Tales from Castle Balderstone

by Ryan Veeder profile

Episode 1 of Tales from Castle Balderstone
2018

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5 star:
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Number of Ratings: 16
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- bloodzeed, September 19, 2023

- Edo, August 17, 2023

- TheBoxThinker, March 18, 2023

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Care to join me for a little FRIGHTseeing?, October 11, 2022
by jakomo
Related reviews: Balderstone series

Where it all began for the now-venerable series of Tales from the Crypt-esque anthology-horror games. Four spooky micro-IF stories are told by horror authors gathered at the titular castle. A tale of ghostly revenge, a surreal dive into psychosis (and blood), an abandoned hospital explore-em-up, and a trolling exercise (unless I missed something?). Much shorter and less thoroughly implemented than later episodes, but Veeder's comic turn-of-phrase and subversive wit shines through as usual. There's some hilarious mockery of self-indulgent literary "post mortems" in the framing device. In particular, the send-up of the heavy-handed metaphors of the abandoned hospital story, by it's own author, is expertly handled.

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- mediocre.marsupial (Australia), March 23, 2022

- unWinnable State (unWinnableState.com), March 25, 2021

- E.K., June 21, 2020

- beecadee, June 21, 2020

- Zape, June 13, 2020

- kierlani, April 22, 2020

- Sobol (Russia), November 12, 2019

- Stian, May 16, 2019

- Denk, November 19, 2018

- Mr. Patient (Saint Paul, Minn.), November 13, 2018

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
A humorous and horrifying collection of short Halloween games, November 3, 2018
by MathBrush
Related reviews: 15-30 minutes

This game is framed as a collection of friends sharing tales. After an intimidating wall of opening text, you begin playing the mini-games in random order.

You can, at any time, excuse yourself to go to the bathroom to skip a tale, which opens up a small segment of the game.

The stories were fun, and in a wide range. One was essentially a one-note joke; one was a deeply disturbing exploration in three parts that was frankly horrifying; another was like a fairy tale; and the fourth is a fun riff on metaphorical games.

I found this game truly enjoyable. Its one defect for me was the difficulty in finding the right actions/verbs on a regular basis. However, that may be part of the charm. But when I saw a pattern on the wallpaper and couldn't X PATTERN, or couldn't get a response for cutting it with one of two items present in the game, I got frustrated. SHOUT could work more often, TALK TO isn't implemented. But I don't know if it's worth it going back to spruce this game up, since the fun's already there.

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- CMG (NYC), November 1, 2018


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