Video Game / Cragne Manor

If you approach Cragne Manor as an conventional work of interactive fiction, you'll find it confusing and frustrating. Temper your expectations, be prepared for the weirdness you're diving into. You'll still end up confused and frustrated at some point. Then you'll discover that this is completely worth it.

Cragne Manor is a collaborative work of Interactive Fiction commissioned by Jenni Polodna and Ryan Veeder for the 20th anniversary of Michael Gentry's Anchorhead. It is an "exquisite corpse"-style game — more than 80 writers contributed, all of whom were mostly unaware of the others' parts — and also a game full of exquisite corpses.

The player controls Naomi Cragne, a woman who has taken a train to the town of Backwater, Vermont in order to find her missing husband, Peter.

It can be played here.

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Cragne Manor provides examples of the following tropes:

• Aerith and Bob: Some characters have normal names like Dan and Peter, alongside stranger ones like Christabell and Fulvous.
• The Alleged House: The available houses in Backwater, as detailed in a real estate pamphlet, have such upsides as "Concrete-sealed basement, hardly any muttering!" and "Entire upstairs still mostly above water!"
• Ambiguous Syntax: One of the magazines in the real estate office is called "Yurt Fancier". Naomi knows it means "someone who likes yurts", but also wonders if it's implying that the yurt is fancier than she is. The narration says that it is: "it's made of cruelty-free faux beluga whaleskin and you, last time you checked, are not."
• Anti-Frustration Features: To avoid frustration with using the parser, the bridge room will regularly tell you the correct command to type for things you might want to do, such as throwing the rope into the water.
• Bag of Holding: Naomi has a Jansport backpack that she can put all her items in. This includes a suitcase, a filthy welcome mat, various large articles of clothing, and a rat corpse. It's separated into pockets for you to help organize your items better.
• Bathroom Stall Graffiti: The meatpacking plant's bathroom is covered in graffiti, such as "I Told You Not To Use The Shitter, Broseph", "Stop Shitting In The Sink", and "Don't Shit In The Shower Anymore Bro!"
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: Much like the Verlac clan from Anchorhead, the Cragne lineage is very long and frequently very occult.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall:
  • The sentient journal in the mausoleum tries to convince you that life is meaningless and forgettable. It calls you out for wasting time playing the game, and even sends you back to the beginning. The text narration says that you spend hours retracing your steps and wind up back there (in reality, you don't actually have to do anything).
  • The padded cell room makes multiple notes that the author is unaware of what could have happened in other rooms, and hopes that it doesn't go against what's happened earlier.
  • You can't go into the forest in the Cambrian era because there's tardigrades. It says, "Have you even *seen* a tardigrade? Go google it, I'll wait" and pauses itself. When you continue, it says "Yeah I didn't think so."
  • One room on the second floor of the manor is stylized in the form of Inform 7 code itself.
  • The lab says that the author doesn't know if there was a tower described on the manor before, but if it was, then there's where you are right now.
• Breather Episode:
  • Finding one of the library books requires you to break into a mausoleum and fight off a journal that claims nobody will remember you after your death. Compared to that, Bethany's real estate office is a way more lighthearted segment. You are insistent on stealing Erotic Literature for some reason, and do so by having Bethany take out folders on various places in Backwater, most having silly or entertaining backstories.
  • After the harrowing scenes in the cemetery and underground, Cragne Manor has two pretty silly rooms if you go west of the entrance. Both the gallery and the rec room have a fair amount of jokes (such as your fortune, which reads "beware the updog", or getting to watch classic Sesame Street on TV). It's a much-needed break before the music room, which is very dark and loaded with Nightmare Fuel.
• Bring My Brown Pants: The sight of a horrifying boneless horse running at Naomi causes her to (slightly) piss herself, as noted if you attempt to use the bathroom after escaping it.
• Cheerful Child: Zigzagged with Carol, a young girl who lives in Cragne Manor. She is very affectionate towards her "Aunt Naomi", holding a pretend tea party. The two of them joke around and have fun, and Naomi is notably refreshed by spending time with her. However, Carol owns a collection of Creepy Dolls (including the particularly horrible "Malice the Clown") and a scrapbook of highly disturbing images.
• Colourful Theme Naming: The positions of the Aldermen of the Variegated Court are all named after archaic colors. For example, Mazarine is a shade of blue, while Fuscous is a combination of colors averaging out to a brownish gray.
• The Computer Shall Taunt You: The room narration in the study will repeatedly insult you, questioning why someone so crude and simplistic would venture into such a high-minded room. Once you find the key in it, it tells you to just get out because it's probably the only reason why you were there.
• Content Warnings: The game begins on one. It then asks you if you really want to play; if you say no, it says "We respect your decision! Have a great day." and closes out of the game.
  Welcome to Cragne Manor! Before we begin, we want to make sure you really understand what you’re getting yourself into...
  
