Whembly Castle

Whembly Castle was shoved in my direction by Jason Dyer via his laudable and fascinating 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. It is worth speeding up the cycles in DOSBox-X though as it runs very slowly initially; one of the downsides of running an emulator within an emulator.

Once up and running you can explore the region around a lake and a nasty maze which will need dedicated mapping skills because any one direction missed could be the one that houses an item vital for your continuity. At least there is a handy collection of objects near the start which are ideally suited for the purpose of maze mapping.

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. And there are privies. Lots and lots of 'em. Maybe the author had a weak bladder but I am reminded of the Not The Nine O' Clock news sketch with Rowan Atkinson choosing a bathroom suite. Look it up on YouTube.

The game is unfortunately somewhat buggy and on my first play through I was unable to enter the boat. When I restarted however I could reach the area with the boat much more quickly and consequently I could enter the boat and make sail into the large lake. I suspect my manifold save game slots on the first assault had somehow corrupted the game file. The game also shows its age in only accepting upper case commands which is a bit of a pain as I fill in my trizbort map in normal upper and lower case so I am constantly having to toggle the caps lock when typing.

For the purist and completist text adventure fan this is a must play. Younger players probably won't like it but such is life.