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One of the most memorable ASCII games of the bygone BSS era, Castle Adventure
is a fun parser-based maze adventure designed by Kevin Bales, and later released
("stolen" in fact) by Keypunch as part of their Swords and Sorcery package under the
title Golden Wombat. Similar
to Atari's Adventure and many other early adventure/RPGs, your objective in the game
is to collect all valuables and complete all tasks. A perfect score is 1,550 points,
but it is possible to finish the game with lower score. Although the game looks like
a very out of date title, with ASCII characters and simplistic gameplay, it's actually
both more memorable and deeper than most ASCII games. For starter, room descriptions
are quite detailed and well-written. Second, the game is played in real time, which
means monsters will not wait for you to type something before they attack. This makes
fighting appropriately exciting. Lastly, the game is much deeper than most other maze
games because it has puzzles. These require you to type the right commands into the
parser, like in a typical text adventure, such as "show cross to vampire." Although
most puzzles are obvious, there are some obscure ones that will stump you for some
time. In a nod to RPG genre, you can only carry a limited number of items at any
given time. |