Ratings and Reviews by Trant Heidelstam

This game is probably the most important piece of Italian interactive fiction of the 20th century. It combines a very pleasant atmosphere and humour with various gameplay flaws; which element will prevail in your final judgment depends on your tastes.

The game sets you in the role of an amateur treasure hunter, determined to find the riches of the old Scottish kings. After surviving the failure of your airplane, you end up locked in an old castle. Your goal is now to escape, and maybe plunder some precious objects along the way.

Avventura nel castello goes above and beyond the standards of Italian games of the Eighties. Every room and object gets a short but well-made description, which combine very well to create the overall feeling of a mysterious and haunted place. Death is frequent and expected, but saves are unlimited and the descriptions of the various fatal outcomes are a part of the playing experience. Quoting Jason Dyer (in a different game review), “you just have to approach with the attitude that you’re collecting deaths, like Pokemon”. The benevolently sarcastic narrator will sometimes comment your good and bad ideas with some irony. I liked the little touch of showing one letter at a time during the most thrilling moments, adding to the suspence.

So much for the good points. The bad ones are mostly the result of the time and place where the game was written. The most apparent and annoying shortcoming is that the room descriptions do not list the exits, forcing you to tediously try each direction at the risk of forgetting some. On top of it, there are some not intuitive “guess the verb” occurrencies, a couple of riddles that can likely only be solved by trying everything on everything and some situations where the wrong action can softlock the game without warning.

I personally enjoyed the game a lot, even from the perspective of a modern player. But many factors greatly helped: its style of humour resonated with me, I liked the setting, did not get stuck too much and luckily managed to avoid the softlock. Bruteforcing the maze with just pen and paper also contributed to my sense of accomplishment at the end of the game.

If you are willing to tolerate the age wrinkles of this adventure, you like the “haunted castle” setting and don't mind being mildly teased by the narrating voice, this game could be for you. If you are looking for a polished experience and deep topics, maybe other titles are more suitable.

“L'astronave condannata” (The Doomed Spaceship) is the work of one of the pioneers of interactive fiction in Italy. Originally released for ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, later for MS-DOS, it is a short adventure that sees you tasked with solving a vital mission under a strict time limit with a solid in-game justification.

The game is nothing spectacular, but it is refreshing to see none of the things that make early IF games so annoying. There are no walking dead states, except if you are left with too much to do when the time limit is about to expire (fair enough). There is no parser guessing, since all the verbs are simple and all objects are marked. The riddles are always logical. There is no save/undo function but the game is very short, so the few “learning by dying” occurrences are tolerable.

Considering the age of the game and the small developer scene in Italy at that time, it is hard to wish for more. I would have liked a little more atmospherical worldbuilding like the author did in “Avventura nel castello”, but on the other hand the extremely terse and functional descriptions could be easier to digest for kids and Italian learners.

This was the first adventure game I ever managed to solve, so it will always have a place in my memories. My rating might be affected by this, but the game can offer some pleasant moments even to those without emotional connections to that era.

A short science fiction story in CYOA style, available in Italian only. You are prisoner in a mysterious institute and must try to escape. (Spoiler - click to show)Your attempt will be in vain, as you will find out that you are entangled in an inescapable time-traveling circle, which your guardians have unsuccessfully tried to break.

The game is short and does not overstay its welcome. Many scenario elements and descriptions do well in introducing a certain atmosphere, but none of them is expanded into a complete subplot or a vignette, leaving the impression of an underdeveloped world. There are also some spelling errors, suggesting that the author was more focused in the learning experience of writing a game than on the final result for the player. 2½ stars, rounded up as encouragement.

A short and simple game about killing Dracula before midnight.

This was my first text adventure and it surely did not give young me a good impression of the IF genre. It's a very simple game that nonetheless manages to score “cruel” on the fairness scale, as you can inadventently get into a walking dead state by doing very reasonable actions. Its only redeeming value for me is that it was one of my first successful reverse engineering attempts, to which the simple GWBASIC code of the DOS version lends well.