Milon’s Secret Castle (NES)
Finding a secret in a video game can be a delightful little addition to your adventure. Whether it’s just a neat little touch or something almost as substantial as the regular content, a secret makes use of the interactive nature of a video game to provide a nice surprise for those willing to go off the beaten path. A game teeming with secrets to uncover may sound like a fulfilling experience, but Milon’s Secret Castle on the NES made the mistake of designing important tasks for the main adventure like they were secrets. Rather than finding something hidden becoming a fun surprise, merely trying to progress ends up an obnoxious hunt by leaning into the secret hunting style far too much.
The Milon in Milon’s Secret Castle is a young boy in the land of Hudson who finds himself isolated from other people. Since the people of Hudson use music to communicate and he has no talent for it, Milon feels like he doesn’t belong, but before he undertakes a quest of self-discovery, he decides to check in on Queen Eliza at her Secret Castle. In somewhat fortuitous timing, Milon finds the castle right after the Evil Warlord captured its people and Queen Eliza. Now able to step forward and become the hero of a people who never knew him, Milon is granted the ability to shoot magical bubbles by the castle’s magician, the bubbles able to expose helpful items the queen had hid around the Secret Castle before her capture.
Unfortunately, the idea of Queen Eliza littering her castle with secret goodies is the first major flaw in this side-scrolling platformer. Milon’s Secret Castle sees you entering doors on different floors of the castle to search the areas within for useful items, but for the most part when you enter a space, you’ll just see a load of block platforms and various enemies patrolling the space. You need to use your magic bubbles to start exposing items absolutely necessary to make progress, and there really isn’t any sort of hint or clue on where you might find the tools and resources you need. Instead, most every space in Milon’s Secret Castle must be explored thoroughly, Milon needing to constantly be spraying bubbles in case a block is actually money in disguise or a hidden door might exist in an innocuous spot. Sometimes you may have to do a bit of tricky platforming to get to a spot that proves to have something important, but other times items just as crucial will just be inside a random block in an unassuming area, and things are made worse because you can’t be sure what you exactly need to progress at various points in the adventure.
Finding money is always useful, there being various stores that sell items with sometimes vaguely explained but absolutely vital benefits, but Milon’s Secret Castle takes things even further by having another important item type only possible to find by bonking Milon’s head on the underside of blocks. Music boxes are required to find to open the way to the game’s boss battles, each music box coming with a quick minigame where you can earn cash by grabbing the right types of music notes, but one thing about cash is, early on, it is a very finite resource. While near the end you will start to find money pick-ups that refresh, at first you will need to scour for every scrap of currency you can find to be able to buy useful items, and while there are technically optional secrets to find as well like honeycombs to expand your life meter or umbrellas that increase your shot speed, you’ll certainly need these if you want later bosses to be feasible, making hunting every inch of even the tallest or most obnoxious rooms important.
Unfortunately, sometimes you can enter a space before it is feasible to fully explore it, adding some confusion since you won’t yet know about useful items like the shoes that allow you to take often hidden springs to reach high areas. You’ll encounter enemies of living fire and try to kill them with your bubbles, only to not realize you aren’t even dealing damage since you don’t have the appropriate item in your inventory. A few shopkeepers do give you very short hints that try to point you in the right direction, but even when you get an item like the hammer that can expose hidden doorways, you are left to figure out where that hammer can even be used. Even when something like pushable blocks becomes a factor, sometimes it can be hard to even get the action to trigger, making you possibly doubt whether the block you were trying to move can even be budged. Milon’s own movement isn’t the greatest either, the often tall spaces you explore requiring some tight jumps at times but Milon needs a little running start to cover decent distance and might need to get hit by a boxing glove trap to squish him down before he can fit between gaps that didn’t look too tight to fit through. Frequently falling while just trying to thoroughly spray bubbles on every inch of a stage ends up even more obnoxious, and that’s before you factor in other hidden elements like pitfall traps or unexpected springs that can waste more of your time.
Thankfully, you can take your time in Milon’s Secret Castle… or at least you could if the game’s enemies weren’t so persistent. Referred to in the manual as demon-monsters, the Evil Warlord’s minions do have a few tame foes like cycloptic slimes that slowly patrol, but a great deal of them are flying fiends that can pass through floors and walls and might launch fireballs at you that similarly ignore the barriers you are bound by. Unfortunately, Milon also has no mercy invincibility to help him out, meaning when an enemy is ramming into you, you can end up taking multiple hits in a row before you can even attempt an escape. You can take them out with a bubble attack, your shots having a little bit of reach thankfully, but even if they don’t launch a fireball so quickly while you’re trying to attack that you couldn’t have avoided it, enemies respawn rather rapidly. You’ll rid yourself of a pest and barely have had time to move along before it starts coming back to life, although there is one advantage to these nuisances. The regular enemies can be killed to farm hearts, and if you find a less risky place to do it, you can bulk up a bit before you tackle some unknown challenge ahead or a boss fight. It is tedious and you might be tempted to waste precious money on the paltry heals sold at stores instead, but it at least gives you some way to avoid dying and losing all progress, because before you defeat the first boss, a game over is a full game over. In a nice bit of kindness, the manual does speak of a “Continuing Option”, where after a Game Over, if you hold left and press start, you’ll be right back in the game with all your items and cash. Sometimes you’ll even be in the last room you left off in, but also you’ll have very little health, making that heart gathering process an unfortunate part of getting back into the action.
