CW: Mentions of systemic racism.
wowgoodname recommended this one on my list here: https://www.backloggd.com/u/Woodaba/list/recommend-me-a-game-and-ill-review-it/ and while I didn't pick this one originally, I simply HAD to play this one once I realized there was an Ireland One. And boy, was I not disappointed.
Something that is depressingly common among older Irish people - though it still crops up among younger generations from time to time - is a sentiment of Irishness being an identity with similar generational trauma and associated systemic violence as that experienced by people of color in America and other places. Inevitably, they'll bring up the "no cats, no dogs, no blacks, no irish" signs and point to that as evidence of the "fact" that Irish people "were just as hard done by" as the people kidnapped from their homes and enslaved, and some of these people will even go so far as to say that the Irish actually had it worse than black people in America for certain periods of time.
Obviously, this is horseshit of the highest volume. This is not to downplay the very real marginalization that many Irish people throughout history did encounter or the equally real violence perpetrated to the Irish at the hands of Britain but it's so cringeworthy to hear people who really should know better try to claim a similar level of violence was visited upon them because it just is not the same by any stretch of the imagination and yet people like My Dad will continue spouting this cheerfully racist delusion, crawling forward through history unchallenged and uninterrogated.
I say all this to make clear a certain awareness of the context surrounding what I'm about to say and the image I am invoking: Nancy Drew: The Haunting of Castle Malloy is eire-sploitation of the highest caliber. I cannot tell you how much fun I had experiencing the most bone-headedly cartoonish depiction of the emerald isle I have encountered in recent memory. Right from the beginning, the suggestion that the titular castle was simultaneously a couple hours drive away from Dublin and just down the road from Donegal got me giggling, and from there, things just got better and better. The phone booth run by the "Lepre-con" telecom company, bumper stickers advertising a radio station boasting "All Bodhran, All the Time", and of course, the man that stole the show and my heart, Donal.
The sole Irish character Nancy Drew interacts with (aside from a bartender who is only heard, never seen) in her quest to exorcise the uh "haunting" of Castle Malloy, Donal the Caretaker, whose name is pronounced in a manner hilariously divorced from anyone with that name I have ever known, who wears a cap, spends all his time drinking in the local pub (The Screaming Banshee) has the most "jaysus begorrah" accent you could possibly imagine, and will rant to anyone who can hear about the faeries and their ineffable ways is a man that has stepped right out of John Wayne's The Quiet Man, and he rules. A king. A legend, even if he made me spend the majority of this game's runtime on meaningless bullshit chores.
The sheer absurdity of The Haunting of Castle Malloy is easily the highlight. I won't go over ground wowgoodname has already covered in her excellent review (https://www.backloggd.com/u/wowgoodname/review/281822/) but it's the sheer ridiculousness of the premise and the amount of absurd curveballs thrown in your way, like enormous cybernetic doomsday device which...sheared sheep, the underground nazi(?) missile silo and the MULTIPLE JETPACKS in a plot that is ultimately ABOUT JETPACKS, that carried me through a series of puzzles that are, generously, a bit of a mixed bag. A couple are genuinely fiendish brainteasers, but too many just test your ability to take notes, or your patience with minigames that don't require skill or quick thinking as much as they do memorization of instructions. I think someone once said that a good puzzle should never take longer to input the solution than working out the solution, and this game consistently breaks that rule to intensely frustrating levels.
It's not a bad little game, all things considered. I have a nostalgia for this kind of "CD-ROM" game that we don't really get anymore, as games like this picked up from the bargain bin at TK Maxx and Woolworths made up the majority of my PC gaming as a child, but I also think this is a perfectly good adventure game in it's better moments. Like I say, I got a huge amount of enjoyment from the perverse thrill of this ridiculous depiction of my home country and the ludicrous directions the story goes. But also I think there's genuine skill and artistic craft on display in this game that unfortunately doesn't really get the place in the spotlight it maybe deserves when the game is such a directionless mess. There's some really well-crafted pre-rendered backgrounds in this game, particularly in the haunted playroom of the titular castle, which is genuinely creepy and never quite feels wholly comfortable to be in, despite how many times you return there over the course of the adventure. Parts of this game are funny, parts are well-written, parts are fun to solve and parts are unnerving. But all the good is lost in the endless tedium of bad minigames and sheep-herding.
Still. While I do think it may have been a better game if it wasn't ultimately about an old woman flying around a castle in a jetpack while an offensive irish caricature yells about faeries, I don't think I'd take that hypothetical better game over this beautiful, hilarious, mess.
wowgoodname recommended this one on my list here: https://www.backloggd.com/u/Woodaba/list/recommend-me-a-game-and-ill-review-it/ and while I didn't pick this one originally, I simply HAD to play this one once I realized there was an Ireland One. And boy, was I not disappointed.
