For
a long time now critics have carped that Myst
clones did in the adventure game in the early 90s. All I know is that
when I finished Myst, in the late 90s,
there was nothing I wanted more than a Myst
clone. As many as I could find. I didn’t find many. The
Castle was one of the few. This game has pretty
much everything that the critics despise about Myst.
It’s a pretty slideshow. It’s got nice atmospheric sound
effects. It’s got enigmatic puzzles that serve little purpose
other than to drive you up the wall. It’s got an essentially
deserted game world. I was very happy for a while there, except that
it was over just when it seemed to be hitting full steam.

Oh, yes, there was one
other thing I liked about The Castle. It
was a Mac only game. Those didn’t come along too often either.

That was in 2001, when
I first ordered the game from the website. Recently, I was more or
less flabbergasted to discover that not only is the Blueline website
still up, but it’s still selling the game for the same price
I paid six years ago. Here is a game using a “game engine”
that was basically outmoded in the mid-90s. It’s only available
for Macs, which now have what, four percent of the computer market?
Indeed the website still proudly proclaims: “No PC version is
available or planned.” Take that, Bill Gates! And it’s
still on the market! Why is that? If this were a commercial gaming
house product it might still be on their website’s backlist,
but probably not. If you really wanted a copy, you’d have to
troll eBay.

The
Castle was produced, programmed, written and acted in
by its CEO, Mr. Daniel C. Kueng. According to the credits, his wife
helped here and there too. The Kuengs live in Switzerland. My guess
is they have a nice life. He’s probably got a good job in something.
It costs them next to nothing to keep the website up and ship out
a jewel box whenever they get an order. This allows them to be indifferent
to the shockwaves that regularly rock the professional gaming industry.
This allows them to eschew producing a PC version of their game. Seemingly
out of perversity, or pique. Or conceivably even principle. But it
also allows people like me to order a ten-year-old game I might really
like. That, to me, is the promise and the beauty of the internet realized
— in a small, but satisfying way.

So those four percent of
you out there with a Mac are now wondering: What about the game itself,
for crying out loud. And is it playable on Tiger?

The Castle
takes place on the grounds of a big white house that has turrets.
Three people, Brad, Rod and Noemi have landed here mysteriously. After
a while, you discover Noemi’s cat-face-adorned diary and all
those pages you’ve been picking up all over the place are at
long last readable. You catch up on the story, which, as I say, is
dished out to you page by page as you stumble across them. Brad and
Rod are madly in love with Noemi, who is indeed a fox. There’s
some kind of magical and mildly satanic (lots of upside down pentacles
and such) game going on. You don’t really know who Noemi prefers.
You, as the first-person protagonist, are essentially following around
in the same footsteps and actions of these three, as chronicled in
the diary. You unlock the same doors and uncover the same revelations
as they did on their eventful week or so in this odd vacation spot.
Eventually you come to the same shocking moment of truth they faced
and must decide for yourself.

The
plot is fine. I confess I didn’t pay much attention to it the
first time I played the game. I was too frantically trying to find
my way around to solve the puzzles. I’ve always felt that a
plot that is “unfolded,” or worse “told” to
you as you’re playing an adventure game is a little like someone
reading a short story to you over the side of the ship while you flail
around in the water drowning. I don’t want a plot, I want a
life preserver! However, I admit I understood and admired the plot
of The Castle much more the second time
around. Plot is still not what I play adventure games for, but I’m
not opposed to one. For me, adventure games are about two things:
puzzles and atmosphere.

Atmosphere, to me, is how
the game makes you feel. Not the story. The feeling. That’s
what was great about Myst. You felt like
you were there, wherever it was. Real life doesn’t have a plot.
It has sensations. It has occurrences. Plot is great in a book, because
you’re reading a book. You’re not in the book. (Okay,
really great books do both.)

