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Review
Castle Warlock was the third of five games written by the admirable Ken Bond; it is one of the best examples of the castle/dungeon romp genre that I have come across. The plot (such as it is) has you on a horny handed expedition to loot the castle of the evil wizard Danzil and make it home in time for tea. Put the kettle on mother. Tragedy unfortunately strikes your expedition before the pot is on the trivet as your guide shuffles off this mortal coil during a storm and you are left to fend for yourself. A lengthy odyssey awaits you and a blissfully graphics free one to boot.
The PAW parser was much feted at the time and Ken makes full use of its envelope pushing potential here. TAKE ALL is available although there is no OOPS or BACK. All descriptions are at their lengthiest from the get go, so no toggling VERBOSE, BRIEF etc. is required. EXAMINE and SEARCH are both on the menu although utilisation produces the same result. The handling of multiple keys never caused me a problem as it has in the past for instance. Look after the disambiguation and the rest will follow. PAW has enabled the author to pen longer and more evocative decriptions and while they are not up to a Meretzky or Austin standard the atmosphere engendered is still above par.
There are numerous sudden death scenarios and it is also extremely easy to hard and soft lock the game; it should be obvious in each case soon after the specific faux pas however. Learning through suffering was of course a great part of early text adventures and perfectly okay by me. If you dislike that kind of game you would do well to avoid any Ken Bond production. As hitherto mentioned the lamp timer is extremely generous and there no other daemons to worry about. There are some old fashioned and some rather original posers in here; more than one requires some lateral thinking. I particularly liked the iron chest and paint problems.
There are a few bugs but these are cosmetic; several changes in room object statuses do not change when they should; conditional flags are obviously not being reset in these instances but there are not many of them and none are game breaking. Spelling and grammar are top notch throughout.
To summarise whilst this traditional fantasy effort is not up to Infocom or Level 9 standards it is a better then average sword and sandal romp. Just save a lot.
