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 are expanded into complete subplots or even vignettes, leaving the impression of a 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.

I had great expectations for this highly-rated game written by a celebrated author, but unfortunately the playing experience was very frustrating for me.

Then game starts as an old-style, unforgiving adventure, of the kind that was popular in my youth. After some time you are catapulted in an upper-level universe where you are informed (in case you had not noticed before) that the story you had played up to that point is a game-inside-a-game. The characters in the outside world are other players of that game and can give you hints on how to proceed.

So far, so good. We can play alternately the “inside” adventure while enjoying the “outside” interactive fiction. The former is cruel and will happily kill you for each mechanical imprecision, but you can restart it in a couple of commands, and meanwhile you can enjoy the friendly and carefully crafted outside world, collecting the next hint to proceed and enjoying some moments of relax where you can just talk and interact with objects in a safe environment.

Unfortunately, the warm feeling does not last. The hints for the inner adventure progressively get sparser and less reliable, so that the fake difficulty of the inner adventure becomes very real. You have to perform an ever-increasing sequence of actions to return to the point where you were killed the time before. Granted, your Z-machine interpreter can hopefully save and replay actions saving you time, but probably you won't enjoy seeing the “Open file...” dialog every two minutes. Meanwhile, the outside world does not evolve, making it less and less interesting to linger in there.

This process killed all my enthusiasm. At the end I was so exhausted that I just got a walkthrough and reproduced the actions. There I discovered that in the apparently safe outside adventure one can at a certain point make an irreversible action which secretly locks the player out of all but the worst possible ending. But this was not too bad news for me as such ending was also the shortest one.

I guess I missed a lot of what makes the game so special for many players, be it the subtle references to classic games of the Eighties or the elaborate alternative endings with multiple levels of reality. But even after reading various analyses, I feel this game is too exclusive and could have offered something more for the laypeople. I'm not an IF expert by any means but I am also not a total novice, so I wonder which level of experience in interactive fiction is required for one to really “get” this game.

This game is naive, juvenile and with a lot of rough edges. And yet, I had a ton of fun with it.

You start as a prisoner being interrogated. Your first decisions are typical of an adventure/RPG (gender, skill points, abilities), but soon you are presented more unusual choices, which give you the possibility to define the backstory. Are you guilty? Do you know who framed you? It's up to you to decide! Only your Luck attribute is, most appropriately, mainly left to chance. Depending on your choices the story evolves in many unpredictable directions – you may end up winning the game thanks to your wizardry or ninja skills, or simply by being tough enough.

It is this explosion of possibilities that made me give four stars to this admittedly very minor game. The writing is nothing to speak about, probably made by a teenager, and the characters are just sketched, but I enjoyed a lot exploring the palace and its prison, slowly figuring out yet another escape possibility, winning the game with a carefully planned sequence of choices or with a couple of lucky random decisions.

Not an obligatory play by any means, but a fun way to pass the time and get some solace from the everyday worries.