This has been bugging me for over a year now because I can vividly recall the game but I can not find any trace of it on the internet and I’m hoping someone here has heard of it.
The game is fairly simple and my guess aimed at young kids. The premise was you were given a first person perspective of a black and white room and could rotate the camera left and right by clicking the edges of the screen. If you clicked on a door or hallway you moved down it. You were given a list of objects to find in the maze like mansion (which I believe was randomly generated every time you played) and I want to say if you clicked on the item in the list it had a text to speech reader that would try to read the name of the object out to you. If you found all the objects it would play a short melody then take you to a new set of rooms.
However this game was terrifying to me as a child because in addition to finding all these objects you were being chased by a glowing light. It would slowly travel from room to room and if you ever ended up in the same room as it you lost. The game also had a Zelda like mapping system where each time you started in an area the map on one side of the screen was blank but as you visited rooms they would fill in and you could see the light traversing the maze on it. If you found a flashlight you could use it and a secret passage would appear taking you to another section of the map which came in handy if the glowing light trapped you.
My best guess for OS would be either Mac OS 8 or System 7
It looked very similar to this
but after looking through all of ICOM Simulations games none of them are what I’m thinking of. It could very well be the fact that I was 6 and am not remembering the game correctly though.
If anyone happens to know the name of this game I would be really grateful to them so the next time I visit my parents I’m not spending the entire time trying to setup an ancient computer that may not even boot.
The ICOM stuff were authored adventure experiences, whereas the thing you’re describing if the randomization is not misremembered sounds like a roguelike almost.
I’m afraid I don’t have any leads on what that specific game is, but just in case you haven’t already checked out these resources, I’d recommend looking at the Macintosh Software Library, the Macintosh Repository, or the Macintosh Garden! They’ve got a lot of different selections of software from around the era you mentioned archived for basically this exact purpose – with some screenshots that might jog your memory.
Good luck! I hope you find it, there’s nothing more satisfying than tracking something like that down.
Does this look familiar? I used to play these kinds of HyperCard games as a kid, too, but never played this one. Seems to match most of your description aside from the “glowing light” part.
I’ve found a couple games that fit your description in one way or another, are they any of these? If they aren’t, do you remember anything else about the game or the year you played it?
Scarab of Ra (Has most of what you described, except it’s in a pyramid instead of a mansion. There are clouds that could be the light you talked about, but they don’t harm the player. There is a mummy that chases you with the cloud around it when you grab a certain item.)
Haunted Mansion (Doesn’t have map, but it is a kid’s game where you explore a haunted mansion.)
Bus’d Out (Has mapping system but that’s the only similarity.)
Eternity Inn (It’s in color, but it does have speech when you pick up a key.)
