The Colonel's Bequest

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During the eighties and early nineties, the world of Adventure Games belonged to Sierra. Games series like King's Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, and Quest for Glory, established the company's love of quests, and in 1989 there was The Colonel's Bequest, following in the same naming format of putting the word "quest" somewhere in the title of each game. The game was created by Roberta Williams of King's Quest fame, and borrowed elements from Williams' Mystery House, created in 1980 and known as one of the first graphical adventures.

The Colonel's Bequest used a traditional text parser and 16 color graphics, much like Sierra's other games of the time. The plot, which took place in 1925, involved protagonist Laura Bow, a graduate of Tulane University, being invited by her friend Lillian to her uncle's New Orleans plantation home, where relatives and employees have gathered for the reading of the old Colonel's will. Secrets and deceptions abound as the guests quickly start to disappear, and it is up to Laura to find out what is going on and solve the mystery before it is too late. Turns out she can't: almost everybody will die regardless of what you do, and none of the secrets and deceptions are at all related to the murderer.

Unlike most of Sierra's adventures, the game stood out in that it focused on gathering information and evidence by asking questions or overhearing conversations rather than the typical formula of putting two items together to achieve a goal, although there were a few item-based puzzles to solve that would help Laura obtain additional clues. The player was required to figure out for themselves what was going on by piecing together parts of the story. In the end of the game, you find two fighting people and get to shoot either of them, and will receive a "good" ending or a "bad" ending depending on which you pick. There were also many clues that did not have to be uncovered in order to win the game, increasing replayability and challenging the player to become an amateur sleuth.

Another thing that made the game notable was that it ran on a time system that would change when Laura triggered an event every fifteen minutes, the entire game taking place over the course of one night. Because the game didn't tell you outright what you were supposed to do with the information you collected, it is difficult to know just what is going on on the first playthrough, and easy to miss important events if you triggered the next event too soon. Characters would make plans to meet in various places at certain times and could be followed or spied upon.

The second and last in the series, The Dagger of Amon Ra (1992), used 8 bit colors and a point-and-click interface. It takes place a year after the first game, in New York, where Laura, now a newspaper reporter, is charged to write a story about the dissapearance of an antique dagger from a local museum. Attending a benefit at the museum, she meets the various suspects, who quickly begin to die off one by one. This game had a similar time system but involved more straight-forward, item-based puzzles than the previous game. Like its predecessor, it also required the player to make their own conclusions in order to solve the murders. The identity of the murderer is not revealed at the end of the game, and instead the player is asked a series of questions in order to determine who the culprit is based on evidence collected.

Tropes used in The Colonel's Bequest include:

• Acquitted Too Late^[context?]
• Amateur Sleuth
• Always Murder^[context?]
• Asshole Victim^[context?]
• Big Applesauce: Dagger of Amon Ra
• Big Secret: Almost everyone has one.
• Big Screwed-Up Family: In the first game
• Bookcase Passage^[context?]
• Cassandra Truth: No one ever believes Laura when she warns them about the murders.
• Curtain Camouflage^[context?]
• Darkness Equals Death: don't go down that dark staircase without a light!
  • If Laura goes through any of the secret passageway tunnels in the sequel without either lighting the lamp before she enters or while inside, she will be attacked by bats, which is odd when these tunnels have no critter or any other danger whatsoever when lit. Subverted in the last tunnels near the end of the game as while you don't immediately get killed for entering in the dark, you can't do anything productive without lighting your lamp and you can still get killed.
• Dead Man's Chest^[context?]
• Dead Person Impersonation: Dr. Archibald Carrington in the second game.
• Dirty Old Man: Doctor Wilbur B. Feels of the first game.
• Dramatis Personae: The first game is presented as if it is a stage play, introducing the cast this way before the start of act one.
• Drop in Nemesis: various things Laura did could cause the murderer to appear out of nowhere in the first game, including taking a shower, in an homage to Psycho, complete with a snarky Have a Nice Death.
• Dysfunction Junction^[context?]
• Evidence Scavenger Hunt^[context?]
• Everyone Is a Suspect
• Everyone Looks Sexier If French: Both French people are massive flirts, and the first one is actually a French Maid, ... ooh la la..
• Everything Trying to Kill You: in true Sierra fashion, Laura will die unexpectedly if she so much as takes a wrong step, often from accidental murder rather than by the actual killer.
• Exact Eavesdropping: in both games
• Falling Chandelier of Doom: one of the ways Laura could die in the first game
• Genteel Interbellum Setting
• Guide Dang It: even more than a typical Sierra game, considering many of the actions required to get the best ending don't make sense.
• Have a Nice Death: The shower scene mentioned above gives you the death message "didn't Alfred teach you anything?"
• Heroes Want Redheads: Both the heroine and her love interest in the second game are redheads.
  • The villain of the second game is also a redhead.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: After the Dagger is stolen in the second game, the thief tries to stash it among the replicas in the gift shop.
• Hidden Villain: Lilian, who you do not find out as the murderer unless you search very hard.
• Homage: the aforementioned shower scene.
• Hyperspace Arsenal: As with many an adventure game protagonist, the tiny Laura can hold a wide variety of evidence and tools at once without issue. The second game takes this to the point of self parody, with Laura explicitly sticking every item in her tiny bag that is often smaller than the item being picked up. The only thing that the game claims will not fit is a "portable" typewriter that weighs "50 pounds" which, while funny, is inaccurate
• It's a Wonderful Failure
• Intrepid Reporter: Laura in the second game.
• The Jeeves: Lampshaded with the butler named Jeeves!
• The Killer Becomes the Killed: In both games:
  • Lillian had done all the murders in the first game, yet was found dead in the garden. As it turns out, she had intended to kill Rudy, but Rudy had fought back and killed her in self defense.
  • Watney Little had killed Carrington in the second game but was then killed by O'Riley.
• Lady Drunk: Ethel Prune in the first game
• Look Both Ways: in the second game, you need to look both ways in order to cross the street safely.
• Moon Logic Puzzle: Often the information is there, the game just doesn't tell you what it means.
• Morally-Ambiguous Doctorate: Dr. Feels
• Multiple Endings: In the first game, you either shoot the colonel, or do nothing and let Rudy kill him in the struggle, which is the bad ending or shoot Rudy and injure him, resulting in the good ending. In the second game, it's get all the accusations wrong.
• My Name Is Not Durwood: Crodfeller T. Rubarb in the second game.
• Nasty Party: In the bad ending of the first game Rudy lies that this was the Colonel's plan all along.
• Never One Murder
• Nightmare Fetishist: Olympia Myklos in the second game. Her boyfriend, Wolf Heimlich, shares some of her morbid interests as well.
• Not in Front of the Parrot
• Not Proven: if you fail to find enough evidence, even if you've already figured out who the murderer is. In Amon Ra, even if you identify the killer but fail to convict them, Laura is later murdered in her bed.
• Obfuscating Disability: Colonel Dijon of The Colonels Bequest was apparently wounded and rendered unable to walk during the Spanish-American War. You can see him stand and/or walk under his own power at two separate points in the game.
• The Ophelia: Lillian in the first game.
• Passed Over Inheritance: Given the fact that the Colonel stated that his estate will be divided equally among everyone present at the manor when he made the announcement who outlives him (Other than Laura), the obvious explanation as to why virtually everyone in the manor turns up dead over the course of the next few hours is that the killer is someone hoping to increase their share of the pie. It's actually Lillian, who doesn't care about the money but wants to restore her perceived status as the Colonel's favorite relative by making her his only relative.
• Peek-a-Boo Corpse
• Perfect Poison: in the first game, sleeping powder is used, and mixed with Alcohol.
• Plucky Girl: Laura, of course.
• Punny Name: Steve Dorian, who has a job as a -- wait for it -- stevedore.
• Railing Kill: Look out for the crumbling parts.
• Redheaded Hero: Laura
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Lillian
• The Roaring Twenties
• Secret Relationship: All over the place in both games.
• Sidequest: The bag of gems has nothing to do with the mystery, although it does add a bit to the good ending.
• Stage Names: Gloria Swansong is Gloria Dijon in the first game.
• Super Drowning Skills: Dip so much as a toe in the water and you're a goner. Laura will sink in over her head mere inches from shore.
• Ten Little Murder Victims: the plot of both games
• Triang Relations
• The Un-Reveal: Your pursuer in Dagger of Amon Ra.
• The Unsolved Mystery: it's easy to go through both games and have no idea what just happened.
• The Vamp: Fifi in the first game and Yvette Delacroix in the second. Both are French.
• Yet Another Stupid Death: The chandelier only falls on you if you walk down the exact center of the first floor hallway. Which is right where the front doors deposit you, causing plenty of accidental deaths when the player forgets to sidestep.