I think you summed it up nicely. I thought the puzzles were quite spread out, considering the scope of the landscape. It did feel a lot like ADVENTURE, except with a vampire theme in the first part of the game. There was a lot of guess-the-verb and some illogical stuff. From the cyclops onwards, it was just plain silly. However, that was compensated for by a couple of clever puzzles.
The end game was particularly mean. For anyone else reading this, make sure you save the game when the elevator breaks down.
I’ve done a breakdown of the scoring in case anyone’s interested. It’s extremely complex and could have been simplified a lot, particularly towards the end.
Arthur O’Dwyer has made a couple of blog posts about Castlequest. Especially the last one could be useful for those of you that make their own adaptation.
The downloads sidebar says you need an interpreter to play. That’s not accurate, is it? You can run the executable directly in whichever OS it was compiled for.
Thanks for the update. It makes interesting reading.
Regarding the kitchen door, there is definitely a bug in the original game. Arthur O’Dwyer observed that he could unlock the door with the key even though it was boarded up, whereas I didn’t have the key, dropped the hatchet, chopped the boards with my bare hands and didn’t unlock the door at all. I just double-checked:
>DROP HATCHET
OK
>UNLOCK DOOR
I'm afraid you don't have the key.
>CHOP BOARDS
The door can now be opened.
>OPEN DOOR
The door opens to a brick wall.
The game is chock full of bugs like this. I’m fixing them as I go in my Inform 6 port.
The system it was written for almost certainly didn’t have the concept of upper and lower case - uppercase would be all there was. Those were the days, etc. etc.
The hatchet need to be in the room, though. I havn’t looked this up in the code recently but in my recollection the game only cares if the object is in the room. It doesn’t care if you’re carrying it or if it’s lying on the floor.
That you can unlock the kitchen door with the key even though it’s boarded up fells to me like an original bug. It’s hard to say but I think the intended action is to BREAK or CHOP the door with the hatchet.
As I hinted at an Inform 6 port earlier, I thought I should give an update.
I’ve done an enhanced version in Inform 6. By ‘enhanced’, I mean fixing all the bugs, full sentence parser, ability to examine objects (including scenery), proper doors and containers, support for UNDO, ability to save and restore from within the game and so on.
The puzzles, scoring, wandering monsters, resurrection and the bulk of the original text are maintained, although there’s a few things that I may still change. For example, the resurrection seems pretty pointless, as you can only be resurrected twice and each time you’re resurrected, your belongings are scattered at random. Because of the resurrection mechanism, you can’t undo on death. Personally, I’d prefer the undo, as you get killed a lot in this game and resurrection costs you 10 points.
I’d also like to improve the hint system to ‘smart’ hints. The current system is quite cumbersome and costs you 5 points per hint, but the hint might tell you something that you’ve already done.
The enhancements aren’t finished yet and it hasn’t been tested. I’ve had to put it on hold for a few months because of various game jams and competitions, but I’ll try to get back to it later this year. As the port is 40 years overdue, I didn’t think a few extra months would matter.
As this is a derivative work, I’ll also have to make some enquires about permissions and so on, so as not to upset the original authors.
You can also unlock this door with the skeleton key. One funny is if you f**k the butler. And a bug I have found (among many others) is that the crawlway in the attic randomly locks itself again (unless Count Vladimir rises randomly to relock it). Likewise the first combination entered on the lock always replies along the lines that you have screwed up and need to restart. However if you enter the first combination for a second time the parser response is ok.
I have found another nasty way to make the game unwinnable. I filled the lamp with the fuel in the kerosene can when I found the latter, perhaps foolishly thinking the lantern was empty… In fact the lantern is already full and all this does is empty the can so you can’t use it to refill the lantern when it becomes empty later on in the game. Adding the fuel to the already full can doesn’t increase the light timer so you have effectively locked yourself out of victory as you will run out of fuel before you have finished the game. It would have helped if the lantern had been desribed as “full” given that the game doesn’t understand the EXAMINE verb.
I have all ten treasures safely ensconced in the vault but going up doesn’t cause the elevator to become stuck. I have 255 points so I am not sure what I have missed.
