Dark Castle is not a video game, and I repeat, not a video game. Dark Castle actually is a psychological bio-weapon created by an evil corporation to see how much mental anguish a person can take before they snap and transform into a suicidal crazy person.
The main character is one of the most laughable excuses of a protagonist I've ever seen in a video game. He moves around so sluggishly and awkwardly that you'd think he has some sort of mental
defficiency with a cactus shoved up his ass.
He can't even go down a single step without falling or getting dizzy, sometimes he'll even fall down stairs. It makes me believe he is running around with his goddamn shoelaces untied.
And sometimes when he has to make a jump, he'll just stop in mid-air and fall straight to his death. What?? Is the character just suicidal? Does he not want to be in this horrible game anymore? If so, I don't blame him. It's like that one line that Danny DeVito once said in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: "Suicide is badass!"
Sometimes you have to jump and grab ropes but he doesn't grab them and again, just commits suicide.
And he runs so slowly that it's actually faster to jump around the stage, and even then, that works against the player, because again, falling from even a few inches sends your character into a dizzying frenzy.
Pretty much every time you die is because the controls fight against you. The controls are some of the worst I've ever seen in a 2D platformer. Hell, to duck you have to hold up and press B.
I-I'm sorry?? Holding UP to DUCK? Christ.
Everything you try to do, you either die or get stun locked and it's impossible to play the game with any sort of precision. Your main weapon of defense are rocks, but they don't actually kill any of the enemies, instead they just stun them for a brief moment.
Trying to hit enemies with the rocks is a pain in the ass in itself: because you have to gradually turn your arm in a clockwise or counterclockwise fashion various degrees as if you were fuckin' using Mega Man's arm cannon. Just like the movement, aiming is slow, sluggish, and unresponsive. So by the time you get a proper aim, you're already dead, and if you do hit what you needed to hit, something is already behind you about to kill you anyway. This is especially impossible when trying to hit bats that fly around, just forget about it.
The layout design is also just abysmal. Many areas just have dead ends, a lot of them look the same, and sometimes you can even fall through trap doors that take to this one dungeon cell area, meaning you have to backtrack all the way from where you fell. Which means that it's all meant to waste time along with wasting even more time because you die repeatedly because of the impossible shitty controls, but oh man, I'll get to that.
The game is not only a time waster, but it is INSANELY annoying. The soundtrack only consists of ONE song, which is that one generic Dracula's Castle organ song that everyone is familiar with. It REALLY drones on your ears.
You can shut the music off but every time you die it gets turned back on again. And if you turn off the music while there is a note playing, it bugs out and then it sounds like the organist just slammed his face into the D key and lost conciousness.
Also for some fucked up reason there is a difficulty selection but that means literally nothing, because even on Easy Mode, the game is still impossible to play.
The enemy sound effects are so gut-wrenching to listen to. It never stops, and it's just a real pain to listen to, especially the ones that go
Nah nah nah nah nah
Nah nah nah nah nah
NAH NAH NAH NAH NAH
NAH NAH NAH NAH NAH
God, just shut up. It never stops, it genuinely drives me insane. Then again, it kinda makes sense, because it's like the game is trolling you.
So now for the biggest insult of this entire game:
So when you start the game there are a bunch of doors in front of you that you're supposed to go into to get items to defeat the Black Knight, the main bad guy of the game. But the truth is: You don't need any of these items. All you have to do to beat the game is to just go into the door the Black Knight is in, and when you reach him, you just pull a bunch of levers and that's it, you beat the game.
That's why there are speedruns of this game on YouTube in under 3 minutes, I'm dead serious.
Is this game for real?? So all of that masochism is completely unnecessary? You go through all of that trouble of playing through all the other stages only to realize that you can beat the game in just a few minutes?? Imagine being a kid in the 90s and you were completely unaware of this. Good God you have my condolences.
And this isn't just in the Genesis version, it's in the Mac version, the Commodore version, Atari version, it doesn't matter. And no matter what platform you are playing on, the controls are still broken, your character is still pathetic, and you can beat the game as soon as you start it.
It makes me wonder why this game was even made. Oh right, to cash in on the popularity of the resurgence of Dracula movies that came out in the late 80s and throughout the 1990s.
And if that wasn't enough, they released the game on the infamous Phillips CD-i, and oh ho ho boy, it's even WORSE than the Genesis version.
The art style is even more cartoonish, the sound effects are even more irritating, and the controls are somehow even worse, I am dead fuckin' serious. You cannot, and I mean you CANNOT control the character. It would be actually easier to control UFOs to make it easier for people to spot them.
It's incredibly difficult just to get past the first screen of the first level not just because of the horrendous controls, but you also get bombarded with bats that kill you in one hit. You also get stuck on stairs a lot, and you still have to manually aim your arm cannon to hit shit with rocks. And any little goddamn pixel you drop from, you fall over and get dizzy. This is meme-worthy.