Something that is depressingly common among older Irish people - though it still crops up among younger generations from time to time - is a sentiment of Irishness being an identity with similar generational trauma and associated systemic violence as that experienced by people of color in America and other places. Inevitably, they'll bring up the "no cats, no dogs, no blacks, no irish" signs and point to that as evidence of the "fact" that Irish people "were just as hard done by" as the people kidnapped from their homes and enslaved, and some of these people will even go so far as to say that the Irish actually had it worse than black people in America for certain periods of time.
Obviously, this is horseshit of the highest volume. This is not to downplay the very real marginalization that many Irish people throughout history did encounter or the equally real violence perpetrated to the Irish at the hands of Britain but it's so cringeworthy to hear people who really should know better try to claim a similar level of violence was visited upon them because it just is not the same by any stretch of the imagination and yet people like My Dad will continue spouting this cheerfully racist delusion, crawling forward through history unchallenged and uninterrogated.
I say all this to make clear a certain awareness of the context surrounding what I'm about to say and the image I am invoking: Nancy Drew: The Haunting of Castle Malloy is eire-sploitation of the highest caliber. I cannot tell you how much fun I had experiencing the most bone-headedly cartoonish depiction of the emerald isle I have encountered in recent memory. Right from the beginning, the suggestion that the titular castle was simultaneously a couple hours drive away from Dublin and just down the road from Donegal got me giggling, and from there, things just got better and better. The phone booth run by the "Lepre-con" telecom company, bumper stickers advertising a radio station boasting "All Bodhran, All the Time", and of course, the man that stole the show and my heart, Donal.
The sole Irish character Nancy Drew interacts with (aside from a bartender who is only heard, never seen) in her quest to exorcise the uh "haunting" of Castle Malloy, Donal the Caretaker, whose name is pronounced in a manner hilariously divorced from anyone with that name I have ever known, who wears a cap, spends all his time drinking in the local pub (The Screaming Banshee) has the most "jaysus begorrah" accent you could possibly imagine, and will rant to anyone who can hear about the faeries and their ineffable ways is a man that has stepped right out of John Wayne's The Quiet Man, and he rules. A king. A legend, even if he made me spend the majority of this game's runtime on meaningless bullshit chores.
The sheer absurdity of The Haunting of Castle Malloy is easily the highlight. I won't go over ground wowgoodname has already covered in her excellent review (https://www.backloggd.com/u/wowgoodname/review/281822/) but it's the sheer ridiculousness of the premise and the amount of absurd curveballs thrown in your way, like enormous cybernetic doomsday device which...sheared sheep, the underground nazi(?) missile silo and the MULTIPLE JETPACKS in a plot that is ultimately ABOUT JETPACKS, that carried me through a series of puzzles that are, generously, a bit of a mixed bag. A couple are genuinely fiendish brainteasers, but too many just test your ability to take notes, or your patience with minigames that don't require skill or quick thinking as much as they do memorization of instructions. I think someone once said that a good puzzle should never take longer to input the solution than working out the solution, and this game consistently breaks that rule to intensely frustrating levels.
It's not a bad little game, all things considered. I have a nostalgia for this kind of "CD-ROM" game that we don't really get anymore, as games like this picked up from the bargain bin at TK Maxx and Woolworths made up the majority of my PC gaming as a child, but I also think this is a perfectly good adventure game in it's better moments. Like I say, I got a huge amount of enjoyment from the perverse thrill of this ridiculous depiction of my home country and the ludicrous directions the story goes. But also I think there's genuine skill and artistic craft on display in this game that unfortunately doesn't really get the place in the spotlight it maybe deserves when the game is such a directionless mess. There's some really well-crafted pre-rendered backgrounds in this game, particularly in the haunted playroom of the titular castle, which is genuinely creepy and never quite feels wholly comfortable to be in, despite how many times you return there over the course of the adventure. Parts of this game are funny, parts are well-written, parts are fun to solve and parts are unnerving. But all the good is lost in the endless tedium of bad minigames and sheep-herding.
Still. While I do think it may have been a better game if it wasn't ultimately about an old woman flying around a castle in a jetpack while an offensive irish caricature yells about faeries, I don't think I'd take that hypothetical better game over this beautiful, hilarious, mess.
2 Comments
I think what's really frustrating about how second or third generation Irish immigrants in America, particularly in my family, will approach the historical prejudice of Ireland as this defense of how "we can't be racist!" Its never "this generational trauma my family experienced helps me relate to the issue of racism around the world."
But also, hell yeah jetpacks.
But also, hell yeah jetpacks.
poyfuh
2 years ago
Also i just laughed out loud like three different times reading this it's SO good i cannot fucking believe that the actual thematic heart of this game revolves around a twin pair of jetpacks