Hugo's House of Horrors

The Good
While the 16-color graphics remain largely the same as the DOS version, the menu interface is a lot more user friendly. The accompanying music tracks certainly lighten (or is that darken?) the atmosphere and there are the sounds of monsters straight from Nitemare 3D. It's also quite funny that when you use profanity as commands, the computer has humorous responses.

The Bad
If you’re familiar with the puzzles and commands, this shouldn’t be a problem, but there’s no improvement where it was needed the most. There should have been synonyms for commands like UNDO BOLT such as SLIDE or PULL BOLT, because those very specific commands make it hard to progress without a walkthrough. It’s like the game’s system is toying with your mind and giving you brain freeze. Then you get awkward dead end situations which are pretty much King’s Quest standards. Finally, answering the general knowledge questions at the end might not be fair to non-US players, who may not know all the answers, they would need an encyclopedia back in the early 90s.

The Bottom Line
If you missed this classic adventure game on DOS, then you’ve got another chance to try it out on Windows. Not the biggest improvement, but a good one. This game is smaller than most Sierra adventures, but bigger than a straight up text adventure. You don’t need to wait for Halloween to play it, it's quite fun on your first try with a whole house to explore.