Castle Frankenstein - Review

Potentially a good game, but it has one fault which becomes obvious very quickly: although there are a lot of locations, a high proportion of them are non-functional (and not interestingly described), and you have to do a great deal of trudging about between the ones where you can actually do things. Unusually, you can move about in the dark without any danger, and as a result a minimum-move solution would have to take account of this, resulting in a lot of visits to places you can't see at all. There are no magic words, but on the plus side (for most people) there are no mazes either (although you may think you're in one when you enter the forest). In fact nearly all locations have just two exits, so that the main problem is that the exits are usually not mentioned at all in the description. In terms of the game's plot, you may think it odd that the locals decided you should be the one to kill the monster, but failed to give you any weapons.

One other oddity, which may be regarded as a bug: When you get to the bottom of the pit, you get a message about the giant hand having vanished that was here before, even if this is your first visit. This might be connected with the movement you see on the opposite side of the pit at an earlier point, but it's not very clear.

Parser/Vocabulary (Rating: 3/10)

It's a standard two-word parser, which seems only to recognise the first two or three letters of every word. All necessary commands are easy to carry out, and there is only one point where guess-the-verb would be necessary. However the claim that it understands complete sentences seems to mean that it usually just looks at the first two words and ignores the rest - for example, you can enter TIE ROPE TO AARDVARK and it will ignore the fact that there is no aardvark in the game.

Atmosphere (Rating: 4/10)

Not bad, but would be better if not for all the non-functional locations.

Cruelty (Rating: Tough)

There are a lot of places where you get killed by a particular move, and it is easy to softlock the game if (for example) you buy the wrong item in the shop.

Puzzles (Rating: 2/10)

Not many real puzzles, although one (involving using the rope) is quite clever.

Overall (Rating: 3/10)

It would have been better if a lot of the non-functional locations had been removed.