Uninvited walkthrough

Uninvited, by ICOM Simulations, makers of the much more popular Shadowgate. I was always curious about this game.

When I was a youth messing around with computers in the pre-internet days, a good adventure game with a box and paper manuals and all that fancy stuff cost about 40 dollars. That's in 1980's money, which is over a hundred dollars in 2020's money, where you can buy twenty much fancier games for your smartphone for the same amount (assuming you're unhappy with all the thousands of free ones).

That's way too much for a teenager to spend on a regular basis, and though I was a stinking software pirate I could only copy what I could access from friends, and no one I knew had a copy of Uninvited. Why get Uninvited when you could get the superior game Shadowgate for the same price? Or spend that 40 bucks on ten fast food meals to stuff into your voracious teenager face?

Of course, the real trick these days is getting such an old game to run at all. I was interested in the Apple IIgs version, since it's in color and it's what I would have played back in the 1980's, but I got rid of my Apple IIgs two decades ago. I'm on a laptop running MacOS.

First thing I tried was an Apple IIgs emulator called KEGS. It was operational, but the emulator had weird timing glitches that made it very hard to play. After only a few screens I gave up and searched for something else.

The solution turned out to be the all-time greatest emulator of the Apple IIgs, a program called Bernie ][ The Rescue. It only ran on the archaic OS 9 operating system, which Apple hardware stopped supporting around the turn of the century, so I had to use an application called SheepShaver to emulate a PowerPC-based Mac old enough to run OS 9, and then launch Bernie inside that emulator to emulate an Apple IIgs. Wheels within wheels. Somehow it all works.

I got ahold of a walkthrough written for the game, because though I was curious enough to want to go back and play it, I wasn't patient enough to confront the challenge of the game on its own terms. When I was a kid and there weren't any better options, and the whole idea of using a point-and-click interface as the foundation for a visual story was still being explored, I would have stridently avoided all external help just to prolong the experience. These days the pointing and clicking is ancient, and the fun for me is mostly in the spooky stylized art direction, and the Monty Python and Douglas Adams inspired offbeat weirdness to the plot and the puzzles that 1980's-era games are infamous for.

I played it late at night, with all the lights off except for an LED candle, and creepy music playing in the background for maximum immersion. It was heaps of retro fun. As I went I took snapshots, and afterwards I assembled this slideshow of almost all the "rooms" in the game, in rough order according to the plot:

The original author of the walkthrough I used is lost in the origins of the internet. As I went through the game I made edits and corrections, and I'll post it below as a reference for fellow travelers.

( Walkthrough for the non-Nintendo versions of Uninvited )

At the end of the game, successful players get to fill out a certificate and send it to their computer's printer to demonstrate their awesomeness. How charming!