The Haunted Hoard: Spooky Castle (ZX Spectrum)

Spooky Castle for the ZX Spectrum is a game you could beat in three minutes if you didn’t die at all. However, the entire experience is based around death being incredibly common, hard to avoid, and rather unfair, the player given three lives to survive an experience whose myriad issues practically guarantee you’ll get a few game overs before you even see the second screen of this rough 2D platformer.

In Gormless Gary’s quest to save Princess Clare he’ll find Spooky Castle a location lacking in creativity but still making remarkably efficient use of the same variables to aggravate potential players. The first problem comes in moving Gary around at all. Climbing up or down ladders requires you to be positioned just right to actually scale them. Getting onto ladders quickly is definitely a necessary skill since it can be the difference between survival and immediate death by way of the two enemy types, so if you are just a little bit off from standing directly in front of it that can cost you a precious life. You can at least try to pick your moments so that it’s slightly safe if you’re not lined up perfectly, but other problems arise with the ladders despite the player having to use them in almost every room. If you jump onto the tile with the ladder from above, Gary will slightly sink into the space, not able to climb down the ladder or move to the sides. He needs to jump back out, but the enemies that come at you are so quick that landing in this space will likely doom you since if you did jump here, you were already likely trying to avoid a lethal situation to start with. Perhaps even worse is the fact that being on a ladder can sometimes lead to inevitable health loss since you can only get off a ladder at the top or bottom, but to understand that danger I must first introduce the two enemy types that make this experience so terrible.

Ghosts are the main worry in Spooky Castle because a single bit of contact with them will immediately kill Gary. Periodically, a ghost will appear from the right side of the screen and fly across it horizontally, the player having some time to see it coming provided they’re not trying to enter the room exits that are always on the right. The areas a ghost appears on a screen are always set so you can reliably predict where it might come from, its choices adjusting based on your own position in the level. Just because the ghost’s appearance has some degree of reliability to it does not make it a well designed obstacle though. You essentially need a running jump to clear it properly, the rooms are rather small and often containing other concerns like fires that occupy that movement space and landing on one will kill you just as instantly as a spirit. So, you need to sometimes wait for the ghost to appear, leap over it, and then make what progress you can before waiting out another ghost’s appearance. Sometimes though the ceiling might bonk Gary’s head as you go for the jump and lead to him landing on the ghost, so that’s another unfortunate consideration to throw on the pile.

Maybe if just timing things to get over the ghost was your only concern, Spooky Castle still wouldn’t be good, but it could at least be a mite more tolerable. The instant kill ghost appearances at regular intervals are complicated further by the bats though, two appearing at a time from above and not following the same rules the ghosts do. Bats will fly in and choose when they want to start moving horizontally. This can mean there are moments you are literally unable to avoid at least some damage, such as when you’re on a ladder and a bat is descending down that ladder all of a sudden as well. The bats do seem to want to fly towards the player if they can line it up, but sometimes they just don’t, so they’re not as predictable as the ghosts and thus harder to avoid. Bats at least drain health instead of instantly kill you, the player losing more health the longer they’re in contact with one. This can mean there are moments where you enter a room and your choice is to let a ghost kill you or leap into the bats flying towards the ledge above where you won’t have the health to weather their attack. The bats are too inconsistent to manage and their freedom of movement means they can sap health in an instant no matter how carefully you try to play.

There is no real mastering Spooky Castle, it’s instead about hoping your bat luck is good. Planning around the ghost movement and understanding the various room types will help you do better, but the bats are a wild card that can rob you of a precious life through no fault of your own. As mentioned, there are moments where entering a screen you’re practically doomed, the door you enter from always locking behind you. That door locking also prevents one of the game’s small hope spots from finding purchase. There are pick-ups in the game, both of health and extra lives. However, to leave a room you must first grab a key, it opening any of the locked doors in the room but no two rooms in a row will have keys placed to make popping back and forth between them easy. To beat the game legitimately though you likely will need to find the areas where you can enter a room, grab an extra life, go back, and then hopefully grab the key in there without dying so you can repeat the process. The game does position rooms to try and deny this trick though, the only keys that are easy to grab being ones positioned in dead ends. Yes, there are dead ends, meaning all the work you put into exiting a room can pay off with you having to go back into the previous room and grab the key again to try another door. Rooms are small at least despite the difficulty in safely traversing them and the way onward to the end of the castle is always to the right, but there’s even a problem with the room design we still must go over.