The Genesis version is indeed horrific, but the CD-i version fucks you in the ass harder than most of 2020. The whole IP in general belongs in the deepest depths of enteral damnation and must never rise again.
1/10
The main character is one of the most laughable excuses of a protagonist I've ever seen in a video game. He moves around so sluggishly and awkwardly that you'd think he has some sort of mental
defficiency with a cactus shoved up his ass.
He can't even go down a single step without falling or getting dizzy, sometimes he'll even fall down stairs. It makes me believe he is running around with his goddamn shoelaces untied.
And sometimes when he has to make a jump, he'll just stop in mid-air and fall straight to his death. What?? Is the character just suicidal? Does he not want to be in this horrible game anymore? If so, I don't blame him. It's like that one line that Danny DeVito once said in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: "Suicide is badass!"
Sometimes you have to jump and grab ropes but he doesn't grab them and again, just commits suicide.
And he runs so slowly that it's actually faster to jump around the stage, and even then, that works against the player, because again, falling from even a few inches sends your character into a dizzying frenzy.
Pretty much every time you die is because the controls fight against you. The controls are some of the worst I've ever seen in a 2D platformer. Hell, to duck you have to hold up and press B.
I-I'm sorry?? Holding UP to DUCK? Christ.
Everything you try to do, you either die or get stun locked and it's impossible to play the game with any sort of precision. Your main weapon of defense are rocks, but they don't actually kill any of the enemies, instead they just stun them for a brief moment.
Trying to hit enemies with the rocks is a pain in the ass in itself: because you have to gradually turn your arm in a clockwise or counterclockwise fashion various degrees as if you were fuckin' using Mega Man's arm cannon. Just like the movement, aiming is slow, sluggish, and unresponsive. So by the time you get a proper aim, you're already dead, and if you do hit what you needed to hit, something is already behind you about to kill you anyway. This is especially impossible when trying to hit bats that fly around, just forget about it.
The layout design is also just abysmal. Many areas just have dead ends, a lot of them look the same, and sometimes you can even fall through trap doors that take to this one dungeon cell area, meaning you have to backtrack all the way from where you fell. Which means that it's all meant to waste time along with wasting even more time because you die repeatedly because of the impossible shitty controls, but oh man, I'll get to that.
The game is not only a time waster, but it is INSANELY annoying. The soundtrack only consists of ONE song, which is that one generic Dracula's Castle organ song that everyone is familiar with. It REALLY drones on your ears.
You can shut the music off but every time you die it gets turned back on again. And if you turn off the music while there is a note playing, it bugs out and then it sounds like the organist just slammed his face into the D key and lost conciousness.
Also for some fucked up reason there is a difficulty selection but that means literally nothing, because even on Easy Mode, the game is still impossible to play.
The enemy sound effects are so gut-wrenching to listen to. It never stops, and it's just a real pain to listen to, especially the ones that go
Nah nah nah nah nah
Nah nah nah nah nah
NAH NAH NAH NAH NAH
NAH NAH NAH NAH NAH
God, just shut up. It never stops, it genuinely drives me insane. Then again, it kinda makes sense, because it's like the game is trolling you.
So now for the biggest insult of this entire game:
So when you start the game there are a bunch of doors in front of you that you're supposed to go into to get items to defeat the Black Knight, the main bad guy of the game. But the truth is: You don't need any of these items. All you have to do to beat the game is to just go into the door the Black Knight is in, and when you reach him, you just pull a bunch of levers and that's it, you beat the game.
That's why there are speedruns of this game on YouTube in under 3 minutes, I'm dead serious.
Is this game for real?? So all of that masochism is completely unnecessary? You go through all of that trouble of playing through all the other stages only to realize that you can beat the game in just a few minutes?? Imagine being a kid in the 90s and you were completely unaware of this. Good God you have my condolences.
And this isn't just in the Genesis version, it's in the Mac version, the Commodore version, Atari version, it doesn't matter. And no matter what platform you are playing on, the controls are still broken, your character is still pathetic, and you can beat the game as soon as you start it.
It makes me wonder why this game was even made. Oh right, to cash in on the popularity of the resurgence of Dracula movies that came out in the late 80s and throughout the 1990s.
And if that wasn't enough, they released the game on the infamous Phillips CD-i, and oh ho ho boy, it's even WORSE than the Genesis version.
The art style is even more cartoonish, the sound effects are even more irritating, and the controls are somehow even worse, I am dead fuckin' serious. You cannot, and I mean you CANNOT control the character. It would be actually easier to control UFOs to make it easier for people to spot them.
It's incredibly difficult just to get past the first screen of the first level not just because of the horrendous controls, but you also get bombarded with bats that kill you in one hit. You also get stuck on stairs a lot, and you still have to manually aim your arm cannon to hit shit with rocks. And any little goddamn pixel you drop from, you fall over and get dizzy. This is meme-worthy.
The Genesis version is indeed horrific, but the CD-i version fucks you in the ass harder than most of 2020. The whole IP in general belongs in the deepest depths of enteral damnation and must never rise again.
1/10