Castle Quest Demo

Intro

"Castle Quest" is an abandoned puzzle game that was being developed by Blitzen using RPG Maker 2003 that will forever be stuck in the demo stage. Which makes me scratch my head over the fact this game is listed as completed. Though, I suppose some would argue that the demo is completed. A demo that can be beaten in under 15 minutes despite claims to the contrary by maia:

It is a demo that will take you 30-60 minutes to play through . . .

So I'm pretty much left to conclude that either maia is exaggerating when they made that claim in order to get more people to play the demo or that maia isn't that good at puzzle games.

Story

You start off as an unnamed cleric whose been tasked by the king with rescuing his daughter whose been locked away in the deepest, darkest part of his own castle's dungeon by an evil baron.



I'd ask why the guards didn't stop him, but incompetent guards are kind of a staple in a lot of games. At any rate it looks like were going to need to find some help in the castle and use our combined skills in order to rescue the princess. Albeit the demo only goes as far as the first major boss. So rescuing the princess is never going to be possible.

Gameplay

As mentioned above the player needs to combine the skills of various classes in order to advance. In the demo were introduced to the cleric, ranger, and thief. The cleric can heal herself which means she can safely pass over spikes. The ranger is the best fighter in the group and is needed to deal with giant snakes, giant spiders, humongous spiders, and skeleton warriors. The ranger can also jump up and fall down ledges in order for the player to advance into new areas. And the thief can steal keys from the numerous sleeping guards laying about the castle so the player can open locked doors.

Though I do have a few annoyances. For starters you can't heal anyone else with the cleric. In order to restore health lost by the ranger through combat you'll need to interact with the magic fountains.



In the demo there are two of these. One of them is just North of the throne room and the other is in the South Eastern corner of room full of easy to open doors. And you'll need to use this second one in order to ensure you'll have enough health to take down the demo's only boss.

Graphics

Graphically the game looks unique with the developer choosing to go with everything being in black and white. A decision that is a bit mixed in my opinion. On the positive side of the scale as I mentioned previously this game definitely stands out from the sea of free games that were made with this software that relied entirely on the RTP assets. On the negative side of the scale the game looks highly dated. In fact, the only games I can think to compare this to are stuff meant to be played on an Atari 2600 or a ZX Spectrum and even most of those games have more color than this demo does.

Sound

Sound wise the demo only has a handful of sound effects, but the lack of different background tracks will quickly get on your nerve since the main theme in this game is super annoying. Jeez, this game doesn't even change songs in the boss's room. The game just changes the tempo of the main theme to make things seem more tense. To make matters slightly worse I'm not sure if this is an original track or borrowed from another game. Though the lack of additional songs does make me think of "Hydlide" of all things.

Conclusion

The basic premise of exploring a castle and needing to switch between various characters in order to save the princess is a good idea in my opinion. After all, one can take very basic skills and force the player to combine them in interesting ways. Unfortunately this one never got past the demo part of the process so it's impossible to know if this would have been a great game or not since the demo only shows the basics on how to use three of the planned seven characters.