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Yon Astounding Castle! of Some Sort Reviews
Author: Tiberius Thingamus
Date: 2009
ADRIFT 3.9
Reviewed by Philip Armstrong
What a surprise! Yon Astounding Castle! of some sort by Tiberius Thingamus may
not be the best game in the competition, or the most original, or best designed,
but it might just go down as my favorite.
Yon Astounding Castle!, like Spelunkers Quest, is another treasure hunt in a
cave castle. However, it proves that, with a little stylistic flair, the genre
isn’t imaginatively bankrupt. The game is about a generic adventure fellow who
is searching an abandoned castle for ten magical treasures. What sets the game
apart from other treasure hunts is its wonderful, clever writing. The game opens
as such:
Outside Yon Castle
Ye standeth at ye edge of ye forest outside yon castle, which is surrounded by
yon moat. Yon drawbridge in ye east is up, preventing ye entry into yon castle.
Nearby there groweth yon nut tree.
Yes, the entire game is written in this faux medieval style. Some people may be
turned off by this or find it annoying. It never bothered me. Mostly because
“yon” is a intrinsically funny word. I though the writing was quite clever. For
example, yon nut tree is described as “tall and nutful,” and when trying to
examine the tree’s nut you are asked “Please be more clear, what do ye want to
examine? Ye nut or yon nuts?” I love that ye and yon are item adjectives.
I also liked that Thingamus drops out of the fake style from time to time. It
gives the game an irrevent feel that I enjoyed.
> w
That would taketh ye away from yon castle. Besides, yon forest hath poison ivy &
poison ivy-like plants, and ye wanteth not to risketh getting that. Also,
wolves. And, like, monsters.
This irreverential tone extends in the gameplay. The game can be beaten at any
point by simply typing “win.” There are ten different endings available
depending on how many treasure you have when you “win.” For example, winning
with no treasures get’s you the following:
Ye returneth from yon castle empty-handed and quite disappointed with yeself.
Ye spendeth ye rest of ye life complaining and picking at ye scabs for leisure.
When ye hath time away from that, ye filleth in for ye lad who licketh yon
stamps for ye living when he falleth ill from yon stamp poisoning. Ye doth not
lasteth very long, and soon perisheth from ye lack of sustenance &
sustenance-type things.
Congratulations!
What’s more, each ending plays on the previous one. When you win with one
treasure you’re told how you rose to the position of permanent stamp licker. The
continuity in the endings adds a nice little narrative to what is largely,
though not entirely, a plotless game. The game has some nice puzzles, though
they are of the sort where your traversing back and forth across the map to get
items to solve other puzzles to get items. My favorite was one where you have to
use magic glasses to examine a thing so closely you see the one pixel that’s out
of place.
Yon Astounding Castle! is a wonderful burrito of a game. It’s well made with
good, if old-fashioned, puzzles wrapped in a fun old english tortilla and
smothered with a heaping of irrevernce. Highly recommended.
Reviewed by Conrad Cook
Mm, okay. When I double-click to start this game, I get five error dialogue
boxes, and Adrift fails to load the game. Then when I go through the menu
system, Adrift loads it fine.
I have a problem with Adrift. Largely due to smouldering resentment at the
bugginess an earlier version introduced to my Comp entry of last year.
(I wonder if Emily Short, Victor G. and all those real IF writers who are
boycotting un-beta-tested games will play this one. It lists no beta testers,
but it runs pretty smoothly; at least, in the Windows version of Adrift.)
Yon Astounding Castle! of some sort is a fine game on the classic Zorklike game
model. You go around taking items and doing things with them, collecting
treasure, and manipulating devices and magic items, gradually upping your score
and gaining access to new rooms, until you win.
The tone is what makes YACoss unique. Really the title says it all. The game is
written in faux-Middle English, with much silliness in the way it presents the
Dungeons-and-Dragons bent of the game.
And, artistically, this choice of tone is a good one: Rather than hide the
inherent silliness of the RPG thing, the author features it.
I got stuck — yes, even YACoss is apparently beyond me — and the walkthrough is
in an MS Word .doc file, which irritated me.
I got stuck because I didn’t notice an exit in one of the rooms — typing EXITS
would have forestalled this — and eventually resorted to the walkthrough. I
almost gave up on the game, but decided that would be lazy.
This is a very courteous game, with in-game hints offered when you EXAMINE
things. Maybe too much. But it really does make up for the minor irritations and
lamenesses of a Zork-type game in its style. I mean:
> X DEVICE
Lo, ’tis yon device for ye resizing of all manner of belts & belt-like things.
If ye wisheth to resizeth ye belt with yon device, ye could placeth ye belt upon
yon device and pulleth upon yon belt resizing lever. Ye magic belt and ye
resizing wheel cronkle are on yon belt resizing device.
>PULLETH UPON LEVER
Ye pulleth upon ye lever and yon belt resizer doth yon thing which is its– that
is, it doth practition or thereby executheth yon method which thereby reduceth
ye magic belt by one size.
…and yet, for all this the game is entertaining without actually being fun. I
have the converse complaint of the one I leveled against _Earl Grey_: there’s
not enough story.
It seems that because this is a Zorklike game, the silliness of the narrative
voice, while entertaining, creates too much distance for me care about it, qua
game.
I remember once, as a grown-up, I tried playing one of these combat-based battle
RPGs — _Warhammer_, or something. And it left me cold. And I looked around at
the other guys at the table, and they were all into it: they stared at the game
table with these spaced-out looks, really putting themselves into that world.
