Sheer Agony

STORY / GAMEPLAY
The Kruwehl family is found dead by mysterious poisoning. And now it's your turn to meet this tragic end. You are a formidable journalist that wrote an article on Kale Kruwehl, the current owner of the "Sheer Agony Manor". And now you regret this article as you can't let yourself die like this. There must be a solution and obviously it lies somewhere inside the huge (and frightening) manor.
The game is based on a well-written mystery scenario but it's a tricky adventure that unfortunately has a few bugs that make the gameplay quite unfair; most of the puzzles can be solved only by luck as there are no hints following the scenario to do it! Also, to investigate a crime scene you need to stand on certain spots of the screen, otherwise you won't be able to continue. Overall, it's a pity such a cool crime scenario to almost be ruined by "buggy" gameplay.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The ST version features nice digitized graphics but limited to only 16 colors (I think it could handle more than its default on-screen palette, as the images are static, and painting programs such as Spectrum512 could easily perform such screens for the ST series). The graphics are sometimes difficult to follow, especially when trying to find objects inside the mansion (the 256-color version for the Atari Falcon works better than that). It looks like the pictures were taken directly from the Falcon version instead of taking new ones to match the ST's lower color palette and thus color image quantization is not very successful in reducing the number of distinct colors the Falcon version has.
The game's sound is nice though, offering some spooky (but not sampled on the ST version) background sounds.