Milon’s Secret Castle has a range of bosses you need to face to unlock the final fight and sometimes it’s not even clear which items are needed to make these bosses appear, but once you have satisfied the conditions, you’ll find yourself mostly facing the same kind of foe over and over again. While the final fight with the Evil Warlord is unique, every boss encounter before then is with some large hopping beast that lobs magic spheres your way. There are seven of these fights and besides a visual difference, the usual thing that sets them apart is how long the fight takes, Milon also needing to hop around and fire his bubbles to try and hit their faces. Committal jumps can mean there are moments where a leap attack looks safe only for you to get hit, and while very late in the game you can get items that give you some better aerial control, most of your deaths in Milon’s Secret Castle will probably come from the guessing games involved in trying to hit the bosses and avoid their attacks. Thankfully you can leave the rooms in case you consider it a lost cause, but it doesn’t make the fight any better that there’s an option to flee from its obnoxiousness. This is at least better than regular rooms where you need to find a key and the exit door to leave, reaching the exit required even if you’ve visited it before. With how many plain doors you enter in the castle it can be difficult to keep track of which one you even want to go to or have unfinished business in, so having to replay some of the more tedious rooms just for the chance to exit makes Milon’s Secret Castle drag on even more than its dull bubble hunting gameplay already requires.
THE VERDICT: An absolutely obnoxious secret hunt with almost no hints on what to look for or where to find it, Milon’s Secret Castle ends up turning its platforming spaces into sluggish searches for whatever blocks were arbitrarily chosen to hold vital items. Even just moving around normally has its flaws thanks to Milon’s poor controls, this exacerbated by other aggravating factors like hidden traps and enemies that not only can deal several hits in rapid succession but reappear quickly after you take them out. With most every boss battle also being essentially the same but taking longer to beat each time, Milon’s Secret Castle ends up a confusing and unrewarding experience because even finding the necessary hidden secrets feels like you just happened to stumble across the needle in the haystack.
And so, I give Milon’s Secret Castle for the Nintendo Entertainment System…
An ATROCIOUS rating. It might be better to think of Milon’s Secret Castle not as a case of finding a needle in a haystack, but having to find multiples needles in the same haystack without any clue on how many you’re looking for. Sure you’ll find some of them, but the fact that even finding them isn’t that special since looking for one is just as meaningful as finding another takes the wind out of the sails of secret hunting. You are relieved to see a honeycomb certainly, but also finding it was just as much a process as finding a single dollar. Funnily enough, the few moments the game does try to telegraph there could be something interesting nearby might not even technically count as much of a secret since its the rare moment the game does provide clues you can deduce. On the other hand, Milon’s Secret Castle is not a cryptic game in the traditional sense, because you are not often figuring out things so much as running through the process of elimination. Spray everything with bubbles, hit your head on some blocks, and try to push some blocks and hope the game detects your intent properly, and that’s pretty much the extent of finding secrets. Different rooms can try new things with the layout like long vertical shafts you break apart to make landing spots, a room where most every surface is a spring, or a room where you need to walk over falling trap floors to move around, but they don’t make the process more interesting, especially since gimmickry can hinder your already rough movement while enemies fly around unimpeded and whittle you down. The continue option and lack of timer at least make Milon’s Secret Castle possible to complete after brute forcing, retreading, and for most people, consulting a guide to even have a hint of where crucial items are or what they even help with.
If you knew what to be looking for and blocks held clues on their purpose, Milon’s Secret Castle could have been a game about trying to hunt it all down while surviving the enemies and overcoming tricky jumping challenges. Instead everything is heavily obfuscated and the game is far too coy in telling you what’s needed to progress, and it is quite possible that even when you blast a block with bubbles, you might get the angle wrong and dismiss something that should have broken open as unimportant. Milon’s Secret Castle wants to make the excitement of finding something secret a constant element in its design, but by making most every important step on the journey a secret to uncover, you grow fatigued and the thrill of discovery is lost, especially since the hunt requires very little thought to undertake. You aren’t figuring out how to beat Milon’s Secret Castle, you just eventually eliminate every option until you can move on to repeat that process in room after room until you can finally put this obnoxious NES platformer behind you for good.