Whembly Castle

Whembly Castle was shoved in my direction by Jason Dyer via his laudable and probably Sisyphean blog in which he intends to tackle every text adventure ever written. He is currently flailing along in the rapids of 1982 and can probably hear the tumultuous roar of 1984 some way up ahead where the currents are really deep and strong.

This particularly large area of whitewater is only playable via a North Star Horizon emulator which itself can be made to run from within DOSBox-X by mounting the relevant directory (in my case D:\Horizon) then typing HORIZON to run the emulator. You then need to select F7, choose RO and then select the .nsi file you should have saved in the Horizon directory {Whembly Castle.nsi}. You should after a few seconds receive the North Star DOS 5.0 prompt. At this stage type GO BASIC and when the prompt READY appears type LOAD CASTLE and the instructions will ask you if you wish to carry on a saved game or start a new one.

Once up and running you can explore the region around a lake and a nasty maze which will need anal mapping akills because any one direction missed could be the one that houses an item vital for your continuity.

Once this item has been gleaned you can make progress breaking into a cabin and a shack where oars and fuel are your ticket out of here and onto the mysterious lake and its castle set in the centre.

The castle in itself is a massive one with hundreds of rooms, secret corridors, paintings of Alice In Wonderland and Sir John Whembly there for you to admire and decipher as clues to where the missing sack of gold could be secreted away. Word puzzles, generators and wells all need to be maintained and brought back to life before any obvious deductions can be made. The maze below the well is a whopper consisting of over sixty locations that have to be thoroughly mapped as several items and tools are scattered about and each will be necessary to solve the treasure hunt. My map currently registers nearly 300 locations and I suspect I am nowhere near solving the thing. One nice touch is no inventory limit which makes dropping objects to map the mazes easier to do.

If you hate mapping mazes and deciphering cryptic puzzles you would do well to avoid this and perhaps invoke a Twine game where your chronically depressed sister has two hundred and fifty moves to learn how to love life by interpreting wisdom imparted by a small can of wood preservative found in your parents wood shed. The kind of one room game that makes gravy congealing seem a positive adrenalin rush. Shellac Sheila the Cuddly Creosote Can is coded to give seventeen pieces of advice to the suicidal player - can you make it back to the land of laughter and shed your inhibitions with your garden boundaries fit for the vagaries of the impending rain and gales this autumn or will you look for a pair of secateurs to finally shuffle off this mortal coil?

Lawn edging was never as white knuckle a ride as this.