Previous Next

Transylvanian Castle is an adventure/exploration game inspired by the famous story narrated in Bram Stoker's Dracula, and by those titles of the same genre, often programmed in BASIC, which were popular in the early 1980s.

The plot goes as usual: Doctor Van Helsing, an expert in the occult, travels to Transylvania to investigate some mysterious disappearances of local people, which seem to be connected to Count Dracula, a strange character living in a castle located in an isolated place. Van Helsing enters the castle, but the heavy front door suddenly closes behind him. In order to get out, he will have to fight against strange creatures, defeat Dracula himself and find the key to the door. All within three days, otherwise the curse permeating the castle will take his life.

Van Helsing is controlled with the keyboard and may carry up to three items. These might be weapons of various strengths, a ring and a shield for protection, food or potions to recover lost energy. Weapons can be equipped in the right hand and protections in the left, thus increasing the character's attack and defence.

In the castle rooms you can find, randomly arranged at game start, common enemies and special enemies. The former are different in strength and resistance and can be attacked with bare hands or one of the common weapons, and among them there is also a purple tentacle: a reference to Maniac Mansion or Day Of The Tentacle, perhaps? The latter can only be killed with special weapons, different for each one of them: for example, the hammer and stake are used against Dracula. Killed enemies also give a certain amount of gold coins, which only purpose is to provide the player with a sort of score. However, given the totally random placement of monsters, it may happen that from the start you are surrounded by too much powerful enemies, so that Van Helsing succumbs immediately or almost. It would have been better to modify the algorithm in order to insert the weaker enemies and at least one weapon in the rooms near to the entrance, so as not to have to be forced to face the stronger ones immediately and just with your fists.

The author writes at the end of the manual: "This game is not original, nor does it pretend to be. It was conceived and designed to pay tribute to the wonderful 80's, their games, their music, their series and especially Chris Dorrell, designer and programmer of video games for 8 Bit computers and author of 2 magnificent games that are among my favourites, The Oracle's Cave and The Runes of Zendos". In fact, Transylvanian Castle has an extremely simple appearance, like a title of almost forty years ago: a small window at the top right schematically depicts the action, while the rest shows the characteristics of the player, the objects, a map of the rooms visited so far and information relating to the progress of the game. Everything happens in an equally simple way - you enter a room, attack its occupant, and if you stay alive, take the object stored there, until you find the key, kill Dracula and go back to the initial room. All of this while time flows inexorably.

There are neither other goals to achieve, nor skills to upgrade, nor non-playing characters to interact with: Transylvanian Castle is all there. A "light" title, then, but worth of interest, especially if you like the genre, and different from the majority of this year's homebrew productions.