I hadn’t checked the percentages, but that looks right. In plain English, if you haven’t killed the count, you have a 20% chance of going to rooms 9, 15 or 28. If you have killed the count, you have a 20% chance of going to room 2. I hate random things in adventures.
The other maze is a pain.
Oh, there’s another maze…I havn’t even found the count yet.
Sorry, I assumed you had found him. Have you found your way into the attic yet?
Yes, but not the combination.
Get your trusty hatchet, go to the kitchen and try to go east. You’ll see that something is blocking your way. This is where the hatchet will come in handy.
I was just trying that in this very moment… 
Damn. I just got killed by the gnome. You can shoot it, but you can’t recover the bullet like you can with the werewolf. (I hate all these recurring protagonists.) I suspect you need the hatchet, but I didn’t have it with me. Time to call it a night and continue tomorrow.
Has anyone finished yet? I found all the treasures and got stuck in the elevator (which is what’s supposed to happen), but couldn’t work out what to do next. I know there’s more, but the bloody thing just closed on me without warning. It does that a lot.
I’m a bit behind you, got 155 (of 300) pts at the moment and have just finished the second maze.
Are you running directly from Windows or from a command prompt? If you open a command prompt and run the game from there you can see the last message before the window closes.
I’m starting this morning on my Rust translation.
Of course. I normally double-click on the exe. I’ve just written a little batch file with a pause, so I can double-click on that and see the end game messages.
Finished!
You feel the elevator jump as you are wisked up towards
ground level. You emerge in the open air in the village
square amidst cheers from the local villagers. Banners
proclaiming the death of count Vladimir hang from most
of the old buildings around the square. The mayor
presents you with a key to the city and makes your
birthday a holiday. You watch the sun rise as you
bask in your newfound fame.
You scored 300 out of 300 points.
This qualifies you as a "CLASS A" MASTER!
The vocabulary is certainly limited. You need to use THROW and WAVE in many places when the parser don’t understand more suitable verbs.
Both the end game and “the last lousy point” are not very logical and I had to look at the code to solve them. (You use BREAK DOOR when the elevator gets stuck between floors and you need to WAVE HATCHET to get the clues for the last verb. The “last lousy point” is earned when dropping the empty bottle on the island.)
The light source is also a bit limited and to earn max score you need to solve the game in under 250 moves.
The game borrows heavily from both ADVENTURE and ZORK and in places makes a Scott Adams game seem polished. But despite this I found that the game is quite charming and in my opinion have a good balance between the above/below ground parts.
Congratulations!
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.
I also have a scoring breakdown + map in Trizbort if anyone is interested.
I’ve rebuilt the Windows executable again with Arthur’s latest “patches” branch, and the executable is now here: https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/pc/Castlequest.zip
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.
He also made a walkthru for optimal score.
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.
Hah! I just downloaded the Windows executable from IFDB. Starts up fine.
-Would you like instructions?
->y
-Please answer YES or NO
->yes
-Please answer YES or NO
->YES
[introduction and instructions follow]
This game is so oldschool it demands you to type in ALL_CAPS.