The Castle
has pretty good atmosphere. It’s trying very hard to reproduce
the same one the Rand brothers created in 1993 and does a not bad
job of it. Except, as I say, the biggest thing you discover is that
the game world of The Castle is not very
big. With a game produced essentially by one guy, this is forgivable.
The puzzles are pretty good too. But, again, there are really only
a handful of them. The hardest thing in the game is trying to figure
out how to use things. I don’t think I am giving anything away
in saying that the hardest part of the game is getting the rowboat
to work. There’s also a hedge maze that is not complicated in
itself, but when you click to go one way or the other it’s not
particularly easy to see where you’ve ended up. Eventually,
you get the hang of it though.

It should be noted that
The Castle has just enough racy material
in it to make it, as the saying is, “unsuitable” for the
very young or the easily offended. We’re not talking raunchy
here. The occasional tasteful erotic drawing (assuming you find it)
and a little heavy breathing in some of the diary entries and other
reading material you come across. The jewel box I have warns away
children 16 and under. I noticed that on the website it lowers that
to 13-year-olds. Have sexual mores slackened that much in six years?
Perhaps in Switzerland they have. The Castle
also contains some violence, and a couple of gory moments that I think
are far more “disturbing.” Effective, but disturbing.

The
Castle is also one of the few (possibly the only) commercial
adventure games made in SuperCard. Myst was, of course, a souped-up
Hypercard stack. SuperCard came along offering full color and lots
of other benefits. Alas, the time of the slideshow stack was already
over. As someone who dabbled in SuperCard, I confess I am very impressed
with Mr. Kueng’s mastery of this application. However, it is
a simple game engine, and it is not hard to throw it out of whack.
Not glitches, per se. But if you turn at the wrong time, for instance,
the small overlay QuickTime movie might still be playing in front
of you. Not a big deal, but folks nowadays are accustomed to 256 megabyte
graphics cards pumping out 3D worlds like firehoses.

In addition to the plot,
the other thing I took greater notice of playing The Castle
this time around is just how much in the game is similar to Myst.
Even the opening title sequence letters appear the same way. The music
in The Castle, though very subtle and nice,
is also quite reminiscent of Robyn Miller’s justly acclaimed
Myst soundtrack. Even the elevators look the same! You will have flashbacks
to the lifts in Myst island’s library
and Channelwood’s treetops. But as hard as The Castle
tries to echo Myst, it still is quite a
different game. It’s apparently just not that easy to make a
genuine Myst clone. If only someone could.

I suppose I should get
around to rating the various aspects of The Castle.
Okay.

You know how I feel about
plots in general, but I did think the one here is well done, and actually
more interesting in a second playing of the game, when you can finally
pay some attention to it. I’ll give the plot a B+.

The music and sound effects
are fine, nothing memorable, but also good. Let’s give them
a B.

The puzzles. Only problem
with the puzzles is there’s not enough. The ones that are there
I’d give an A-.

Playability/interface.
This is a bit dicey. Since moving around is simple enough, but I think
it’s going to take most people some time to figure out how to
interact with things. I’d give the playability a C+, though
much of that is due to the age of the game. For instance, the game
was apparently designed during the era of the 13-inch monitor and
the game window is consequently on the smallish side.

And is it playable on Mac
OS 10.4 or whatever it’s up to nowaday? I don’t know.
I played it on my seven-year old G4 running OS 9.2.2. I also tried
it on Mac OS 10.1.5 (the place I got off the OSX boat). The game ran
fine under both, although in Classic mode of course in OSX. The Blueline-studios
website claims that the game’s system requirements are “PowerMac
G4, Mac OS X.” (I’d bet the game is playable on a much
older system than that. In 1997, the reigning Mac OS was 8.1 or thereabouts
and if you had a 100 mhz processor you were cookin’.) But they’re
also promising an OS X demo soon! This sort of thing just cheers me
up. Is there anything more perishable than a commercial adventure
game? I wish every single one had its own little website like The
Castle where I could still actually purchase
a copy for only $19.95.

I very much enjoyed playing
The Castle, both times, and overall I give
it a B+.

Final Grade: B+
(find
out more about our grading system)