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Tribute: Return to Castle Coris
Author: Larry Horsfield
Date: 2020
ADRIFT 5
Reviewed by
MathBrush
Related reviews: 2-10 hours
Larry Horsfield has a
long-running and fairly successful series of ADRIFT games with the hero Alaric
Blackmoon.
I always have a bit of trouble finishing the games. These
games are definitely in the older school fashion, which Adrift is suited for.
Adrift only encodes specific verb-noun combinations, although you can set up a
few synonyms. So in particular, if an action works in one room, it might provoke
an error message in another. To climb down a rope, you must type ‘CLIMB DOWN
ROPE’ but not ‘DOWN’. This isn’t necessarily a drawback…it ends requiring
careful analysis. These games are the perfect games to slowly pick at over a
month or so.
During the comp, though, I rushed with the walkthrough,
until I messed up a part with a bucket and got stuck. In the part I saw (about
2/3 of the game), I found some really fun dynamics (like growing and shrinking),
intervened in a goblin war and navigated through some crazy caverns. Definitely
one to come back to later!
+Polish: It has a lot of effort put into nice
color changes and complex mechanics.
+Descriptiveness: I could imagine a lot
of the scenarios vividly.
-Interactivity: I frequently had trouble doing what
I'd like to with things, and commands frequently had to be very specific.
+Would I play again? I plan on looking at this again.
+Emotional impact: A
lot of parts of it were just fun, like crossing the ravine and changing shape.
Reviewed by Viv Dunstan
Ok lengthy parser game time! I went into this game with
some trepidation. Would I manage the online ADRIFT play system ok? As a Mac user
I can’t run ADRIFT games offline at the moment. Also it’s game 8 in a series and
I hadn’t played the earlier ones!
Fortunately things went better than
feared. I used the large font version supplied at the ADRIFT site - thanks for
that. The online play never seized up on me, although I was saving frequently,
in case I died - yes that happened! - and needed to restore.
The game is
fun. It’s very much an old-style parser game, a very traditional text adventure.
It is slightly unforgiving in the parser, but not as bad as I expected. Most of
the time I was perfectly fine. My only recurring hitch was the commands to use
with the grapple hook and rope. Also with containers that I was carrying I was a
bit thrown that INVENTORY didn’t show their contents, and that EXAMINE and
SEARCH on them gave different results. I did learn to use EXAMINE and SEARCH a
lot.
The game world is rich, and I only got a bit over halfway into the
story in my 2 hours play. The game starts as a dungeon crawl, but contains much
more variety. It also has some nicely realised NPCs. I particularly liked my
encounter with some goblins.
My main recommendation to the author would
be to provide a little more clueing re some of the puzzles in-game. There were a
few cases where I needed to do something that wasn’t apparent enough in the
location. There’s a balance to be struck in terms of too easy versus too hard,
but I think a few more in-game clues would be helpful and give the game itself
more polish.
So yup, I couldn’t play through fully in the time I had. And
for a few commands I needed to resort to the walkthrough. But generally it was a
smooth, rewardi
Reviewed by Mike Spivey
Return to Castle Coris is the most old-school text
adventure I’ve played so far in this year’s IFComp. It’s huge, somewhat
sparsely-implemented, contains lots of puzzles, is set in a fantasy world, and
features a plot that’s pretty much “Explore this interesting location and see
what you find.” Fans of this older style of interactive fiction will probably
enjoy Return to Castle Coris, but players who prefer shorter games with more
focus on story will likely not care for it as much.
Me – I’m somewhere
in-between. I like big, puzzle-filled games, but I generally prefer more of a
unifying narrative than Return to Castle Coris has. I played the game for maybe
two-and-half hours before stopping. I earned 250/400 points, so this gives a
sense of how large Return to Castle Coris is.
The best parts of Return to
Castle Coris are its writing, its scope, and the cleverness of many of its
puzzles. Descriptions of objects and rooms are more evocative than you normally
see in old-style IF; I could picture many of the locations rather vividly. The
game, again, is huge; it takes a lot of work to create a game of this size, and
one can’t help but admire that. Plus many of the puzzles are quite creative,
using items you can carry and the environment around you in interesting ways.
The biggest flaw I see in Return to Castle Coris is the same one that caused
me, finally, to give up on it: Too many of its puzzles require the use of a
phrase that might come easily to an author but that isn’t a standard IF command
and isn’t clued and so will be very difficult for a player to think of. This is,
I suppose, partly a guess-the-verb problem and partly a guess-the-author’s-mind
problem. The last puzzle I worked through provides a good illustration.
