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 sometime after February 1997... around three months after the game was released. Hm.

The only available copy of this demo is its digital contents, which have an unknown origin - likely taken from some shareware shovelware compilation CD from the late 90's. It's possible (though unconfirmed) that it had a physical release much like I. M. Meen's shareware demo. The files of this copy of the demo were last modified on February 2nd, 1997, almost six months after the final game was built. It's possible that these February dates were made when the demo was copied over, and that it actually had an earlier release.

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 that there are no physical copies or uploads apart from one on the Internet Archive, 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.