Return to Claymorgue's Castle

Usually when I have to review a game I really didn’t get on with, I try to avoid being excessively mean by doing some comedy, maybe going high-concept with a song parody or police blotter or what have you. I’m not doing that here, however, because despite finding Return to Claymorgue’s Castle quite unpleasant to play, I feel like I did get something out of the experience, and explaining what and why requires going into a fair bit of detail about all the things that didn’t work for me.

The game is an authorized sequel to one of Scott Adams’s lesser-played adventures – at least, 1984’s Sorcerer of Claymorgue Castle doesn’t have any reviews or ratings on IFDB – taking what appears to have been a fantasy collect-a-thon and giving it the Scooby Doo treatment. You play a journalist who rolls up at the gates of the eponymous fortress with the rest of your crew – a researcher, a hacker, and an athlete – bent on uncovering… well, something or other, the game isn’t really big on motivation beyond exploration for its own sake. So far, so old-school, and the approach to puzzles is likewise quite traditional: outside of a spot of device-manipulation to crack a computer password, you’ll be walking through gimmick-free mazes, digging for secrets, making a grappling hook, and using MacGuffin A to unlock MacGuffin B. The one mechanical twist is that often, you’ll need to enlist the aid of your comrades to get through a puzzle: like, the hacker obviously is the one who can unlock the computer, the athlete is thee only one who can successfully throw the grappling hook, etc.

Now, I must confess that the Scott Adams style of two-word parser games is not a subgenre I find particularly appealing. I never played them back in the day, so there’s no nostalgia value, and the terse prose, primitive interface, and sometimes-unfair puzzles are just not what I come to IF for. As to the last of these, Return to Claymorgue’s Castle lives down to its lineage: the puzzles are severely underclued, with most near-misses, like trying to throw that grappling hook yourself, generating default “that won’t work” messages that don’t provide a push to the intended answer, not to mention a few places where I’m not sure how anyone could progress without going to the walkthrough. For example, pretty much the first challenge of the game requires you to go through the maze to a nondescript area, and then examine a patch of weeds twice, with the first just resulting in another generic failure message.

Admittedly, many of the more traditional lock-and-key puzzles were at least more straightforward, but that brings me to the game’s first point of departure from its inspirations: instead of the traditional two-word parser, Return to Claymorgue’s Castle is implemented as a parserlike choice game in Twine. Now, this is a subgenre I tend to enjoy, but the interface here is about the most literal, cumbersome interpretation of the concept you can imagine. In theory, this shouldn’t be that bad – you’ve got the list of characters and their inventories in the left-hand sidebar, the room description and contents in the middle one, and the verb list in the right. But the verb list is long and somewhat fiddly, and you need to manually select yourself as the person doing the action even if you’re alone – plus if you accidentally click object-verb instead of verb-object, the action queue gets reset. As a result, constructing the simplest command requires at least four clicks, and possibly scrolling up and down three separate sub-windows, with more complex actions being more click-happy still.

It’s tortuously slow, and made worse by the low contrast provided by the pixel-art backgrounds and the frequent guess-the-verb issues – sometimes examining would work to reveal what a piece of writing said, sometimes only reading it, and sometimes, as with the leaflet you start out carrying, neither will. Similarly, I could never figure out how to actually talk to any of the other characters, though they do occasionally interject with their thoughts (often when you’re in the middle of clicking to make a command, which means you miss these bits of dialogue unless you notice that the main window’s changed in time). And since the game mechanics require a lot of clue-free trial-and-error where you need to attempt every action you can think of, and then try the exact same actions again with the other members of your group, anyone susceptible to RSI will be a whimpering mess by the halfway mark.

Beyond the interface, the game’s other major difference from its 1980s antecedents is the prose. Afficionados of the era often say they enjoyed the minimalism that early microcomputers’ memory constraints imposed: with the games only able to fit a few words per location, item, or character, players’ imaginations could run wild. Return to Claymorgue’s Castle, by way of contrast, adopts a style that can be charitably described as logorrhetic. Even the emptiest of locations gets hundreds of words of description long on telling me exactly what I was meant to be feeling and short on the actual details that would evoke those feelings. The prose is weighted down by excessive adjectives and adverbs, and frequently talks itself in circles, repeating words or even whole ideas from one sentence to the next. Like, here’s the drawbridge:
"
The drawbridge is old and rusty, with wooden planks that creak and crack. The chains that hold it are thick and heavy, but also worn and corroded. The drawbridge spans over the moat, which is deep and murky. The water is stagnant and foul, with patches of algae and slime. I can’t see the bottom of the moat, but I imagine it is full of bones and debris. The moat surrounds the castle, which is imposing and gloomy. The walls are high and thick, with towers and battlements. The entrance is a large archway, with a portcullis and a gate. The entrance is dark and ominous, with no signs of welcome or warmth."

And here’s a door:

"A sturdy wooden door, its entrance barred by a hefty bolt, conceals untold enigmas. This ancient milieu, rich with history, murmurs the chronicles of eras past. The wooden door, its secrets kept by the heavy bolt."

(There was not even a single enigma here, let alone untold ones – I’d already been around to the other side of the door, it led from a kitchen to a courtyard).

My eyes glazed over early, and I found myself skimming the text desperately looking for the few pieces of concrete information or game-relevant objects amid the flavorless tide of oatmeal. The author’s native language doesn’t appear to be English, so I certainly don’t want to cast aspersions on their language skills, and perhaps there’s something about the translation process that led to this muck (my sense is that an LLM let loose on perfectly fine foreign-language text could certainly generate sludge of the quality here on display). But regardless, the game would have been far better served by a dramatically simpler syntax and vocabulary.

And that’s my little revelation: while I don’t like the simple parser, terse writing, and barely-clued puzzles of this particular tradition, in fact those elements all fit together quite snugly, if not elegantly. If your puzzles are going to demand exhaustive testing of possibilities without much feedback, you need a fast, straightforward interface to make that bearable, and clean prose that focuses on the stuff you actually need to interact with to win. Or turn it around: if you’ve got a relatively simpler parser, you might need harder puzzles to keep the gameplay from likewise feeling too simplistic, and a writing style that’s clear enough that the player won’t try to type stuff the game can’t recognize.

So by sticking to this particular flavor of puzzle design, while unsuccessfully trying new things on the interface and stylistic sides of things, Return to Claymorgue’s Castle wound up giving me a backhanded appreciation for how they used to do things in the old days. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I’m going to be running out to play all the Scott Adams classics as a result – but I suspect if I did I’d have far more appreciation for them than I did before.