Afterward, someone very close to me, whose husband was in the game, asked if I’d
enjoyed it. And I told her, “Yeah, it was okay. I mean, it’s basically toy
soldiers.” When you can’t get into a game like that, you spend your time
watching what’s actually going on — watching the other people play the game, and
going through the motions yourself.
That’s where I was with Yon Astounding Castle! of some sort. The problem here
was the the very cleverness and entertainingness of the writer’s narrative voice
drew me into that emotional space; and the emotional space the writer wrote the
game from was too much a reflection on Zorklike games, very much outside the
emotional zone of the game-world itself.
For this to have worked as a game, the writer would have needed to bring his
considerable writing skill to bear on making the game-world vivid, lively, and
emotionally meaningful to the player. Instead, there was so much meta-humor, and
what was going on in the game-story itself was unremarkable enough, that it
popped me out of the game.
(I greatly liked the part with the gnome, tho. And you get the idea the author
would be very cool to hang out with.)
This game will probably score high in the IF Comp: around an 8. That’s simply
because it’s so well done, and it so follows the rules and conventions of
classic IF, that nobody will want to rate it lower. And, frankly, it well
deserves a high rating. But the author needs to learn to create an emotional
investment in the substance of the game, and I suspect that would begin with him
finding a story that he himself feels emotionally invested in.
Reviewed by Renee Choba
Hey! How did the author get Stephen Hawking to read the intro?
The good: there's a squirrel. And some decent puzzles. And a Book of Wisdom that
gives appropriate hints.
The bad: all the ye-ing and yon-ing and -eth-ing started to wear on me quickly,
and made figuring out what I had to do unnecessarily difficult.
The really good: when you wanteth to win, you can typeth "win". Which I did
after a while, becoming a stamp licker with a shrine devoted to my one treasure.
I was content with that.
The game never quite went from amusing to all out funny for me. And I guess I'm
just not much of a quest-y type of person. But if you are into this style, there
seems to be a decent solve-some-puzzles, beat-the-wizard sort of game here.
Reviewed by Shane Fitzgerald-Gale
Yon Astounding Castle. I’ve heard tell of ye!
Oh dear, i see it’s written with Adrift. And in Olde Worlde English too. Joy of
joys. How lucky am i? Can’t say i’m looking forward to it. But then, who knows?
Maybe it’ll surprise me. So, on with the raping and pillaging.
Good morrow yon feisty wench. <nudge nudge, wink wink>
Oh, and work was shit, thanks for asking.
I confess, i didn’t give this one the time it deserved(huh!?!). No, i gave it a
lot more time than it deserved. Oh, that was harsh. I regret it already.
Especially since i spent all of 10 mins on it. I don’t know whether it was the
headache brought on by the Olde Worlde English stuff(although it couldn’t have
helped), or the fact that it’s clearly a faux medieval type thing or maybe just
the fact that i simply wasn’t in the mood for this kind of nonsense today, but i
just couldn’t bring myself to go any further at the moment(and i hadn’t got
far).
<sigh>
Alright, what i’m going to do is this. I’ll hold off on a rating until i’ve
played all the rest, and then, and only if i get time before the voting, i’ll
return to it and see if i can face it. Who knows, maybe i’ll love it. But
seriously now, i just can’t face it, and since this is my little universe with
my little words in it, i’m just gonna say… oh nothing really!
Updates are highly likely for this one.
Reviewed by Victor Gijsbers
Þis time, þe spoiler space is a short Inform 7 program.
"Thorns" by Victor Gijsbers
Include Unicode Character Names by Graham Nelson.
London Bridge is a room. "You have eyes for only one [unicode 254]ing: '[unicode
222]e Olde English Pubbe', right across [unicode 254]e street."
But Adrift may not have unicode support, so on to þe review of Yon Astounding
Castle! of some sort.
I expected to hate þis game. Þe blurb seemed pretty bad, and þe opening screen
was even worse. See, I þink you can only poke fun at someþing effectively if you
understand þe þing you're poking fun at; so to make a humerous parody of old (or
faux-old) English, you need to be able to write it very well. So I shuddered
when I saw þis:
‘Twas writ using ye olde
ADRIFT 4,
for which all rights of copy & such
doth hereforeto belongeth to
Campbell Wild
Ye First Version
released upon ye
Twenty-Ninth of September in ye
Ninth Year of ye
Second Millenium
Anno Domini.
Þere are so many mistakes! I þink "hereforeto" should be "heretofore", "doth
belongeth" is evidently wrong, "Second Millenium Anno Domini" is utter nonsense,
and anyway, we live in þe ninþ year of þe þird millenium. Þis game, I þought I
knew, is going to be incredibly tedious.
But þen someþing unexpected happened: Yon Astounding Castle started to charm me.
It told me "Typeth not of ye word help, for yon message knoweth not what it
talketh about.", which was a pretty funny way of dismissing þe standard ADRIFT
help text. Þe game also turned out to have a nifty "win" command.
And þen I typed "climb tree", which was obviously what I had to do, and þe game
refused to understand me. So wiþ some trepidation I typed "climbeth tree",
and... yes, it worked! Þat had me laughing. Okay, it's a bad joke, but at least
I get to participate in þe bad joke.
It turns out þat Yon Astounding Castle! of some sort is a well-constructed and
quite long dungeon romp, full of jokes þat are mostly pretty bad, but add up to
someþing þat is often really funny. Þe game just keeps sending jokes at you, and
at a certain point your resistance wears down and you start enjoying þem. Þe
gnome who says "Gno matter, on with ye gnext gnaming riddle." becomes funny, as
does "Ye be pretty sure ye building is yon hovel of some kind, for ‘tis filled
with all manner of hovelry." Þen þere are þe footnotes, þe weird chain of -akeries,
þe intricate machine wiþ its intricacies, and so on... noþing here is going to
win a best joke contest, but again, þe overall effect is not just zany or wacky,
but genuinely funny.
