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Yes! Further spawn from the baleful union of Dungeon with Dragon. Maybe humans just love being like rats in mazes, as long as they have an escape key. I certainly enjoyed prowling through Vampire Castle.

The staple music is Bach's Toccata & Fugue ("Phantom of the Opera" to adventure freaks). My musical son was offended by some inaccurate notes, but I found it fun, and eerie, which is important as it is played through much of the loading and to punctuate certain events. Other sound effects, plentiful and dramatic, include crashings, chimes, dripping... I won't give any more away!

This program ranks almost as a text only adventure, but there were occasional "surprise graphics" which were startling and so good that one could have wished for more. The text was well written, evocative, and humorous at times. I liked having to meet up with a "gypsy garlic salesperson" and felt a full-blooded (sorry!) surrealist, wandering through a castle bearing a hang-glider.

Messages were reasonably varied, typing errors prompting such sympathetic responses as "Perhaps it's your teeth chattering, but..."

A time element was included, and proved relevant to the storyline. However, one could do with the information that holding down RETURN not only elicits a column of chirpy queries as to what the adventurer thinks he is doing, but also puts the clock forward. A useful fact if you prefer to fight vampires at dawn!

In this respect, documentation is not adequate. This has been said before (e.g. review of Kubla Khan) but needs repeating: the vocabulary was quite wide, but one could do with a list of computer-acceptable words. Nouns would often be literally a "dead" giveaway in Vampire Castle, but a full list of verbs would have saved much groping and irritation. Authors, take note!

The adventure was well constructed. Like a good detective thriller, however improbable the plot, it all looked coherent within its own terms, in retrospect. There was only one pointless clue, the word ALUCARD. After all, we *know* we're tackling vampires.

Retrospect for me came when I consulted the cheat-sheet provided with the package. This adventure was certainly hard to solve; even afterwards, going through a sequence (there were plenty!) to achieve the final staking of the vampire was by no means easy. And this is quite a big recommendation.

B. C. Timmins