Chill Manor - Shareware Demo

Being a properly-published DOS game that was released in the mid-1990s, Chill Manor was bound to have a shareware or demo version featuring a small snippet of its gameplay. And it did; a two-level sampler was released on the demo disc of the April 1997 issue of PC Gamer... around six months after the game released. Hm.

It's possible (though unconfirmed) that it had an earlier physical release much like I. M. Meen's shareware demo, and that the PC Gamer disc is the only available version of the demo. The demo itself is dated to February 1997, which may indicate that it was copied at that time for the demo disc...

Much like the I. M. Meen sampler, the Chill Manor demo is essentially a stripped-down version of the final game with only two levels; Level 1 (The Hall of the Ancients) and Level 12 (The Hall of New Horizons). While Level 1 is identical to its final counterpart, Level 12 adds six Rubies of Courage to the starting area to make its opening section easier. This can be seen in the first image. After beating Level 2/Level 12, the game cuts to credits with two additional sell screens for the full game and the Action Learning series (pictured below), before quitting to the DOS prompt.

Fun fact: The title key for Chill Manor is wrong! It's actually 401133, and the 1 at the end likely came from I. M. Meen's key.

Given the demo's apparent scarcity (only two uploads with it as of writing), I've decided to host a backup copy of Chill Manor's free sampler demo:

Download the shareware demo here!

For the record, you can't load a demo save of Level 2/Level 12 into the full version of Chill Manor and get a glitched Level 2. The game will just crash after the title card fades out.