A text-only adventure going classic lines. Your task is to rescue a princess from within a gloomy haunted castle with its many rooms, dungeons and moat.

As I confidently set off to achieve this aim. I was soon frustrated by the first of many problems - I could not get past the gate!

After numerous attempts to pass this obstacle I decided I would have to cheat and examine the program.

The program is loaded as machine code but is in fact mostly written in Basic and uses over 30K of memory.

I was impressed by the use of single letter entry for direction, e.g. N for North. This makes any game more enjoyable and faster to play. Response time was surprisingly quick and the program even calls you by name.

Yet again, the reliable Dragon tape system had no problem loading even this size of program.

If you like text-only adventures, or have not yet tried one of these most frustrating games, then Horror Castle may be worth adding to your collection, as it is easy to use, but definitely not easy to crack. As I write, I am still having difficulty making progress.

E.C.