an alternate puzzle solution. But through the game’s efficient gate keeping, the map never becomes overwhelming.
The adventure puzzles were a little more hit or miss for me, in part because the answers can be very unintuitive. It is unclear to me how you can put termites into a slingshot and than expect them to eat a tree they land on. The physics of the infinity pool made no sense to me; it seems to work almost by magic, but we’ve been given no reason to assume that we are in a magical world. And I never noticed that the seasons change in the garden, because I didn’t think of revisiting the rooms – this had not been necessary in any of the earlier stages of the game. I think it might have helped if, when moving from room A to room B, there had been a message like ‘Autumn turns into winter.’ or something like that.
But these are minor gripes. The game’s ambitions are limited, and it surely fulfils them to the satisfaction of anyone looking for a light puzzler. The end sequence actually tries something more ambitious: a puzzle that is at the same time an Oh no!-type realisation dawning on you. I was possibly not in enough of a Donald Duck mood to have that realisation – and the insects are all very docile in the earlier parts of the game! – but it still felt like an appropriate finishing touch.