(SPOILER ALERT.)
I had just arrived at the edge of a large rift, after
traversing a desert. There appeared to be no way to cross the rift. While in the
desert, though, there were numerous birds of prey soaring around, occasionally
snapping up lizards or other small desert creatures and flying off with them. A
while back I had acquired magical items that could make me small or large. The
solution to this puzzle is really clever: Make yourself small, so that an eagle
will think you’re prey, swoop down on you, and fly you across the rift. Before
the eagle eats you, transform yourself back to your original size. Again, a good
puzzle – especially since it’s clued by the scenery descriptions of the birds of
prey. So I did this. Yet nothing happened; no birds flew down to grab me. I
eventually checked the walkthrough, and apparently you need to get the eagle’s
attention after you’ve turned yourself small. And the way to do that is,
according to the walkthrough, WAVE ARMS. Now, your arms are never (to my
knowledge) mentioned before this in the game, nor are any of your other body
parts. None of your other body parts even appear to be implemented. There’s no
hinting that this is how to get the eagle’s attention, or even that you need to
get the eagle’s attention after making yourself small. I have no idea how I
would have figured this one out on my own. Unfortunately, this isn’t the only
instance of this kind of problem. It’s just the one that, after two and a half
hours, made me give up on the game.
I also had several unpleasant
wrestling bouts with the Adrift parser. For example, L is understood as an
abbreviation for LOOK, but L BEHIND (an object) doesn’t produce the same
behavior as LOOK BEHIND (the same object). The worst, though, was when I typed
GIVE RAT TO CHICKS and the game responded with “The two chicks do not seem
interested in the dead rat.” The solution to this puzzle was actually to give
the rat to the chicks; the problem turned out to be that I had the rat in my bag
rather than in my hands. The parser’s response was incredibly misleading.
In sum, Return to Castle Coris has some strong features that will make it
appeal to fans of older style text adventures: good writing, a huge game world,
and some solid puzzles. Too many of these puzzles need to be better-clued,
though: If the solution to a puzzle requires a nonstandard command, the player
needs some indicator as to the exact command needed. Otherwise, the puzzle needs
to be rewritten so that it uses a more common IF command. As the game currently
stands, I think many players will find Return to Castle Coris frustrating or
have to resort regularly to the walkthrough.
Reviewed by Annsi
The background to the story is already explained in the
blurb of the game, so you can start playing without necessarily reading the
introduction - quite handy. Knowledge of the background story is not needed
during the gameplay anyway; it is there mainly to connect this game to the
universe of some earlier games by the same author, making this one a sort of
sequel (the blurb mentions an earlier game in the series, “The Spectre of Castle
Coris”).
You start at the mouth of the tunnel you are supposed to
explore, and once you are in, you have to solve a series of puzzles to proceed,
and that is basically what this game is about. From the very start, you have to
pay close attention to everything around you, or you might miss some crucial
objects needed to proceed. You will probably get stuck very early on, and have
to resort to the walkthrough. I had to quickly resort to playing with the
walkthrough open on the screen simultaneously, which was not a good sign. There
were some things you wouldn’t come to think of doing by yourself at all - for
example, at one point you encounter something in the tunnel, and you have to it
to discover a couple of objects. You are supposed to throw an object into a
shaft, and this was not hinted at in any way, etc. So, in effect, the solutions
to the puzzles were such guesswork that most of the progress was just thanks to
typing what the walkthrough instructed. After some time of playing like this, I
was attacked and died, and didn’t bother to play forward. Shame, as there
obviously was a lot more to the game.
The puzzles are inventive enough in
themselves, but they were not sufficiently clued, and there were also many
guess-the-verb issues, and I just didn’t want to bother trying to read the
author’s mind as to what the next move should be. 6
Reviewed by
Stian
Like Just another Fairy Tale, this game takes on the classic style fantasy
genre head on, albeit with a more adult focus. The writing is remarkably solid,
which perhaps is not surprising, seeing as Return to Castle Coris is episode
eight of a series. Here, the action takes place underground, further and further
into the unknown. It actually reminded me a lot of certain games taking place
underground that I played in the past, especially Ultima Underwold and Legend of
Grimrock. Such were the feelings evoked by the writing. Unfortunately, however,
I found this even harder than Just another Fairy Tale; not only are the verbs
many and (to me) obscure, but it seems you also have to imagine nouns that are
not described, and perform rather random actions that work in specific places
while giving no informative response in others. Perhaps it’s a learning curve,
going through the episodes chronologically. At least I managed to die
spectacularly a few times.
Reviews should be considered copyrighted by their respective authors.
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