Colonel's Bequest

The Colonel's Bequest uses Sierra's Creative Interpreter (SCI), providing 320x200 16-color EGA graphics and supports a variety of sound hardware, including AdLib, Sound Blaster, and Roland MT-32. Along with King's Quest IV, the game was one of Sierra's last to use a text parser, before their transition to VGA graphics and point and click gameplay.

This was also one of the few Sierra adventure games to focus more on the characters than puzzles. Although solving puzzles is required to obtain a high score, it is possible to discover information about the characters' backgrounds and relationships with each other. Regardless of the importance of these elements, it is possible to finish the game without solving any puzzles, discovering many vital details about the characters, or even identifying the murderer.

The Colonel's Bequest is set in 1925. The game's main character is Laura Bow, a Tulane University student, daughter of a detective, and an aspiring journalist. Laura is invited by her flapper friend, Lillian, to spend a weekend at the decaying sugar plantation of Colonel Dijon. When the reclusive and childless Colonel gathers his quarrelsome relatives for a reading of his will, tensions explode, and the bickering leads to murder.

Throughout the game, Laura remains stranded on the island, surrounded by suspects and potential victims in a classical Agatha Christie manner. Laura's task is to learn the family secrets and ultimately, the identity of the murderer. There is also an optional subplot concerning a hidden treasure. The storyline advances by a quarter-hour when new plot elements are witnessed, with a new act beginning every hour. Sometimes a quarter-hour can advance in a few real-time seconds, if Laura happens to be at the proper place.

Upon release, The Colonel's Bequest received positive reviews. Johnny L. Wilson from Computer Gaming World opined the game's lack of difficulty would likely disappoint "hard-core adventure gamers (i.e. inveterate puzzle-solvers)" but it succeeded as an "interactive play" that was much more story- than puzzle-driven compared to previous Sierra adventures. He praised the game's use of humor and audio, and called it a "forerunner of one style of future entertainment software".

In the May 1990 edition of Games International, Theo Clarke called the game "solid genre stuff", noting that "the theme reverts to the 'mansion murder' concept of [Roberta Williams' first program] Mystery House". He commented on the radical new approach this game takes, wherein the player has the option of not taking any action except to observe, saying: "Such an approach is not very rewarding, but it serves to demonstrate the essential difference between this and other games". Clarke concluded by giving the game an above-average rating of 8 out of 10 for both gameplay and graphics: "I have found all of the Sierra games quite obsessive but The Colonel's Bequest has a charm all of its own".