Þe puzzles are good (þough a few seemed too difficult, such as þe one wiþ þe
magic cupboards), þe implementation is good and polished, especially for an
ADRIFT game, and all in all, playing þis was a very enjoyable experience.
It is, of course, not doing anyþing interesting wiþ plot, narrative,
interactivity; it is simply a treasure hunt wiþ an evil wizard added for extra
special effects. It won't move you, it's not art. But if you are looking for
entertainment, Yon Astounding castle! of some sort gives you a lot more þan you
might expect from þe title.
Reviewed by Jenni Polodna (Pissy Little Sausages)
Yeah, this looks like a goofy one. These always worry me,
since… well, let’s get this right out in the open: Wackiness is not, by itself,
funny. Yes, a great many genuinely funny things exist that are off-beat or
surreal or charmingly zany, but you cannot merely show up in a pair of oversized
lederhosen and a hat that makes you look as though your whole body is being laid
by a chicken and expect the surrounding aether to crystallize into a rich pure
vein of actual funny, because it won’t, and everyone will feel sort of
uncomfortable and sad for you.
Not that Tiberius Thingamus’ Yon Astounding Castle! of some sort is going to be
this sort of game, necessarily. It might turn out to be silly, which is highly
preferable to wacky. I will give it twelve million points if it turns out to be
a Kierkegaard-inspired Gothic cybernoir with an anti-hero protagonist done in
minimalist prose.
I never know how big this RSS buffer is supposed to be. One more paragraph, I
think, should do it. Haagen-Dazs Five ice cream is delicious. The texture alone
makes me wonder if this is a thing mere mortals were ever intended to consume.
What act of good have I done in my life that I should be allowed to purchase a
tub of this exquisite manna for like three flipping dollars? I have cured no
diseases. I have saved no curly-headed children from horrible deaths. There is
no way I can be worthy.
Seriously, though, it’s really good.
Mostly Spoiler-Free Upshot: The forced-wackiness levels in this game were much
lower than I’d been expecting, but every instance of the words “the,” “you,” and
maybe a couple others, has been replaced with the word “ye.” This. Gets. Old.
And there’s something about the green-on-black text that gives me a headache,
and I’m not sure you’re even allowed to use the word “yonself” to mean “itself,”
I’m not completely convinced “yonself” is even a word, and… yeah.
The game under the irritating candy shell, though, is a perfectly serviceable,
if not particularly challenging, old-school puzzler, and I encountered no bugs
or typoes (granted, I was trying to read each sentence without actually looking
at it), which by itself probably puts this game in the top sixty percent. Also,
I chuckled a few times, and no one actually died. So, y’know, not bad.
[spoilers start here]
Well, I am yon temporary licker of stamps and I do possess no units of treasure
or treasur. I’d say it could go either way from here.
Ye standeth at ye edge of ye forest outside yon castle, which is surrounded by
yon moat.
Oh, God, the entire thing is in faux-medieval. Wait, what am I complaining
about? The last game I played was primarily in German. I can probably sort of
read faux-medieval. I hope there’s a ye flask somewhere I can’t get.
Yon tree is tall and nutful.
Ye better believeth it.
In yon courtyard appeareth to be yon weird squirrel.
I would opine that squirrels, ducks, and bunnies are, if not the top three most
frequently chosen animals for vehicles of wackiness, at least in the top ten.
This seemeth like ye right time to mentioneth yon mandatory warning that ye
should examineth ev’rything which ye doth see in ye room description. Or else
’tis quite possibly too late, but ye should hath figured as much.
Ah, playing by Infocom rules, are we? I see how it is.
Ye examineth ye greenery-like thing(s), and figureth ’tis basically like ye
greenery, only more thing-like.
Okay, I chuckled.
(for, lo, ye sense of hallness is strong in this one)
And here I rolled my eyes.
Oh, God, ye Evil Blizzard King hath spake ye curse of bad spakery upon ye
kingdom. “Hath spake ye curse of bad spakery” as a phrase makes me want to
perform an unspecified violence upon an unspecified person’s unspecified bits.
“Ye stoppeth before ye pulleth yon ligaments in ye back or something” made me
giggle, though, possibly because the base sentence under the ye-oldes was modern
and colloquial enough for the contrast to work. It’s fun to speculate about this
stuff, but it’s not getting me any treasure (or treasur), dammit.
I like that the Booke of Wisdom gives room-specific hints when you read it.
That’s neat.
So, okay, looks like what we’ve got here is a puzzler of the tascade variety
(you need to open door A with key B, which is in box C, which opens with crowbar
D, which was eaten by monster E, and can be removed with stomach pump F, etc.),
and while the green-on-black type combined with ye olde Englyshe is starting to
get to me, it’s not un-fun, as these things go.
Furniture objects don’t seem to be movable, or at least I haven’t found one yet
that is. This strikes me as odd for this type of game, where generally there’s a
thing under the thing and you move the thing and lo, there’s the thing. Or,
y’know, whatever.
Oh, good, a gnome to ask me riddles I know the answers to! It’s a nice change
from “examine every object in the room description, then do the logical thing.”
“Gack!” Ye gnome throweth ye tiny tantrum. “I hateth yon envelopes!["]
Oh, man, he wants to know if I know the name of the first ever monkey to survive
a rocket flight. I certainly hope I’m not expected to not google.
What are these puzzle footnotes I’m supposed to see and where do I see them?
To ye south of ye cakery lieth ye more mundane bakery and to ye east is ye
dakery.
