Walkthrough for Castaway by Keith Parrock Written by Richard Bos First, a few notes. To start with, Castaway is a game for the ZX Spectrum written in Basic. It was published in Micro Adventurer in January and February of 1984. It's written using the system expounded in Melbourne House's book Over the Spectrum, which isn't very good; to be completely honest, it's poor indeed. Castaway can't actually be called good, either, but given its inheritance, it's certainly not as bad as it could have been. As for plot, well, it's a plain old treasure hunt. It may call its treasure "equipment", but you have to collect them all and drop them off at the collection point. If that's not a treasure hunt, I'm a Dutchman. Synonyms are, well, absent. You can't use "get"; it's "take" or nothing. On the up side, you can abbreviate words to as many letters as are needed to distinguish them from others. Objects need to be referred to by their first word; Castaway has been designed to make this mostly not a problem. Inherent in the system employed is combat with monsters. You need weapons to fight monsters; in a rather D&D-ish style, each monster and each weapon has a point value, and the rest depends on RND. Here, too, Castaway has worked around the problem by ignoring it; there are monsters which you can't fight with any weapon, but most monsters can be killed with any weapon, and the strongest weapon, which will kill any monster which can be fought at all, is found quite near the start - the text below takes it and never looks at another. Obviously, since this is a walkthrough, spoilers - such as they are - are rife below. There is a help command; it isn't particularly helpful, but you might try it anyway. If you can get hold of the original magazine (there are scans available on the 'net, on World of Spectrum for one), the first part includes a list of the verbs the game understands. Take the flare. For some reason you need this to be allowed to walk around. Don't drop it until the end of the game - in particular, don't drop it here! Go north and west, take the spade, south, west and south, dig, take the key and drop the spade. North, west and south. Take the spear. Go west twice, south, east twice, north and east. Reveal. This command is in the introduction to the listing, so fair enough; but how you're expected to know to use it here, I have no idea. Take the staysail. Go west, south thrice and east. Kill the lizard. You'll be asked by what means; answer spear. Take the battery. Go north twice, west, north, east four times, north, south, west and south. Drop the battery and staysail. Note that all pieces of equipment vanish - and your flare is also equipment, so if you drop it here, you can't move! Nasty... Go south twice and east twice. Unlock the door, drop the key and go north. Take the air tank and chart. Go south, west twice and north. Dive, take the compass and dive again. Go north, and drop the air tank, compass and chart. Go south thrice and east twice, take the crowbar, and go south, west, south, east twice, south twice and east. Break the chest, then drop the crowbar and take the pump and wetsuit. Go west and south, pray, and take the dinghy. Next go south, west, east and north. Kill the diplodocus (with the spear again - I won't mention this from now on, but use it every time) and take the rudder. East, north twice, east and south, kill the pteranodon (you don't even need the spear for this) and take the mainsail. Then east, north twice, south, west, north, up and down. Drop the pump, wetsuit, dinghy, rudder and mainsail. Now up, east, south, east twice and down; push the door; and down again. Kill the native and take the jib. Go east and take the bucket. Go down twice, kill the rattlesnake and take the chain, up, east and south, kill the vampire bat and take the tiller. North, up twice and south; take the telescope; up, north three times, south, west, north, up and down; and drop the jib, bucket, chain, tiller and telescope. Go up and east, take the rum, and go back up and down. Take the lantern. Go south thrice and east, take the sextant, east twice, take rope, east and south. Rub the lantern, then drop it and go south. Reveal again, and take the pulley. Go east, kill the crocodile, and take the genoa. Go west, north, west, north twice, south, west, and north thrice. Drop the sextant, pulley and genoa. Go up, east, south, east and north twice. Kill the gorilla and take the anchor. Go east twice. Take the halyard and transmitter. Go up, north, east, north, south, west and south. Drop the rope, anchor, halyard and transmitter. And for our last treasures... sorry, equipment: go up, take the machete, go east and south, take the foghorn, and go east and south. Cut the vine and take the canvas. Go back north, west, north, up and down. Drop the foghorn and canvas; and now, at last, drop your trusty (?) flare.