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Westen House
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About the game
Jonathan Westen has died and left his scientific notes to his old friend, Professor Edward Kelvin, with a letter, a house key and half of another key. The notes must be collected before Jonathan's sister Lucy takes over the house, so the professor sets off at once. What starts as a simple errand turns into a search through locked rooms, a library of strange books and a basement nobody is supposed to enter.
Westen House is an isometric adventure in the style of the classic 8-bit "filmation" games. You walk, jump and push furniture around each room, carry a small inventory of objects, and use them on the things you find: an oil lamp, a safe behind a painting, chests, crates and doors. Letters and diaries scattered around the house carry the story forward and hold the clues you need later. The plot borrows a few names from Bram Stoker's Dracula, and the second half is a gothic vampire tale, told with 8-bit sprites and a light touch.
Playing it here
This is a homebrew game for the MSX, the 1980s home computer standard that was especially popular in Japan, Europe and Brazil (where it sold as the Gradiente Expert and the Sharp Hotbit). It is a new game by an independent developer, not a commercial release, made for MSX1 machines as a 48 KB cartridge. It runs here in the blueMSX emulator with C-BIOS, a free replacement for the MSX system software.
Click Play, wait for the intro (Space skips it) and press Space on the title screen. Your computer keyboard works as the MSX keyboard. F2 saves the full state of the emulator in this browser and F4 brings it back; the game itself has no save, so this is the way to keep your progress. A gamepad acts as the MSX joystick: the bottom button is Space and the right button is M.
Controls
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| Arrow keys | walk |
| Space | jump |
| M (or N) held + arrows | choose an item in the inventory |
| M (or N) held + Space | use the selected item; with an empty slot, interact with an object next to you or pick up the one you stand on |
| Q | switch how the arrows map to the isometric directions |
| M on the title screen | show the controls |
| F2 / F4 | save / load the emulator state |
A few things worth knowing
Try both arrow layouts. In an isometric room, "up" can mean two different diagonals. If walking feels wrong, press Q: the game switches to the other mapping and you can keep the one that suits you.
Keep an empty slot. To open or examine something in a room, select an empty inventory slot, stand next to it and press Space while holding M. To pick something up, do the same standing on top of it.
Read everything. The letters, notes and diaries are the game's puzzle hints. Codes and passwords for later locks are hidden in them, so pay attention to dates and names.
Credits and licence
Westen House was written by Santiago Ontañón, who releases his games as Brain Games; he started it for the MSXDev'21 competition and finished it shortly after. Code, graphics, music and story are his. The README thanks Jordi Sureda for beta testing. Data in the cartridge is compressed with ZX0, whose decoder by Einar Saukas is under the 3-clause BSD licence. The game is free software under the Apache License 2.0. The licence text is linked from this page.