Publisher: Vic Tokai
Developer: System Sacom
Year: 1993
Mansion of Hidden Souls is not a great game. It’s a slow, plodding puzzle game in the same vein as Myst or Lunacy. And I absolutely love it.
The story goes like this: a brother and sister are out one night when they come across a butterfly. While the brother protests, the girl chases the butterfly through a field. The brother follows, and soon finds that his sister has disappeared into a mansion. A mansion that seems to have appeared from nowhere.
Upon exploring the mansion, the boy comes across more butterflies, and it becomes apparent that each butterfly represents a soul. In fact, the souls are shocked to see him in human form, as they say every person who enters the mansion becomes a butterfly. What follows is a quest through the house to find and save your sister before she’s doomed to spend an eternity stuck in the house as a butterfly. Along the way you learn more about the other lost souls in the mansion.
Mansion of Hidden Souls is presented entirely in full-motion video, and so what appear to be very nice, pre-rendered visuals (by 1993 standards) suffer from a lot of swimming pixels and flashing colours due to the limited palette on the Genesis. And, of course, you’re stuck moving along very specific paths, one slow camera-shift to the next.
But having said all that, I still thought the game looked great back in the day. This was the sort of multimedia experience I was all for in the early ’90s. Heck, stuff like this was one of the reasons I bought a Sega CD in the first place. And for what it was, Mansion of Hidden Souls delivered something I hadn’t really experienced before, and did it in an enjoyable way.
Why butterflies? My guess is because there is apparently an old superstition in Japan regarding butterflies: that they are the personification of the human soul. The appearance of a butterfly in your room would signify that you were about to see the person you love most. On the flip side, the appearance of many butterflies were a bad omen. Additionally, the ancient Greek word for butterfly primarily means “soul” or “mind” (thanks, wikipedia).
Mansion of Hidden Souls saw a sequel, too. Called The Mansion of Hidden Souls (and you thought the Need For Speed naming convention was confusing), the game appeared on the Saturn and followed the story of another soul on a quest to discover the true purpose of the mansion. The game plays almost exactly the same as the Sega CD original.
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