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This time I played Le Manoir du Dr. Genius(Dr. Genius' Mansion), an early French adventure game. It might be the first French adventure game, but I'm not sure. Also different sources listed the release date as 1983 or 1984, but more went with 1983 so that's what I'm going with. As for the platform it was released on, the Oric 1 was UK-based Tangerine Computer System's attempt at a home computer to rival the ZX Spectrum. It released in 1982, but in 1983 it was the best selling computer in France. It's also the first game I've ever finished in French! My French is very basic, but thankfully the language in this game was kind of at my level, though I did have to look up a lot of words while playing.

...Now when I say I "finished" the game, I'm being a little loose with that definition here, and that's because I extremely cheated in this game. I don't mean I used a walkthrough, I mean I literally hacked the game so I could sequence break through the final section of the game... Why did I do this? This game is really hard! I tried using a walkthrough and I still couldn't get through it. The house kept getting hit by lightning, killing me over and over. I'm not sure if it's completely random, happens after a certain amount of turns, or if I didn't do something to prevent it. Either way I could only get about halfway through legitimately and cheated through the final puzzle. It has a reputation for being hard, but it truly is difficult.

Aside from that, it's obviously inspired by Sierra On-Line's Mystery House (after all the old adventure games I've been playing at this point I'm like "Who wasn't?" lol). Your goal is to survive and escape Dr. Genius' Mansion. The house looks similar to the Amityville House according to this article (in French). It tries to carve its own unique identity with stuff like a teleporter and monster in it, but the difficulty is the thing that's likely to stick with you. There's a sequel that was released the following year, if I play it, I hope it's easier...