Okay, that’s sort of funny. I think. It’s possible I don’t ye even ye know ye
anyemore. I kind of… want to lie down, actually.
Yeah. Yeah. I think I’m done.
Reviewed by Jake Wildstrom
I expect wacky. I expect awful, anachronistic Ye Olde
Englysh. I expect an uncooperative parser, since it's ADRIFT. I am immediately
not-disappointed on the first two fronts. And the third isn't long in coming, as
the game accepts "UP", but not "CLIMB TREE" in the first room.
The writing starts to grate pretty quickly. Ye Olde Englysh is bad enough
(particularly with the completely arbitrary use of "ye" and "yon"; I don't think
there's any typographical convention in early Modern English using "ye" as a
synonym for "your"), but the overuse of the "X and X-like things" construction
gets tedious too. I eventually managed to get the game in an unwinnable state
and didn't much care, because I'd found this simultaneously way too precious and
not precious in particularly entertaining ways.
Plotwise, this game is fairly relentlessly old-fashioned. It's a magpielike
treasure hunt, involving a bunch of locked doors, monsters to defeat, riddles,
and suchlike. It's actually other than its own stale whimsy a fairly standard
exemplar of this type, and, for what it is, on this front, is not all that bad.
The author of this one is presumably competent and has some good ideas, so I'd
really like to see them turn their talent to something a little less gimmicky
and annoying.
Also, walkthrough in an MS Word document? Not all of us use Windows.
Reviewed by Michael Neal Tenuis
The spoiler-free summary is: If you don’t let the fake
Olde English put you off, you’ll discover a merry, lighthearted treasure hunt.
It’s quite a long game, and reasonably well implemented. Recommended, despite
some flaws and a very thin plot.
(There are spoilers in the review, but only mild ones, I think. So if you
haven’t decided whether to play Astounding Castle and the summary above is not
enough to sway you, I think you can safely read the following to get a better
picture.)
In this adventure, findeth ye olde treasures from within yon castle. Maketh
friends as ye o’ercome meddlesome goblins! Outwitteth ye riddling gnome!
Resizeth ye belts & belt-like things!
Can ye getteth all o’ ye treasures & defeateth ye evil wizard?
Verily, thou hast overdone it with thy phrasing.
I suspect that the mock-archaic style will get old(e) very fast for most
reviewers. It does contribute to the silly atmosphere, but the author might have
achieved the amusing effect without irritating those players, if he had
restrained himself and had used this stylistic device only in NPC dialogue and
in the Book of Wisdom (the integrated hints). Apart from this issue, there were
no glaring misspellings or grammatical errors.
Depending on one’s tolerance of (silly) puns, the writing might be found
groan-inducing or hilarious. It’s not highbrow literature, but that’s not what
it aimed at, and I felt it was filled with a sense of good-natured humour.
The story/plot is thinner than a Chinese lantern, but that doesn’t matter too
much, because the game does not pretend otherwise. Still, I’m somewhat on the
fence: On the one hand, it would be nice if there was a bit more world-building
or backstory (could be unobtrusively exposed in treasure descriptions, room
descriptions, NPC dialogue). On the other hand, that would probably run counter
to the game’s overall style, which is a deliberate mix of traditional gaming
flavour and self-aware, but not self-deprecating, silliness. Adding more
backstory might counteract the game’s lampooning of the treasure hunt genre and
of IF conventions. The “intricate object”, for example, is clearly a parody of
how some other IF games force the player to examine everything in several levels
of detail. Giving the object a credible purpose within the story-world would
obviously subvert the parody, and the same goes for the motley collection of
treasures. To get an idea of the style, see this quote (though it’s not always
as self-referential as here):
>listen
Ye heareth whate’er sounds ye room description describeth, o’ course.
The puzzles are mostly straightforward, sometimes allowing multiple objects for
the solution. Some reminded me of the LucasArts adventures of yore. Two notable
exceptions: On one occasion the “riddling gnome” turned into a trivia gnome and
I had to consult Wikipedia, and on another occasion, right before the very end,
there’s an instance of guess-the-noun where I had to look at the walkthrough.
I liked the “WIN” feature very much: You can retreat from the castle at any time
with the >WIN command, whereupon you’ll be presented with a short account of the
rest of your life (then you can >UNDO). Your fate ranges from an early death by
stamp-poisoning to a nobleman’s life, and there’s a different result for each
number of collected treasures, so be sure to WIN and UNDO when you gain a new
treasure. It’s a nice touch that even in the high-ranking outcomes you’ll always
see some drawbacks and some lingering doubts about the other lives you could
have had — rather realistic!
Astounding Castle is quite long. When I noticed that I had hit the 2-hour-mark,
I wrote down my judgment (which is, roughly: “quite good”[*]), after which I
still needed more than an hour to get to the end. In this phase, the game
suffers from long walks to and fro, which are exacerbated by a slightly
unintuitive geographical layout (If you draw the typical grid-map, you’ll get
crossing paths, like this: When, from room X, you go N. E. S. W, you are not in
room X again). There’s also a maze, which didn’t add much except a pinch of
old-school flavour.
I played & finished the game in Gargoyle because of the beautiful typography,
and when I later opened it in the original Windows Adrift interpreter, I saw
that it had a pretty cover picture and even synthesized speech in the intro. I
didn’t check if there were other pictures.
Summary: An enjoyable, merry game if you’re in the right mood to get into the
silliness. There’s a cute squirrel, a talking flower, and an obese snake. What
more could one want?
