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Download from the Internet Archive at https://archive.​org/​details/​wozaday_Windmere_Estate

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Windmere Estate

by Dennis N. Strong

Fantasy, Treasure Hunt
1982

(based on 1 rating)
1 review

About the Story

A traditional treasure hunt in and around the grounds of a sprawling estate. Collect all the pirate's plunder and store it in the correct location up to a maximum of 415 points. Vampire bats, hedge mazes and weather vanes abound. Published for Apple II and North Star by Dynacomp in 1982.

A two word parser and a large map mark it as early eighties. It shares a map with another Dennis N. Strong game from the same year, namely Zodiac Castle.

A public domain game it is freely downloadable from archive.org amongst others.


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Number of Reviews: 1
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Old School Treasure Hunt , August 30, 2023
by Canalboy (London, UK.)
Related reviews: Treasure Hunt, Fantasy

I have not played many Apple II text adventures but having downloaded the AppleWin emulator recently I thought that I would chance my arm.

Windmere Estate is a traditional find the treasures and store them somewhere two word parser game which appears to be getting tougher the further I hack into it.

The diaphanous premise is that pirates stored their manifold booty in and around the grounds of the estate and you have the chance as usual to emulate Croesus by finding it all.

I initially had some parser issues as oddly entering certain objects in a room requires the syntax "open x" e.g. "open closet" will take you into said item. Examine doesn't work, neither do verbose or take all.

To start with the puzzles seemed childishly simple. Hmmm there are some rats in here and some rat poison nearby. Now what could possibly work? However, as I have penetrated the deeper recesses of the estate the difficulty quotient has inclined considerably. There is a closed vault door, a seemingly inaccessible dumbwaiter (Curses anyone?) and an organ upon which I can produce a cacophonous din but to no avail. One particular problem is caused by a parser infelicity however and I have no qualms in telling you that the portrait needs to be referred to as a picture. Nuff said.

As tradition dictates there are a number of secret passages and hidden rooms which gradually make traversing the large map (I have currently identified 93 rooms) easier.

I have so far accumulated 23 treasures but this only amounts to 230 out of the maximum attainable score of 415 so I still have some way to go.

There is a HINT option which nudged me towards the painting / picture solution but generally speaking you are on your own as this seems to work in very few locations.

You can at least recharge your flashlight at a certain location an infinite amount of times and there are no hunger or thirst daemons. Moving in the dark is usually fatal through injury or at the teeth of a vampire bat. Multiple deaths abound but there are few soft locks so far.

This is worth a look if you are an old school fan and don't mind drawing a map and watching your points tally slowly increment.

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Windmere Estate on IFDB

Polls

The following polls include votes for Windmere Estate:

Games with exploration (or even just games w/ secret passages and such) by Cygnus
There seems to be a LOT of games where you just.. explore hidden secrets in mansions, or similar. some of them have a plot, some of 'em don't, but i'm lookin' for stuff like D'Arkun, the Manor at Whitby.. Or any games with just...

The great puzzlefests by Victor Gijsbers
Playing Curses!, I started wondering which games belong to the canon of great puzzlefests. With this term I mean puzzle based games that are long, difficult and punishing; but also fair, engaging and truly rewarding to work through. The...




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