Bones: The Game of the Haunted Mansion

Bones: The Game of the Haunted Mansion is a member of the pseudo-roguelike Wizard’s Castle family. It is one of the oldest games of this family, originating in 1981 on DEC mainframes.

The story is quite conservative: As in the other Wizard’s Castle games, your task is to descend into a dungeon to find the all-powerful Globe of some mighty Warlock on the deepest level.

The gameplay is a hybrid of boardgame-like exploration and roguelike dungeon crawl, the whole presented as in “windowed” interactive fiction game, while the setting is a mix of fantasy, horror and sci-fi elements, playing in a haunted mansion filled with dust, bones, undead skeletons, RAM chips needed for auto-mapping, Uzis and Laser guns, etc. The only graphics is the BGI title screen; the rest of the game plays in text mode and reminds late DOS applications with windows.