There are 17 total rooms in Spooky Castle, each taking up one screen. When you start off, each room is a new challenge. While only the first and last look visually distinct since they’re the castle entrance and exit essentially, the levels in between aren’t given too much to work with besides ladders, ledges at different elevations (or a treasure chest that acts like one), fire, walls, and how many exits the room might have. There are some decorations on the wall that serve no purpose, but the important parts are lightly shifted around so you do feel like you’re facing something nominally new even if it’s not shaking up the formula much. However, when you reach the game’s tenth screen you might get a sense of deja vu, as it is actually the same exact design as the fourth room. When I reached screen 11 and realized I was seeing the third room again, I actually worried I had somehow activated a teleport to an early room by picking the wrong door. However, that wasn’t the case, as from room 10 to 16 Spooky Castle reuses the room designs from earlier without alteration save for the order they’re stitched together. It’s not like the game is reusing different designs every time either, as you’ll see room three’s design rehashed twice during this period of repetition. The sad truth is that doing a level again doesn’t make it easier since so much of the difficulty comes from bat movement, so it just feels like your reward for getting further into the game is to repeat content that would already be incredibly familiar since you’ve no doubt died in those room designs many times to get there.

THE VERDICT: Spooky Castle is a short adventure made agonizingly long and repetitive by its reliance on cheap deaths. You play as a hero who struggles to get on ladders and must get a running jump in small walking spaces to clear the instant kill ghosts that constantly appear. Even if you do plan around your bad movement and the ghost appearances, bats move in unpredictable ways so you can end up doomed to die in a game where it’s three lives before you need to restart and chances to get more can often put you in the same lethal danger you’re trying to build yourself up against. Repeated room designs make the game repetitive on top of unsatisfying and needlessly frustrating, the danger far too great and overcoming specific trials doesn’t have any time to be celebrated since bats and ghosts will just keep coming to harass you.

And so, I give Spooky Castle for the ZX Spectrum…

An ATROCIOUS rating. While being on the ZX Spectrum at least gave it a nice range of colors compared to its drabber Commodore 64 counterpart, Spooky Castle is bound to provide constant frustration no matter the platform. Gary has to be maneuvered just so to avoid instant death obstacles or ghosts that just keep coming, and even if you can get that part down without any troubles with the jump distance or ladder climbing, bats throw those efforts off with their unreliable behavior. The game puts forth no effort to ensure their arrival and movement is fair, the player sometimes doomed when they enter a room and other times stuck on a ladder with no hope of clearing it quickly enough as the bat flies down to greet them. While repeating room designs that were already lacking strong identities serves as a wet blanket for anyone who does put in the effort to make it that far, really it is the bats that serve as the straw to break the camel’s back. Bland room recycling, bad character control, and the instant kill ghosts could all come together into something awful but surmountable, the game at least being “fair” in that all those elements behave consistently and you just need to learn how to overcome them. The bats throw a monkey wrench in to ensure there are unavoidable deaths and punishments waiting for those who do take the time to learn the safe ways through a room, and by putting both healing and extra lives in spaces where you’ll probably lose such things trying to replenish them, even the little moments where it looks like you found some salvation turn sour.

The fact Spooky Castle is so short if you remove all the difficulty really puts into perspective how little you achieve even if you overcome its brutal difficulty. It’s not a test of your dexterity or skill really, the bats keeping you moving so you can’t carefully approach things but also undermining the areas that could have worked as strategic obstacles. If it was easier to get on ladders and there were no bats Spooky Castle’s would likely be very easy to the point of perhaps being too boring, but that would be far preferable to a game that perhaps can’t be called boring because it’s enraging the player by putting them in no-win scenarios. The fact a game with so little content or variation can feel strained and repetitive goes to show how damaging the game’s poor attempt at upping its challenge worked out for it, Spooky Castle certainly not worth the time or emotional investment to actually save poor Princess Clare.