Reviewed by Sam Kabo Ashwell
I suppose that if this sort of thing amuses you, you could do worse. The game is fairly well-polished, for an ADRIFT offering. There's a hint system, appropriately retro cover art and sound, and the crappy parser isn't as obvious as usual. It is, of course, impossible to really try anything that isn't a solution, but again, ADRIFT. There is probably an audience for this, and they will not go ill-served; if you're a fan of highly old-school faux-medieval settings and over-the-top parody, it might be your thing. But I am emphatically not a member of that audience; I found it painfully tedious. 3, maybe a 2 depending on how the rest of the field shakes out.
Reviewed by Christopher Huang
The language of the game was interesting and amusing, at first, but after a
while it began to be a little tiresome to read. I suspect that the object of the
game is to defeat the Macguffin that has somehow magically caused the language
of the world to turn pseudo-mediaeval, but I never really got that far. Truth
is, the sprawl of the map undid me. I think I was wandering through a dungeon of
some sort when my eyes started to glaze over.
The series of -akery rooms was amusing, though.
Another aspect of the language was the way in which the game would frequently
append a qualifier -- "of some sort", "or something" and so on -- which I did
not feel added anything to the game experience. If anything, it was distracting.
A little of that in the beginning, that might perhaps have been sufficient, but
it was too much. It gave the impression of being rather too self-deprecating,
too lacking in self-respect.
As a breakfast, this would be crusty bread (slightly stale) and cheese, with a
glass of milk. No wait, that's yoghurt.
Reviewed by Amanda Lange
It kinda makes my head hurt.
It's all ye and yon and stuff.
Hm, I wonder...
>get ye flask
Taketh what?
Dammit! Oh well. Actual probable spoilers below.
I didn't get all the way through this one in the time alloted, at least not to
get what I assume the best ending would be. I suspect actually figuring out how
to do so would take longer, though I'm also a little distractable today.
I actually like the general atmosphere of this and the puzzles are forgiving and
solvable. I dig that I can 'win' at any time for a different ending, and tried
this a few times (including as the first command, I confess, though that's
obviously not much of a win).
The in-game hint book isn't really terribly helpful. It seems to tell me mostly
what I need to do, but not how to do it, in situations where the former is
obvious and the latter is not.
I took off my headphones because the game talks, in a text-to-speech voice that
grates on you pretty fast. I can't think of any way reading, or even writing,
text in this faux-olde-tymy language would actually be fun. I get that it's
meant to be humorous but it kind of isn't, particularly in the painting room
which made my eyes glaze totally over. I get the feeling like the author was
going for something here, but the end result is he probably put a ton of
potentially annoying effort on his end in to something equally annoying on the
user end. The one thing that's good about the faux-old-English is it makes the
game stand out, since the plot of the game, such as it is, might not otherwise.
I did find one outright error where it says something is south but it's actually
east. I like that I can use 'exits' to verify this.
There's a goblin about halfway in who steals from your pouch. There's probably a
way to get my treasure back from the goblin, but I never found it. I just
avoided him as much as I could, and hit 'undo' any time he stole anything, since
this appeared to happen completely at random. Since this works just fine and
actually prevents my stuff getting stolen I have to declare the whole goblin
thief thing a bit poorly thought-out.
Probably the worst idea in the game is having the gnome riddler ask a trivia
question that the average person won't know the answer to. The in-game hints say
to look on Wikipedia, but since the answer as phrased on Wikipedia is a bit
confusing I had to do the riddle section five times before I made the right
guess. This is doubled in annoying-ness by the fact that it's the last riddle
and you have to re-enter all your answers for the previous riddles beforehand.
This is tripled in annoying-ness by the simple fact that... anyone can edit
Wikipedia. Yes, I understand that its scientific articles are reasonably
accurate due to massive policing, but I might be playing Yon Astounding Castle
the one day a troll from 4chan decides to change the answer to "Goku." You just
don't know.
So, um, bottom-line is a lot of things in this are ill-conceived but it had an
OK flow overall and enough content to keep my interest. Most puzzles were
reasonably clued. There's just some stuff I would've done differently.
Reviewed by Michael Martin.
Arrrgh, argh argh argh argh argh.
If we're going to write in Ye Olde Butchered Englishe, could we maybe butcher it
with a sharper cleaver?
Your target for mimicry is Early Modern English, with maybe a few extra
archaisms thrown in. We have lots of very good text in that dialect and it's all
freely available. You don't have to get everything right as long as you get the
feeling right. Hie ye to some primary sources and get that voice running in the
back of your head.
Not directed at the author here, but please, nobody ever make an IF in Middle
English. The parser alone could probably achieve sentience and destroy humanity
to deal with all the chaotic spelling.
You should also learns to conjugates verbs; if you puts everything in the third
person singular, it will drives everyone who reads it up Ye Olde Walle if they
has even the most basic familiarity with the dialect, which everyone who's
graduated from high school basically has achieves. (Seriously. See how annoying
that is? "I" and all plurals use the basic verb stem, while thou gets -(e)st and
he/she/it gets -(e)th. It's not hard to fake! The wiki article has a few more
basic rules that make it read even more cleanly.)
Furthermore, "yon" does not mean "a"; it means "that, except further away" and
in fact survives to this day, somewhat in Modern English. (It's also similar to
the Spanish aquél or the Japanese ano.) This means, among other things, that
when you climb yon tree it stops being yon tree and starts being this tree. If
you have climbed the tree, the tree is not, if you will, anymore located over
yonder.
