Eric Toth's Inheritance is a throwback of sorts: it's a house filled with puzzles for the sake of puzzles, puzzles for their own sake rather than for the purpose of a story. While there's an ostensible plot, it doesn't really have much to do with the action besides providing an excuse for the puzzles. On the other hand, several of the puzzles are very clever indeed, and the whole thing is solidly done.

It seems that your rich uncle has asked you to come to his mansion to discuss your inheritance, so here you are-- the trick is finding your uncle, who doesn't seem to be around. The mansion is crammed with strange puzzles, though, as noted, and as you might guess, solving enough of them entitles you to fabulous wealth. And off you go, solving puzzles, and eventually you reach the end. The puzzles themselves vary--some are a bit obscure, but all are logical and some are rather ingenious; one relies on an object that the room description seems to dismiss as unimportant, and another suggests that there's a way to manipulate it that doesn't in fact work, but there are worse sins, I suppose. The plot itself hinges on a series of shapes you pick up here and there--plastic circles and squares and such--which go into an device with appropriately shaped slots. There are very few surprises along the way, really--just puzzles. They're not bad puzzles at all, really; several of them span multiple rooms in reasonably creative ways. But they're puzzles for their own sake.

The various elements of Inheritance hang together quite well. There are no bugs to speak of, and the few misleading responses aren't game-killers. A few objects go underdescribed, and one puzzle is a bit contrived, but the game design, while not incredibly innovative, is quite adequate for the job. The writing, likewise, is unremarkable but competent; I didn't see any errors or awkward phrasing. (You may miss the final bit of text, however, because the game kicks you straight out to the DOS prompt when you reach it. Play Inheritance from DOS rather than from a window, in other words.) There are attempts at cobbling together a story of sorts--one significant object is described as a gift from your uncle that doesn't really fit, another is identified as incongruous in another respect--but the bits don't add up to a story.

There's not much inherently wrong with Inheritance, really, other than the point when it appeared, namely late 1999--as all-puzzle, minimal-story games are hardly in vogue these days. The puzzles would have to be impressive indeed for such a game to be received well--see Erehwon for a puzzle-driven game whose puzzles were good enough to make up for the lack of plot--and while Inheritance's puzzles aren't buggy, they're not all that original either. The shift toward the fiction aspect of IF has raised the playing population's standards regarding what works as a game, and even the most skillfully done crossword will get a tepid response if the narrative doesn't justify it. Here, I'm afraid, the narrative doesn't do much more than provide an excuse for the setting.

Nostalgic fans of IF--those who first encountered IF when story was subordinate to puzzles--may well enjoy Inheritance--it's a solid example of its type. But IF as it has come to be known rarely works this way, I'm afraid.