WARNING: There are some graphic scenes in this game. If you could not handle 5 Days a Stranger or 7 Days a Skeptic, do not attempt to play this game.

I really do walk into these things, don't I?

The premise

As recommended to me by rakarr last week, Enclosure is a horror/mystery adventure done in a version of Sierra's AGI engine. The idea is that you're a con-man who masquerades as a psychic, and have been picked up to join a ghostbusting mission at an abandoned research station where mysterious sightings have been reported. Naturally this turns out to be as bad an idea as it sounds, your means of leaving the station are cut off very early on, and it's up to you to solve the mystery and survive while the rest of the party are gradually picked off.

It struck me that the adventure is very well animated for an AGI game - a lot is done with the few pixels on offer in the horizontally doubled resolution. In fact, like I mentioned for Judith before, the 80s appearance of the game does quite a lot for the scare factor in itself - PC speaker stings conjure up bad memories for me in particular, and it's strange to see claustrophobic and frightening environments (and grisly murder scenes) through the previously innocent graphical style, making it look like a really twisted King's Quest. However, the game itself seems undecided as to whether it wants to take the light-hearted tone of the other AGI games or not - there's a part where you've just discovered the body of someone you were talking to a few minutes ago, and have to cross the room over an escaped ant colony to get a vital item. If you walk across without dealing with the ants, they'll leap on to your character and jump away revealing a skeleton that then shrugs wearily. It's as if opening the escape pod in 7 Days resulted in you being squashed by a falling anvil.

The inevitable

The storyline starts off well as you explore and talk to people, but ultimately it seems rather end-heavy, in that the gradual decay expected from these sorts of games is just about present but then accelerates massively towards the end. There are a couple of deaths throughout the storyline, and then it begins squashing everything into the very last part where you discover that *thunk* he's dead, and *spthwap* she's gone as well, as if the writer had suddenly realized that it was the end of the game and the surviving party was still far too large. After a good buildup otherwise, the answer to the mystery is done in a really appallingly Scooby Doo-like fashion as well - it would have been equally satisfying if it had just turned out that the ghost was really Mr Jameson the caretaker from the nearby abandoned fairground who was trying to scare people away from the goldmine.

I would certainly recommend a walkthrough, because a lot of the time, the puzzles are of the variety where you have to do something and then wander around the station for ages trying to work out the one detail that's changed (although Scorpion from Mortal Kombat will occasionally appear for some reason and give you a hint as to what to do next). You can die fairly easily in it, but for the most part, not in enormously sadistic and ridiculous ways like Roberta Williams' series - the only real sticking points are the two arcade sequences, which are both completely awful (and the game has the courtesy to open the game with one of them, but it gets better after that, I promise).

It's not something on the level of the Chzo games as the top description would imply (in fact it would seem to be rather closer to Hugo's House of Horrors in mood), but it's a decent attempt at one, and I admit that it certainly managed to scare me a couple of times.