Skullduggery is a classic text adventure, set on the southeast coast of eighteenth-century England. During this period smuggling goods into England was a common enterprise; necessitated primarily by the King’s tax on imports. Indeed, it was a rare family who did not participate in the smuggler's business at some time.
In this particular adventure a member of the Royal Family Leominster, William the Wildheart, was heavily involved in the business of smuggling. However, at some point in his career he was caught and turned-in by his family. As a result of his family's betrayal, William was found guilty and executed.
Although dead, William's hate was intense and it prompted his return as a ghost. Also, William had hidden a massive treasure which his family coveted greedily, and which he desired to keep for himself. (Who said you can't take it with you?)
As an angry spirit, William wanted desperately to make his family pay for their sins while protecting his treasure against any and all intruders. To this end, William will unmercifully torture any individual who enters his domain.
Skullduggery was originally developed in 'C' for the Apple II series computers in 1986, executing in 64K of memory.
The program was also ported to PC-compatible (MS-DOS) computers in 1988/1989.
[+] Users who have solved this game
[+] Users currently playing this game
All was proceeding well until I attempted to save a game state withing DOSBox-X; upon restoring the saved game the program crashes at the next parse with an ERROR 9 message. This appears to happen regardless of game state when the saved position was created. Using the program itself to SAVE doesn't seem to have this problem. The drawback here is you can only create one save which is subsequently overwritten. Oddly DOSBox-X complains of a type mismatch error but the same version is used to save and restore. Rarely have I had any problems using the DOSBox-X emulator.
That caveat aside it appears to be a rather well-written piece of revenge horror.
Oddly I have upgraded DOSBox-X to 2025.05.03 and the error message has not reappeared. This is distinctly odd as no other game has exhibited such a save/restore position problem.
The game itself is very well-written and looks to be exceedingly large. There are two versions out there; the newer one has a 41kb executable and a date of 01/10/89. The older one is 40kb in size and has a date of 07/05/1989. The newer version is, of course the one to use as the author writes in the accompanying skull.doc file that some bugs were ironed out in the later release.
I have made steady progress in this epic (26 chapters!) but I have encountered a note in a bottle that cannot be disambiguated from another note in the game. It appears that the bottled note cannot be removed from the said container in any way and the bottle cannot be broken. There is another note in the game which isn't inside a container which can be referred to as the butler's note. Unless there is some strange and hitherto unencountered way of extricating the first note it is to be hoped that it doesn't contain any information vital to the game's completion.
If anyone plays this game here is an important heads up; do not take the butler's note before you have found the note in the bottle and taken and read the latter. If you do take the first note you can never remove the note in the bottle and read it as the game thinks you mean the first one. This happens even if you get rid of the butler's note.
Correction - the game allows ten saved game slots internally, not one (0-9). You are still better using DOSBox-X however.
This game has proven to be head-bashingly difficult. There are a number of secret passages and several documents of one sort or another carrying information about the Leominster/Brady families but after carting various corpses around and either laying them to rest in their tombs, placing them on a ouija board (which I think is some sort of platform) or slaying them vampirically and taking their blood I am somewhat at a loss as to what to do. You can kill yourself but the ferryman wants something from you and you always seem to lose your inventory post mortem. There are also nine ingredients to collect for a potion but I have levelled out at six at the moment.