This is less "you're doing it wrong" and more "this made me sad", but I'm
including it anyway; the parser is familiar enough with the player that it's OK
to thou them. Just remember that thou/thy/thee works like I/my/me and you're
fine. Ye/your/you is also OK (which you did, except for using ye instead of you)
but (a) it's less Ye Olde because it conjugates just like modern English, (b)
it's kind of formal, and (c) if you are doing the Ye as in Ye Olde as well,
where printers used 'y' because they didn't have 'þ' or 'ð', it produces a name
collision. Especially since 'ye' as in second person formal/plural is pronounced
as in "Hear Ye", as written, but "ye" as in "ye olde" is supposed to be
pronounced with a voiced 'th' as in our modern 'the'. Sorting it out is work,
and so we all win if you just thou us.
A high point, though: older dialects of English were a whole lot freer with
"-ship" and "-ful" and "un-" and "-like" and such, so your early inclusion of a
chestnut tree standing nutfully in the courtyard was an excellent move.
Deep breath.
Butchery aside (though it was huge enough to damage my enjoyment significantly),
this is a perfectly acceptable silly treasure hunt. Even the riddles were fair,
except for the last one, which asks a trivia question about 20th century history
and prefaces it with "Do ye know". The 20th Century won't be for hundreds of
years; "NO" should totally have been acceptable answer.
Conclusion: If you can get past the butchery, sure, why not. It's better than
Thy Dungeonman by a wide margin, and there is in fact a game here.
Reviewed by Mike Snyder
Preconceptions:
I wonder if the author has heard of Thy Dungeonman? Is this going to be a
serious attempt at humor, a parody of a parody, or just a joke entry? It seems
like I’ve stumbled on mentions of this game looking for other reviews (and at
this point, it seems impossible to avoid), but I don’t remember any of it being
favorable. I guess I’m starting this one with very low expectations.
Review Summary:
Although it could be a very decent (if generic) puzzle-fest, the purposely
clunky way in which it lampoons Old English parody text makes it too much a
chore to read and play. It’s also a bit on the long side for an IFComp entry.
Played: 10/19/2009 for 1 hour and 45 minutes.
Score: 6 (Limited Appeal)
Transcript: here
I didn’t play this through to completion, and so I don’t feel qualified to fully
review it. From the looks of things, I finished maybe half of it, into an
underground portion where I made some progress but had to start relying more and
more on the built-in hint (the book of wisdom) and even the walkthrough. Even
with a “speedy” version of the walkthrough available and fifteen minutes to
spare, it just doesn’t seem worth it.
The disappointing thing is that nothing is wrong with a good old-fashioned
fantasy puzzle-fest. It’s certainly not everybody’s cup of tea, but I kind of
like games that are put together the way this one is. It has things to find,
puzzles to solve, areas blocked off until further progress is made, a throw-away
plot that’s at least interesting enough to justify the puzzles and draw it all
together. It’s even competently coded, and didn’t exhibit many of the quirks
I’ve come to associate with Adrift games. Part of this may be because I played
entirely using Scare (in Gargoyle), but a bigger part is probably that the
author has done a pretty good job writing a solid, working game.
So what went wrong?
It must be-ith all yon faux-Olde-English-ization of thy every sentence or
sentence-like thing. Makeseth it hard t’ readeth or something of some sort.
I don’t often feel awful for being less impressed by a game than it probably
deserves, but here, I do. The author put so much effort into this. It’s not
hastily thrown together. It’s not buggy and simple. Sure, it’s a generic puzzle
fantasy treasure collection quest, but it could have been a good one, akin to
The Colour Pink. It’s as though the author sabotaged his own work, thoroughly
and irreversibly. The protagonist comes across as a complete moron, and not in
the loveable Lost Pig sort of way (which is even worse, because the player is
described as being the protagonist).
As absurd and familiar as the game’s premise may be, it also shows cleverness
and originality. For instance, the spiral section (w, n, e, s, repeat) with
rooms all rhyming with “bakery” was sort of charming. A room description spewing
P-words must have been difficult to construct, but ultimately it’s just hard to
comprehend and a chore to visualize. I felt the gnome’s riddles were a little
easier to solve (possibly because I was using the book of wisdom and hadn’t yet
realized it was actually a cheat) than however many entries so far this year
have had riddles, but the one requiring Wikipedia sort of broke the illusion.
That’s about all the non-reviewery-type things I have to say. I’ve rated it a
“5” – passable – which means this on the Game Informer scale: “It may be obvious
that the game has lots of potential, but its most engaging features could be
undeniably flawed or not integrated into the experience.” While the writing
style is very much integrated into the experience, I don’t know if the game
would have been worlds better without it, or if it would have been just another
generic puzzly fantasy treasure hunt. I’m disappointed (in myself, if not the
game) for giving up before completing it. Still, it must say something
meaningful when even a person who has suffered through far worse in this and
other IFComps would choose to quit.
Update: Upon further reflection, I’m bumping the score up to a “6.” Enough good
is here, and (whether liked or disliked) the text style is thorough and never
lets up, that it deserves more credit than I initially gave. It is a
recommendable game (especially if played at leisure, without feeling the
pressure of a two-hour voting limit), although it’s not going to be the right
choice for everyone.
Reviewed by George Oliver
The amazing thing about this game is I stuck with it -- even after the totally
unclued up exit in the hovel, looking something up in Wikipedia (?!), and the
random apply this to that sort of thing going on here. Regardless YAC is
unabashedly what it is, and pulled off with a style and unity most games don't
come close to. Still it was far too much of this sort of thing for me to stick
with it; I quit after about an hour when the goblin stole my treasure and peeked
at the walkthrough. I'll come back to this on a rainy afternoon. I don't know
why but I had fun playing this game.
Execution: 8. Despite the random difficulty and some minor typos this is really
well put together in my opinion.