  CONTENT WARNING
  
  Please be warned that this game contains:
  
  cosmic horror, body horror, psychological horror, gore, violence, murder, death, self-harm, suicide, mutilation, decapitation, racism, spiders, snakes, rats, aggressive birds, deceased animals, insects, incest, nonexplicit references to uncomfortable sexual situations involving minors, abusive relationships, domestic violence, pregnancy loss, ghosts, mental illness, homelessness, alcoholism, oppressive religious organizations, bullying, kidnapping, hostile vegetation, fungal overgrowth, creepy dolls, creepy children, references to human/anthropomorphic animal sex, eyeball contact, scatological references, strong language, virgin sacrifice, demon summoning, demon possession, blood, skeletons, viscera, infectious disease...
  
  ...and possibly several other types of disturbing content we forgot to include.
• Conveniently Interrupted Document: Parodied. Everything in the bathroom that Ed has handled is covered with inconvenient stains from condiments. The transcript for the scroll ends up looking like "Edward, this is VERY important! You must [ketchup stain] the [mustard] or else [mayo]! This is very important!! You must [more mayo]!!" Naomi expresses frustration when it happens: "Son of a bitch, was Ed eating a fucking hamburger over this ancient magic scroll?"
• Creepy Doll: Alongside the train station is a two-faced doll, with one face scowling. It has a pull-string speaker, saying ominous messages such as "Shun the town! Grey is the tint of that which is already beyond recovery! Brown is the hue of decay!"
• Cruelty Is the Only Option: You have to put the dying crawfish out of its misery by smashing it with a rock, since its shell is used in a puzzle.
• Cuckoo Clock Gag: There is a round white plastic wall clock that doesn’t look like a cuckoo clock at all, but on the hour, a spectral cuckoo appears and announces the time.
• Depending on the Writer: Specific details of locations can vary from room to room. For example, the outside of the train station says it has no windows, but when you step inside, there are windows you can clean and look through. The church is supposed to be made of stone, but when you look at it from the graveyard, it's made of wood.
• Developer's Foresight: When you're in the meatpacking plant's bathroom, the game gives specific responses calling you out for wherever you decide to pee, such as in the sink, on the magazine, or on the stall door.
• Does Not Like Spam: Bethany hates tuna fish, describing it as "like doing mouth-based sex favors for the friggin' ocean."
• Doorstopper: The game has over 500,000 words total — on par with War and Peace.
• Ear Worm: One of the more surreal puzzles in the game involves you knocking down a shack, then an earworm of "Tubthumping" getting stuck in your head. You can sing along to the song, and the lyrics get progressively corrupted and disturbing. Since the earworm is only imaginary, to get rid of it, you can sever its ties to your brain with an imaginary knife you find elsewhere in the area.
• Erotic Literature: An early puzzle has you attempting to steal a Romance Novel referred to, at all times, as "the lion sex book."
• Fictional Zodiac: There are 25,600 possible star signs, such as Tendril in Stasis in the House of the Noose, or Despair Ascending Above the Penitent.
• Game Within a Game:
  • One of the rooms contains a miniature adaptation of Andrew Plotkin's Hadean Lands.
  • And one of the books contains a perspective-flipped adaptation of Hunt the Wumpus.
• Hand Wave: Parodied when you get the melted wax. A footnote explains that you can try sculpting it into whatever you want, but sometimes it won't work because Naomi is a "pretty shitty sculptor". It claims that her lack of sculpting talent is directly responsible to her marriage for Peter, and that it's an interesting story, but too long for the game to explain.
• Haunted House Historian: Bethany, the real estate agent, has near-bottomless info on the lore of the town and its past.
• Hint System:
  • You can find an item almost mandatory to get your bearings: a coffee cup with clouds within that can divine whether the puzzle in any given room is currently solvable.
  • On a smaller scale, the rooms with Christabell and Carol let you get hints. They're encrypted with a letter-shift cypher, but the game tells you what it is and gives it a way to solve it.
• In-Game Novel: Most notable is Konstantin T. Cragne's diary. It's over 20 pages long, and most of them are an entire page's worth of text.
• Item Get!: A unique one. After stealing the book from Bethany, the text "Lion sex book GET.", surrounded by tildes, appears at the bottom of the screen.
• It's for a Book: If you ask Bethany why she has the "lion sex book", she tells you it might give her a hint as to the history of the author's disappearance, even though she feels it's unlikely. But she does admit that the lion sex is well-written. If you read it, too, you can have a conversation with her about it.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • Examining yourself in the railway station brings up the text "You feel uncertain and disoriented, as if you are not quite real. Are you real? Maybe you're a fictional character in a text adventure."
  • After you confess your Accidental Murder to Bethany, she agrees to continue like this never happened, "as though this moment we just shared was an unsettable flag in an adventure game."
