Madcap Castle is a precision platformer where you have to get to the exit but each room has requirements such as pushing all buttons and killing all enemies. Many different traps and enemies are placed in such a way that the rooms won’t be a simple A to B walk. You have one skill that changes halfway through each castle (a world with 15 puzzles including 1 boss). There are 10 castles with their own gimmicks.
The gameboy style in terms of graphics and music is charming. There is a lot of content for the price paid. The skills, levels and bosses have creative ideas and it can feel great to clear levels/bosses sometimes. I like what the game is trying to do as it’s my kind of game. The big issue that ruins things is the way challenge is achieved.
There is fair challenge where a game can be incredibly challenging but the controls are perfect, the enemy behaviour is predictable, the traps are consistent and you know what you’re supposed to do. Madcap Castle is extremely challenging while it fails at all those elements. It requires perfect precision (sometimes with an inch difference) while there are some things that are seriously wrong. To give some examples:
-Enemies: rats can sometimes stop moving out of the blue, frogs have different jump strength, bats can dive deeper when they aim for you. Just to add some context, there will be rooms with many of them and you’re dead with one hit
-Traps: moving lightning can get stuck in its direction, beams & spikes have weird timing where they might stop moving for a while and then move again later in weird inconsistent ways
-Controls: not sure if intentional but you can’t jump when you’re too close to a ledge while it feels like you should. There are certain moves with 3 skills where nowhere is explained how to activate them to clear certain levels (mini version high jump, invisibility high jump, different strengths of dash)
-Skills: ones like teleportation and dash suck because there is no indicator where you’ll land. You’ll have to figure it out by gauging things. This is all well and good but it sucks when the rooms become so complex & long and you’ll have to retry entire rooms from scratch with one mistake
-Checkpoints: as mentioned previously, it became very tedious dying every time and going through many steps again to get where you were. Often times it’s not challenge after a while but the annoyance of waiting for the traps to disappear and this waiting wastes so much time. Same with the bosses. After a while you figure out what you need to do except for one step and you have to repeat all the steps so many times until you figure out that one step. A checkpoint system would have made things so much better
-Other: there are some weird situations like the card skill (your attack) sometimes not hitting enemies even though visually you can see they should be hit. Or you’re killed by the impact of bombs because the impact stays for too long etc.
I was dreading playing more of this after a while and I was more than glad to be done with it in a negative way. While I can see the love and attention the game got, I really urge you to not play this unless you’re a) too curious or b) the type that likes punishing challenge even if said challenge is not fair through systems that are not functioning properly. As mentioned though, the developers can clearly design creative puzzles with great ideas. So there is hope that their next game might get things right in terms of execution.
The gameboy style in terms of graphics and music is charming. There is a lot of content for the price paid. The skills, levels and bosses have creative ideas and it can feel great to clear levels/bosses sometimes. I like what the game is trying to do as it’s my kind of game. The big issue that ruins things is the way challenge is achieved.
There is fair challenge where a game can be incredibly challenging but the controls are perfect, the enemy behaviour is predictable, the traps are consistent and you know what you’re supposed to do. Madcap Castle is extremely challenging while it fails at all those elements. It requires perfect precision (sometimes with an inch difference) while there are some things that are seriously wrong. To give some examples:
-Enemies: rats can sometimes stop moving out of the blue, frogs have different jump strength, bats can dive deeper when they aim for you. Just to add some context, there will be rooms with many of them and you’re dead with one hit
-Traps: moving lightning can get stuck in its direction, beams & spikes have weird timing where they might stop moving for a while and then move again later in weird inconsistent ways
-Controls: not sure if intentional but you can’t jump when you’re too close to a ledge while it feels like you should. There are certain moves with 3 skills where nowhere is explained how to activate them to clear certain levels (mini version high jump, invisibility high jump, different strengths of dash)
-Skills: ones like teleportation and dash suck because there is no indicator where you’ll land. You’ll have to figure it out by gauging things. This is all well and good but it sucks when the rooms become so complex & long and you’ll have to retry entire rooms from scratch with one mistake
-Checkpoints: as mentioned previously, it became very tedious dying every time and going through many steps again to get where you were. Often times it’s not challenge after a while but the annoyance of waiting for the traps to disappear and this waiting wastes so much time. Same with the bosses. After a while you figure out what you need to do except for one step and you have to repeat all the steps so many times until you figure out that one step. A checkpoint system would have made things so much better
-Other: there are some weird situations like the card skill (your attack) sometimes not hitting enemies even though visually you can see they should be hit. Or you’re killed by the impact of bombs because the impact stays for too long etc.
I was dreading playing more of this after a while and I was more than glad to be done with it in a negative way. While I can see the love and attention the game got, I really urge you to not play this unless you’re a) too curious or b) the type that likes punishing challenge even if said challenge is not fair through systems that are not functioning properly. As mentioned though, the developers can clearly design creative puzzles with great ideas. So there is hope that their next game might get things right in terms of execution.