Creativity: 8. The work of a fertile mind.
WTF!?: 7. This gets points for the Olde Englishe (which isn't random as far as I
can tell -- there is a curse of spakery after all).
Score: 7.6
Reviewed by Shane Fitzgerald-Gale
Yon Astounding Castle. I’ve heard tell of ye!
Oh dear, i see it’s written with Adrift. And in Olde Worlde English too. Joy of
joys. How lucky am i? Can’t say i’m looking forward to it. But then, who knows?
Maybe it’ll surprise me. So, on with the raping and pillaging.
Good morrow yon feisty wench. <nudge nudge, wink wink>
Oh, and work was shit, thanks for asking.
I confess, i didn’t give this one the time it deserved(huh!?!). No, i gave it a
lot more time than it deserved. Oh, that was harsh. I regret it already.
Especially since i spent all of 10 mins on it. I don’t know whether it was the
headache brought on by the Olde Worlde English stuff(although it couldn’t have
helped), or the fact that it’s clearly a faux medieval type thing or maybe just
the fact that i simply wasn’t in the mood for this kind of nonsense today, but i
just couldn’t bring myself to go any further at the moment(and i hadn’t got
far).
<sigh>
Alright, what i’m going to do is this. I’ll hold off on a rating until i’ve
played all the rest, and then, and only if i get time before the voting, i’ll
return to it and see if i can face it. Who knows, maybe i’ll love it. But
seriously now, i just can’t face it, and since this is my little universe with
my little words in it, i’m just gonna say… oh nothing really!
Updates are highly likely for this one.
Reviewed by Shane Fitzgerald-Gale
Ya know, i really don’t know my own mind on this one.
I want to like it, i really do, but find it extremely annoying. I think it wants
to give me a good time but just, well there’s no other way to put it, it annoys
me. It also wants me to explore and enjoy and laugh and, yes, yes i’ve done all
those things.
But it’s damned bloody annoying.
It just sodding IS.
So even though i hate it(i don’t, i love it) and i’m pretty sure it hates me
too(no, no it loves me), it would not be fair to Not Rate this one. It’s
hateful, and yet sweet and endearing. It wants to cuddle me to death and yet
desires nothing more than to watch me die slowly and painfully while i look
lovingly into it’s big, beautiful eyes. And i find i want to kiss it and cuddle
it and, and… hell, i dunno!
But it’s so very sweet and so very, very fluffy. And there are so few truly
sweet AND fluffy things left in life.
I think i like it.
I do, i do. I really like it.
I’m ‘a give it a big, big score. Just because it’s so hatefully lovable.
Well done (i think).
This has been a non-review of Yon Astounding Castle.
Reviewed by Rob Menke
Technical: 9
Puzzles: 7
Story: 9
SCARE problems again. It gives me no end of trouble. Each Adrift game seems to
be tailor-made for a specific interpreter, and crashes all others. This game is
no exception. Granted, this is an anecdotal problem — not a technical one on the
part of the author.
Cute introduction.
OK, what was cute is now bordering on the annoying.
Well, at least the first bang-you’re-dead gave me an explicit warning.
OK, being the grammar nazi I am, the horrible misuse of “ye” (second person
plural, equivalent to German “ihr” and the modern American “y’all”) is really
annoying. Unless I have a tapeworm that I do not know about…
Gonna need a bigger map…
Looks like only the six cardinal directions work here.
I’m no longer annoyed by the language. I’m annoyed by the number of times I’ve
had to go across the entire map…
Not much more to complain about. Generally fun to this point.
This was a cute game, but a bit long for a competition entry. Still, the parts I
successfully explored were clever. The stilted writing style was annoying at
first, but I adjusted. (I had the same problem with Lost Pig when I first played
it.) The silver keys were a nuisance. The occasional find-x-use-x puzzle is
welcome, but the sheer number of places that keys could be hidden was
ridiculous. Also, a lot of the puzzles involved crossing vast distances: this
was a problem I had with Zork Zero too: the map was too big and many rooms
existed for no reason but to add atmosphere and/or annoy the player. The second
make item puzzle (which required me to scan the walkthru) seemed a little too
complex. Surprised there weren’t any complaints during playtesting.
Best of the lot so far, but that’s faint praise.
Reviewed by Nate Dovel
I loved Zork. I don't remember how I discovered it, since I am obviously far too
young and handsome to have encountered the game in its original era. But one
day, my directionless Internet escapades stumbled across The Great Underground
Empire, and I was enthralled. It was random, silly, treasure-hunting goodness,
the perfect salve for my exploration itch. A quick trigger finger was
unnecessary, thank goodness, and for once, my creative vocabulary came in handy,
because that parser certainly wasn't doing me any favors. I will never forget
that experience.
But folks. Honestly. No more Zork-era tribute games. Please. The Thy Dungeonman
series did it best; the rest I've experienced are amateurish and dull. Think
outside the box, for Lord Flathead's sake. Case in point: Yon Astounding Castle
takes all the tropes of the genre, removes their charm, and then makes it as
inaccessible as possible for the unfamiliar, modern player.
I started out hopeful. The tutorial was a decent, if fairly standard,
introduction to the genre. The amusing cover art was a nostalgic callback to the
simpler times of computerized gaming. The title is read aloud by everyone's
favorite intentionally unrealistic computer voice, a la Stephen Hawking. But it
quickly dawns on you just how much improperly used old English this game relies
on, presumably for laughs. The kind of turkey-leg-vendor-at-the-Renaissance-Fair
medieval humor you would use if you were slightly tipsy and joking with your
friends, lots of "yon"s and words ending in "-eth". Certainly not historically
accurate, but not even cutely mangled, as Thy Dungeonman does so well. The
author's comedic precision is roughly equivalent to a shotgun aiming for a penny
on top of a bulk-store jar of mayonnaise at one-and-a-half paces.