• Lock and Key Puzzle: Many puzzles in the game involve finding keys to open boxes or doors. Sometimes they're for items in the same room, while other ones have to be brought across the game. Your backpack has a dedicated "key pocket" for storing them.
• Lovecraft Lite: The nature of the game prevents it from plunging fully into bleak Cosmic Horror Story.
• Mood Whiplash: To be expected with 80 writers, all working independently; cosmic horror, fiddly puzzles, wacky hijinks, and sweet scenes are often steps from one another.
• Mondegreen Gag: Carol, as a young child, is unable to pronounce "chrysanthemum tea". She calls it "crisp hand sew mom", and Naomi corrects her.
• Mr. Exposition: Bethany is more than happy to provide as many lore infodumps as you could possibly want.
  Bethany: I'm supposed to practice getting consent before quote-unquote talking people's ears off. People care an awful lot about their ears around here, if you ask me.
• Never Needs Sharpening: A house that's sank half underwater is advertised with the upside of being able to trawl for crawfish from your living room.
• Noodle Incident:
  • The library's schedule specifically notes that no guns are allowed when they meet to cross-stitch on Wednesdays.
  • Past incidents you and Peter escaped from involved a vampire yacht, a sentient wax museum, and a guy with drills for hands. None of these are elaborated on.
  • If Naomi examines herself in the meatpacking plant's bathroom, it's mentioned that she's insecure about her knees being different sizes because she once dated a knee fetishist in college after Peter dumped her.
  • The meatpacking plant's bathroom also mentions that Naomi has two uncles: a plumber, and one who went to prison (although we don't know for what).
• Nothing Is Scarier: You can read an Apocalyptic Log by the creator of a creepy clockwork doll. It describes the creator's fears that the doll is sentient and it can see and hear him. The last page says "I think I've managed to lock her safely away. I only hope tha—" before the writing becomes unintelligible, and all that follows is dried blood.
• Not the Intended Use: The Creepy Doll you find early on is used in a small puzzle that can be solved quickly. However, some players kept it around because its dialogue mentions adjectives and objects in the room, which includes things they might have overlooked at first.
• Our Slogan Is Terrible: According to Bethany, the slogan of Backwater is "Backwater: You Get Used To It."
• Overly Long Gag: The rec room has you repeatedly identifying pieces of board games and needing to dig up the game they came from to find a relevant item.
• The Paranoiac: The scene under the bridge writes Naomi as notably more paranoid than other rooms. She's hesitant to reach her hand into the return slot (reassuring herself that there is definitely not a tooth in there) and won't open the rusty hatch for fear of getting tetanus.
• Parody Product Placement: The backpack you use is a Jansport "NEW 1998 Urban Adventurer Streetwarrior TRIPLE-REINFORCED Lifestyle Management System" one, it's specifically noted that you love it for its easy-to-use features. In the inventory, it's abbreviated as "Jansport backpack".
• Pathetically Weak: Naomi, as explained when she tries to take the bell out of a phonograph.
  It's heavy and you have tiny baby-person arms. Seriously they're like angel hair pasta. You tried to do a bicep curl once and your elbow folded the wrong way, and you weren't even holding a weight.
• The Place: Cragne Manor is a major location in the game, although you won't actually reach it until a few hours of gameplay.
• Precision F-Strike: When you skip a rock into a river, it results in a mysterious, octopus-like being pulling you underwater, giving you a silver chain, and then returning you. The protagonist is so horrified by the experience that trying to skip another rock will have them refuse, the text saying "There is absolutely no fucking way you will try skipping stones again. Ever."
• Press Start to Game Over: It's possible to die in the first room of the game. All you have to do is lay down on the train tracks and wait, which gets you run over by a passing train.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: After the bathroom gets destroyed by the boneless horse getting flushed down the portal toilet, the game asserts, "Perfectly. Normal. Bathroom."
• Rapid-Fire "No!": An article on how to imbue a Teddy Ruxpin doll with a demonic spirit is quickly cut off by the narrator going "nope nope nope".
• Reading Tea Leaves: The murky clouds of cream in the coffee cup will take on different shapes every time you look at it, such as botanical images or modes of transportation. This has a function as the game's Hint System, with the symbol telling you if you've done everything in the room, if you have everything you need to solve it, or if you need to go somewhere else.
• Reality Is Out to Lunch: In Backwater, the rules of reality aren't consistent between one location and the next.
• Riddling Sphinx: Discussed by Bethany. She visited a desert house that had two sphynxes in it. She gets along great with one, but the other one is mad at her because she solved all its riddles in three minutes. Bethany offered to help it come up with new ones, but now it just rolls its eyes at her and makes fart noises when she tries to talk to it.
