Escape from Monster Manor

Escape from Monster Manor is a horror first-person shooter in which the player fights their way through a haunted mansion full of ghosts, monsters, and traps. The goal is to make your way through the house's floors, find fragments of a key item, and get rid of the main threat controlling the estate. The maze of corridors and rooms is navigated in the classic style of shooters of the era, except that instead of soldiers you're shooting at skeletons and specters, which often appear unexpectedly and without warning. A map in the corner of the screen helps with orientation, since the corridors look quite similar to one another and it's easy to get lost. Besides ammunition, you also search for health kits and items that open locked sections, so getting through each floor is always a combination of combat and searching.

The game was important for the 3DO as proof that the console could handle textured three-dimensional environments, which up to that point had been the domain of computers. Enemies are rendered as scaled sprites, but the environment uses fully textured walls, and the game runs smoothly even when several opponents gather at once in a tight space. Its strongest point is the mood: dim lighting, echoing footsteps, and music that works more with tension than melody managed to create a sense of dread even with the modest means available at the time. A sudden enemy appearing in a narrow corridor still reliably works today.

At the time, the game was praised as a decent showcase of the console's technical abilities and as one of the few ways to play a horror shooter on the 3DO; criticism targeted the repetitive spaces and limited enemy variety. Its significance lies mainly in the fact that it was one of the first attempts to bring this genre to a disc-based home console. Today, Escape from Monster Manor is a short but atmospheric affair, best enjoyed with the lights off and an acceptance that you'll be walking in circles a lot.