I can't overstate how unreadable this game is. The word "ye" is used
interchangeably for "you", "your", and "the", and is often jarringly shoved into
a sentence five or six times. For some reason, the author finds it hilarious to
incessantly vacillate on the simple naming of objects, such as saying "You see
here a table or some table-like object" or- I kid you not- referring to "travelers
and/or traveler-type people and/or objects." Even the walkthrough gave me a
headache, when I inevitably had to use it or risk inflicting blunt-force trauma
on my innocent laptop. Note to authors: A good walkthrough is not a repetitive
and abbreviated list of the fewest possible commands it takes to win with a
complete lack of specific game context. It should be a massage, a relaxing
experience prior to returning to the harsh world, or in this case, the
frustrating game.
The story, naturally, is non-existent. You have no name, background, or goal
except the acquisition of treasure, nor does your environment or the people you
encounter. In this, at least, it accurately emulates Zork's one flaw, the one we
all forgive because it was so fun the first time. You are just plunked down in
front of a castle, and never even really told to explore it. Exploring is just
what you do in IF, right? So why bother filling in the details? People are
smart, they'll create their own backstory. And no one wants multi-dimensional
characterization, anyway- let's face it, people are stupid. The old guy is
hungry. You find some oatmeal. Give it to him. We don't need to know why he's
hanging around a dusty basement surrounded by poisoned spikes. He just is. Man
Vs. Oatmeal- that's one of the classic conflict archetypes, so by no means
elaborate on that.
One or two good jokes float intact amongst the mess. Something about "ye grandma
could probably beateth ye up with one hand tied behind her walker", and oh! That
sequence of room names which all rhyme in a chucklicious way. I hope you enjoy
those monkeyshines, player; you'll be rereading them constantly as you trek back
and forth through the same rooms, because the in-game teleport feature meant to
lance that proverbial zit or zit-type thing is completely glitched. I guess they
didn't have beta-testers back in the day of Tiberius Thingamus, the alleged
original game scribe. Or at least none without leprosy and the annoying tendency
to each require different conversation parsing just to wring out the one
scripted piece of dialog they contain: ">ASK BETA-TESTER ABOUT GLITCHING". "The
beta-tester smiles vacantly and teleports his oatmeal into his cranium,
rendering him useless, and also dead."
Zork is dead, people. All dead. Stop going through its pockets for loose change.
(See what I did there? I made a reference to a niche movie instead of making my
review strong enough to stand on its own without stealing the successful parts
of someone else's much-beloved work of fiction. What an ass I am.)
Reviewed by David Fletcher
A title with an exclamation mark is usually a bad sign, and a title with an
exclamation mark in the middle is probably a worse one. The awful ye olde speake
in the blurb is likewise repellent.
Oh god. It is all like that.
I've seen lots of games with grammatical errors before. This is the first I've
seen that was entirely composed of grammatical errors.
This is the third millenium, not the second.
Badly implemented from the start, where you have to climb a tree and "climb
tree" doesn't work. Played through with the walkthrough and it doesn't appear to
improve much.
Reviewed by George Shannon
I’ll admit it – I cannot get the title of this game out of my head. I read the
first few paragraphs and thought, “Seriously? Seriously? You’re brave, game.
You’re very brave.” And somehow I enjoyed the faux-medieval romance voice the
whole time I played it. I know some people hated it instantly, and I guess I
can’t blame them. The whole thing is better if you ham it up in your head,
though. Imagine everything read by a slightly drunk Patrick Stewart. Or,
possibly, a slightly drunk Patrick Stewart dressed like Don Quixote.
The game is basically a one-joke game wrapped around a old-school treasure hunt
in a castle. The joke, like I said, I liked. The treasure hunt is loooong. I hit
two hours and only seemed to be halfway (if number of treasures is any
indication). Fortunately they were relatively active hours; there are lots of
things to do. It’s just that a one-joke game wrapped around anything can’t be
too long.
Something I would have preferred is simply a smaller map – I felt like I was
wandering around in random directions; the map overall just looks like a jumble
with no attachment to a real place.
Reviewed by Dark Star
Yon Astounding Castle! of some sort. Right off the title sounds weird, and it
becomes a tone used throughout the game that grates on my nerves. Here’s an
example:
Ye standeth in ye castle courtyard. Bountiful greenery & greenery-like things
bloometh all o'er ye place. Yon curious buildings stand at all sides of ye,
except for ye west which is occupied by ye castle walls and yon drawbridge.
Also, here there occupieth ye grounds yon weird squirrel.
Writing like this makes it a chore to play the game, slowing me down as I try to
figure out what the author is saying. It might make sense, but it sure doesn't
flow. Though I did find if you could get past this there was actually some nice
writing.
I didn’t play the game for long, so I can’t give it a proper review, but I did
find that the game relied on some ludicrous puzzles. Climbing up the chimney? I
was picturing a fire cooking the stew, but with all that crazy writing it's hard
to get a clear mental image. I also ran into a set of riddles, and I'm figuring
everybody is going to have to turn to the walkthrough to get through those.
I scored this game a 5. I didn't get far into it so I didn't run into any
technical errors, but the writing felt off and the story is cliché. There's not
a lot of room for playing around, Adrift is pretty strict and there's a limited
number of verbs, and everything felt empty with no real NPCs around. Strange for
any castle I’d figure. I’m sorry; I just couldn’t get into it.
Reviews should be considered copyrighted by their respective authors.
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