• Round Robin: The game is a collaboration between over 80 Interactive Fiction authors. Each author was assigned to write a room on their own, with basic information of what their room was and how it would fit into the game, but they didn't know what would be going on in anyone else's rooms.
• Running Gag:
  • As you discover more horrifying stuff in the meatpacking plant's bathroom, the game will remind you that it's a "perfectly normal bathroom".
  • As a Shout-Out to The Lurking Horror II: The Lurkening, the name "Vaadignephod" pops up a lot, mostly on graffiti.
• Scary Librarian: This is a Lovecraftian horror game in which the player is trying to find and return a set of library books. Of course there’s a scary librarian.
• Secret Circle of Secrets: Throughout the game, you learn about a secret society known as the Variegated Court: twelve aldermen, each with a history and a familiar.
• Sexy Discretion Shot: Twin Hearts Beneath the Planes quickly requires one of these. As you read the book, the snippets get progressively shorter, until you reach the supposed sex scene:
  The next approximately eighty-seven pages are all lion sex. All of them. All of it.
• Shout-Out:
  • Bethany references the Breakaway Advertisementinvoked for Reese's Peanut Butter Cups when talking about a house. She mentions that it's like that, but with a house being mostly underwater and it's disgusting and bad instead of delicious.
  • Bethany also quotes the "like tears in rain" line from Blade Runner.
  • The painting of the meat in the gallery is captioned "steamed meats" (using an old-timey letter S that looks like an F). The narration mentions that, despite this, they're obviously grilled.
  • You can watch 70s Sesame Street on the TV in the rec room. It mentions Big Bird, Snuffy, and "that cool pinball animation", along with quoting the theme song. Commercials mentioned include the "Little Mikey" one for Life cereal, Alka-Seltzer's "I can't believe I ate the whole thing", the Charmin ads with Mr. Whipple, and Orson Welles' "sell no wine before its time" commercial.
  • Naomi bids farewell to Christabell by saying "May the Force be with you!"
  • Naomi is reminded of This Old House when exploring the stairwell in Cragne Manor.
  • Dr. Peanut, the scientist hamster who studies peanuts, is a character from the Hamtaro game Rainbow Rescue.
  • One of the books smells “like cocktail wieners soaked in urine”, a nod to Jenni Polodna’s Pissy Little Sausages blog of interactive fiction reviews.
  • The Chapel gives us two The Simpsons references: the lockbox says "The Al-ighty Ollar", which is the MAD fold-in that Homer messes up in "Team Homer". One of the limericks is described as "filthy, but genuinely arousing", which is a line from Mrs. Glick while watching TV in "Three Men and a Comic Book".
• Shady Real Estate Agent: Subverted. Despite the kind of town Backwater is, and the pamphlets you find that try to pass off flaws that make the houses clearly unlivable as upsides, Bethany gives completely accurate descriptions of the houses. While she has to sell them for her job, she's not above admitting that they're terrible once she gets to know you more.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: Bethany is supposed to lie to sell houses, but she tends to comically mess it up. For instance, she lets it slip that something terrible happened in a house, and they had to change the floors. Then she asks if you want to hear about buildings where a bunch of faceless bodies weren't discovered.
• Time Travel: Depending on the candle you put on the pentagram, the toilet in the bathroom takes you somewhere else when you flush it. You'll either end up in space in the far future, or in the Cambrian era. Exploration is limited; you don't want to go too far into space, and the Cambrian era is full of ungodly monsters.
• Unscrewed Salt Shaker: A clipping near the library has a child saying that his uncle taught him to unscrew the salt shaker so people get too much salt on their food. The kid finds it amusing, so he starts putting laundry detergent and broken glass in the shaker instead.
• Unfortunate Names: Parodied. A book by the Hillbilly Bathroom Laughter Press, called The Book of Unfortunate Baby Names, lists some unfortunate names that "real bad parents" gave their kids: John Poopnazi, Flossie Candyass, Elizabeth Dicksmith, and Poonpounder H. Washington Jones. Naomi admits that they're pretty bad.
• Wide-Open Sandbox: While there are items required to progress through the manor and town, the game is fairly non-linear. The creators likened it to a Metroidvania in text-adventure form.
• Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe: Christabell's speaking style consists of butchered old English — words are misspelled, and nouns are randomly capitalized, such as "Deathe", "Seight", and "Towne".
  Christabell: I do thank you for diverting summe Houres with mee in Discourse sweet. I do entreat you return upon your Convenience that we may again share some Werdes.
• Zip Mode: Reading the lion sex book and solving the cipher gives you access to a command you can use to open up a fast travel system. It makes use of the train stations; you have a schedule where colors correspond to different locations, and from most available places, you can type "wait for [color] station" to instantly go there.

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