Voodoo Castle

This is one of the better Scott Adams games (probably the second best one, after The Count). Admittedly, I have a soft spot for it, as I solved it entirely on my own (over the course of like a year), as I would periodically play it, and suddenly get a new idea, until I finally had completed it. I had the Scott Adams Graphical Adventure (SAGA) version that I bought in 1984, for my old 64K, Apple II-compatible system (Franklin Ace 1000), with a green monochrome monitor, no less (although I did later get a chance to see what it looked like in color...after a friend of mine stole a color monitor from a school in 1985 - hey, I'm an IF fan, not a saint).

Obviously, this is a Scott Adams game, and thus relies on a fairly lame two-word parser, with weak descriptions, etc. But the graphics helped bring it alive, and it was better than nearly all other Scott Adams games (only Pirate Adventure approaches it, other than for the previously noted The Count). The puzzles and concepts of the game were fairly cool (although I'm not sure a "Voodoo Castle" makes sense; was it something built by a French nobleman in Haiti, or what?), and were also difficult enough so that it took me a long time to solve them, and yet not so difficult that I just got permanently stuck. I may pull this one out again, after nearly 25 years, and see if I can figure out how to solve it again. Recommended for nostalgists. People used to Infocom-quality fare probably won't want to stoop to playing this, alas, but if you're curious about the old Scott Adams games, this is a great place to start. One quibble; the "castle" was rather small. Seemed more like "Voodoo House."

Voodoo Castle (1979) was the fourth game from Adventure International (AI). It was written by Scott Adams's then wife, Alexis, who had previously assisted on Pirate Adventure, and its opening enthusiastically proclaims that it is "DEDICATED TO MOMS EVERYWHERE!".

The goal of Voodoo Castle is to lift the curse that afflicts Count Cristo, a goal established after the player has opened the coffin in the game's first location and examined the man therein. In the context of the Adams game engine, this is a fairly abstract goal; recall that all of the prose must be extremely minimal (room descriptions generally come in at under 40 characters in length), the parser only accepts two words, and the whole affair has to fit into 16KB of RAM. Doing something like finding treasures and dropping them in a target room, ala Adventureland, is an easy-to-grasp concept in the context of these limitations, but accomplishing a goal as broad as lifting a curse is harder to think about in a vacuum, and potentially a little more intimidating to contemplate when you first fire up this game.

The game's castle isn't actually called "Voodoo Castle", but it is the castle where the action takes place, and Voodoo is clearly afoot. Fascinating paraphernalia can be found lying around in its corridors, including a voodoo doll, a Ju-Ju bag, a witch's brew and a room full of exploding chemicals. With no more to go on than the game's initial exhortation that the player lift a curse, he or she must experiment with these interesting props and advance through the solving of a succession of puzzles, and ultimately of the game. The experience is a lot of fun, and while Voodoo Castle's official difficulty label is Moderate, I find it to be one of the easier AI games. However, I should point out that this was not one of the AI games I had the opportunity to play back in the day. By the time I came to it in the 2000s, I was (a) way older and wiser, (b) had solved a lot of adventure games in general, and (c) had solved a decent number of AI games and acquired a strong sense of their workings.

What is interesting about Voodoo Castle is that there are no antagonists in it. While there are still lots of ways to die or wreck your game, including inescapable rooms and destructible crucial items, there are no people, monsters or other entities that are out to get you. In fact, a theme of Voodoo Castle (if 'theme' isn't too lofty a word in the circumstances) is that people who might seem scary at first are probably not threats, but sources of potential help. Except for the maid, who chases you downstairs if you happen to track soot through the castle. Back in the realm of objects, the cause and effect relationships between a lot of the game's artifacts and things that might happen to you during play are often unintuitive (E.G. "I've recently stopped being blown up by exploding test tubes. Why?") and require much trial and error and game saving to discern.

It would be a struggle to qualify any observations I might be tempted to make about the nature of games Alexis authored or influenced in this series versus the ones her husband authored, but it's certainly fun to speculate. My sense is that when Alexis was involved, the games were a little kinder in tone, though not necessarily in content. The absence of antagonistic characters in Voodoo Castle speaks to this idea, as does its altruistic goal for the player, and the very positive image with which the game ends. Scott of course gave us several games featuring instant death by bear mauling, and he gave us Savage Island Parts I and II, two of the most difficult and masochistic jaunts to ever grace adventuredom. But Adams also opposed the idea of the player having to commit any acts of violence against other creatures to advance in his games. The attitude of the AI games is that violent acts may be visited upon you, usually by nature, if you are stupid or unlucky enough - and we have to take the AI concept of player stupidity with a grain of salt.

Voodoo Castle features a couple of AI's most loveable/hateable guess-the-action and guess-the-verb moments (you won't believe what you have to do with the Ju-Ju bag, and I mean that in a banal way) but fortunately the AI clue sheet cyphers make getting help fun in these games. And I always particularly liked Voodoo Castle's clue sheet. It was the first AI clue sheet I ever encountered, and I encountered it as a kid well before I played the game, back in the Adventurers Corner column of a 1986 issue of Australian Apple Review.

If you haven't tried an AI game before, I wouldn't recommend this one to start with due to the abstract nature of its goal. It's probably best to familiarise yourself with the nature of these very early adventures by first playing a straightforward treasure hunt like Adventureland. But in the scheme of the AI series, Voodoo Castle sports some distinctive features, a castle stocked with lots of interesting objects, and a good dose of that elemental, imminent style of puzzle-solving which is the hallmark of the AI games.

Having played through the first 3 Scott Adams games, I didn't like this one as much. What's the point of everything? Why do you do what you do with the Ju-Ju bag? What's with the statue?

In the other games, I feel like my imagination could fill in a lot of the details. In this one, I just couldn't piece it together.

The atmosphere was good, though, and the non-Ju-Ju puzzles were clever. I still recommend it.