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The Curse of Rabenstein

by Stefan Vogt profile

Horror
2020

Web Site

(based on 6 ratings)
3 reviews

About the Story

"We should try to find a place to stay for the night. The horses need a rest." Those were the coachman's last words before he disappeared without a trace. Lost deep in the Black Forest, you soon find out that some things should remain buried forever.

The Curse of Rabenstein is the new graphic-/textadventure from Stefan Vogt, the author of the acclaimed Hibernated interactive fiction series. It is the first release from Puddle Soft, a collective formed by members of Pond and with the mission of creating new games for the classic 8-bit and 16-bit home computers of the 80s. The Curse of Rabenstein is following the paths of the legendary adventures from Level 9, but it tries to meet modern gaming expectations, so that the most sophisticated genre back from the day transforms into a contemporary homage.


Game Details


Awards

2nd Place - Adventuron Halloween Jam 2019

Editorial Reviews

RetroGamerNation
Making graphical text adventures great again
Having reinvigorated the classic text adventure scene in 2018 with his science fiction based title Hibernated 1: This Place is Death, Stefan Vogt is back with a new graphical text adventure that aims to make the genre further accessible to the general retro gaming community.
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Member Reviews

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Number of Reviews: 3
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Great game, May 9, 2020
by Stephane F. (France)

Great writing, doubleplus great graphics, honest puzzles (I mean : not made for making you feel less intelligent than the author). A must play.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Adventure like it's 1988 ..., April 10, 2020
by Jens Leugengroot (Germany)

Curse of Rabensein really captures the look and feel of a late era 8bit graphics text adventure game. As a bonus, you can play the game on a wide variety of different platforms, ranging from Commodore, to Sinclair and even 16bit systems like the Amiga or Atari ST. Besides being a good classical adventure game, Curse of Rabenstein gives you the chance to compare the different system in a unique way.

Although a little bit too short in my opinion, the game tells a captivating story and keeps you motivated to play on, as you want to see how this all plays out. Most import, it tells a story in a way, like it would have been done in the 80s (wether someone might like that or not).
It's not too hard and I was able to play it without a walkthrough or any hints.

The graphics are the part, there the game really shines. They are done exceptionally well on the whole range of different systems (even the Spectrum got this little graphical edging on the top of the screen).

All i all, I can recommend Curse of Rabenstein. I had a lot of fun playing it on several systems. Thanks Stefan.

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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Cool graphics, interesting ports, not much game, April 26, 2020

This game has fun retro graphics, and is available for a shockingly large number of old platforms, including Commodore 64, Spectrum, Amiga, Atari ST, and MS-DOS. I played it in its HTML JavaScript version, which is almost certainly the version you should play, if you decide to play it.

Those are the good parts.

As a game, there's not a lot here. The limited parser is kinda buggy, the story is thin, and there are no interesting puzzles.

The game has a bunch of NPCs, but you can only "TALK [PERSON]" and "GIVE/SHOW [OBJECT]" to them. (TALK, GIVE, and SHOW are undocumented verbs.) But even GIVE and SHOW are incompletely implemented.

In order to engage a major NPC with the plot ((Spoiler - click to show)"OMG I'm trapped here and my coachman is missing,") you can't just ask them about it or tell them about it, but you have to find a piece of critical evidence ((Spoiler - click to show)the cloth) and SHOW it to them. Until you do that, TALK just doesn't mention the problem to that NPC. Worse, if you SHOW that critical evidence to anyone else in the game, you get a generic parser error, "That wouldn't help you much." This game would be considerably improved if you could GIVE/SHOW every object to every NPC and get at least a single line of dialog.

And here's another parser bug. (Spoiler - click to show)The priest tells you to get water from the well. But the well has no bucket and no rope, so you have to search for them. When you USE ROPE and USE BUCKET, "You attach the bucket to the rope and pull up a fresh charge of water." Cool. GET WATER. "You can't find it." You have to USE BOTTLE to get the water.

Then there's the story. The game is short, but there's… not much. (Spoiler - click to show)You're stuck in a haunted village. Or maybe you've time-traveled back to the past? You meet some people afraid of ghosts nearby, encounter a vampire attacking your coachman, who runs off when you attack him with a torch. Then you go to sleep, and all of the NPCs are gone (where are your horses?!), except an NPC who said he would help you has apparently been dead for years and has kept the object you gave him "yesterday" with him--buried with his skeleton in his grave. (Why? How?) You then sleep again. (why?) You bring holy soil to the vampire, who for some reason hasn't attacked you in your sleep for the past two days, wake the vampire with the soil, and kill him. And the name of the PC? You were Van Helsing the whole time. This story is paper thin, just enough to motivate the puzzles.

And then there's the puzzles. They're almost all of the form, "examine and search everything, take everything, then USE everything you own," except for sleeping, which is "accomplish all necessary tasks for the day, which are only known to the author, before you're allowed to sleep and progress to the next day."

The final puzzle is an exception to this. (Spoiler - click to show)To open the coffin in the Undercroft, you have to use the blanket upstairs to set a trap, then use the soil downstairs to force the vampire to wake. But the soil solution just sort of assumes you know certain traditional vampire lore. If you try using the soil in the Undercroft too soon, the game says that you need a plan, but the limited parser doesn't provide a way to say "I plan to burn the vampire in the library."

None of the game's puzzles offer any of the virtues of a good puzzle. https://xyzzyawards.org/?p=386 No extent, no explorability, no surprise, no ingenuity, no originality, no structural integration, and barely any narrative integration.

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