Castle of Doom: Final Rating

United States
Released 1987
Genre: Text adventure featuring illustrations
Developer: Foxware
Date Started: 23 June 2025
Date Ended: 28 June 2025
Total Hours: 4.0
Difficulty: 4/5
Final Rating: 12

Well, giving up on the first playthrough I’m trying on this blog certainly doesn’t look good on my record, but I just can’t bring myself to continue with Castle of Doom and its annoying parser, while I feel really stuck with that wrench that seems so promising yet ultimately lead me nowhere. And I’m trying to keep in mind this blog isn’t focussing on finishing games bot more to catalog and rate them, and hopefully to tell an interesting backstory now and then. So, let’s see what I can tell you about Castle of Doom.

Castle of Doom was developed by Foxware, released in 1987 as Public Domain software, with the source code being released as Shareware. The developer freely admits this is “designed as a demo for programmers more than a commercial-quality adventure”, and to honestly, it shows. The game is a text adventure featuring graphics for each location, think the later Infocom games, but with a simple verb-noun parser that is just not up to the task. Let’s see how it fares in my rating categories.

Programming:
Writing a new parser running under AmigaOS in 1987 surely was a valiant effort, I don’t want to undermine that. The playable result in Castle of Doom however was... lackluster, even for what the developer himself described as a simple demo. Main problems where all kinds of inconsistencies (for example, NORTH works, but only GO UP does, not just UP), and bugs like the rope that magically was tied to a balcony but at the same time in my inventory. I’m not counting the weird death loops as the first version of the game I tried was likely just corrupted, but there nonetheless was an annoying bug that forced me to click the parser window whenever I changed the room. 3/10

Controls:
I’ve described this category pretty much with the parsers issues already: Moving about the castle and its surroundings feels unwieldy, pretty much doing anything does. Overall, moving through the came felt unnessecarily cumbersome, and the little windows with navigation buttons didn’t really help, either. I have to admit I don’t really have all that much first-hand experience with text adventures, but I found the way to initiate dialogues a bit strange: The parser is incapable of handling complex inputs, so you first have to address the character you want to interact with to put them in dialogue mode, then you can input common interrogatives (like “WHO”, “WHERE”, etc.) followed by the topic you want to discuss. After this, the character automatically leaves dialogue mode, but it all felt so clunky and unreliable I’m not sure I got it correctly. 1/10

Vibe:
There is a very slight medieval vibe to it, but really not much. 1/10

Graphics:
Very mixed. Some parts looked quite nice in a minimalist way (take the crocodile, or that royal painting, for example), others looked absolutely terrible, like most walls inside the castle which looked a lot like they were results of Deluxe Paint’s perspective tools. Added to that, the parser output just overdid it. I’m appreciating the intention to print the visible objects and exits, but the game did this after every damn command and for some more crowded rooms it just felt like unnecessary gibberish that kept you from identifying important elements. 2/10

This screenshot both manages to demonstrate the sometimes garish art style and the cluttered parser output.

Story:
I couldn’t play all that far but keeping in mind this was a demo game to show off the parser technology, I bet there wasn’t much of a story in the first place. Folding puzzles into this category, I think the few I encountered weren’t completely bad. Yes, I was annoyed by the guard, but the unexpected time limit was a nice touch so early in the game, and while having to cut the painting felt somewhat random it used the graphics for puzzle design. And yeah, I guess it sounds like I’m grasping at straws here, but hey, cut the author some slack. 3/10

Audio:
None. 0/10

Fun:
I had a bit of fun exploring the castle and trying out stuff, but the parser managed to get in my way far too often to keep my interest. 2/10

Final Rating: 12

Overall:
I’m feeling a bit bad about rating Castle of Doom so low, because it sure went a lot of work into this, mainly the parser, but unfortunately, the final result was just not all that enjoyable.

Foxware apparently was a one-man show based in Las Cruces, New Mexico. I ran into an entry for Castle of Doom in the The Classic Adventures Solution Archive that gave the name of the developer as Harry James Fox, and credited him for three earlier games on the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, Cave-In, Temple of Terror, and Death Wheel, all released in 1985, written in BASIC with the latter one written in the Tex-Comp Adventure Editor. I first doubted this as I found no evidence to back it up but when I switched to the second disk image after the original bugged out on me, lo and behold, I saw Cave-In as the window title before the actual game started. My best guess is the author started out on the Amiga rewriting his old game but ended up creating a new one instead, but the name string stuck around.