Return to Castle Coris by Larry Horsfield
Ok lengthy parser game time! I went into this game with some trepidation. Would I manage the online ADRIFT play system ok? As a Mac user I can’t run ADRIFT games offline at the moment. Also it’s game 8 in a series and I hadn’t played the earlier ones!
Fortunately things went better than feared. I used the large font version supplied at the ADRIFT site - thanks for that. The online play never seized up on me, although I was saving frequently, in case I died - yes that happened! - and needed to restore.
The game is fun. It’s very much an old-style parser game, a very traditional text adventure. It is slightly unforgiving in the parser, but not as bad as I expected. Most of the time I was perfectly fine. My only recurring hitch was the commands to use with the grapple hook and rope. Also with containers that I was carrying I was a bit thrown that INVENTORY didn’t show their contents, and that EXAMINE and SEARCH on them gave different results. I did learn to use EXAMINE and SEARCH a lot.
The game world is rich, and I only got a bit over halfway into the story in my 2 hours play. The game starts as a dungeon crawl, but contains much more variety. It also has some nicely realised NPCs. I particularly liked my encounter with some goblins.
My main recommendation to the author would be to provide a little more clueing re some of the puzzles in-game. There were a few cases where I needed to do something that wasn’t apparent enough in the location. There’s a balance to be struck in terms of too easy versus too hard, but I think a few more in-game clues would be helpful and give the game itself more polish.
So yup, I couldn’t play through fully in the time I had. And for a few commands I needed to resort to the walkthrough. But generally it was a smooth, rewarding and fun experience, which I would recommend. Thanks again for the large font version.