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Featured reader review by viridian_moon
December 30, 2005 Castle of the Winds is an archetypal Rogue-like dungeon-crawler, a forgotten relic of the bygone shareware days. Charmingly straightforward like other games of its ilk, it dispenses with trivialities like a convoluted plot, rich milieu, and stunning visuals. Briefly put, it’s about killing things.It’s simple and intuitive: you attack monsters by running into them, with a message box giving you details on the exchange of blows and the occasional gory message as you slay your opponents. (In a nice contrast to modern RPGs, you’ll frequently kill weaker enemies before you even notice they’re there as you zip around the dungeon at high levels.) A vast arsenal of spells, numbering nearly three dozen in total, compliments your weapon in a similarly self-explanatory fashion. Castle doesn’t give you any difficulties in figuring out the interface.
What it does give you is a premise, a randomized dungeon, and free reign to accomplish your goal (though admittedly without much originality). Stake out every nook and cranny of the monster-choked labyrinth for loot and experience, or descend deeper into its bowels as soon as you stumble across a stairwell. Adjust your four stats to your liking to better wield a conventional weapon or arcane spellcraft. Belying the game’s deceptively simple premise, there are a lot of character-building choices to make: do you neglect the intelligence stat and hack your way through the game, relying on wands and scrolls to slay the occasional blade-resistant monster, or do you ignore strength instead, sensing your enemies’ location with detection spells and dispatching them from afar before they even know you’re there?
With fourteen equipment slots and hundreds of items that augment your stats in different ways, your character set-up is constantly evolving, and you’re forced to make strategic decisions as your options broaden. Enchanted rings raise different stats, for example; increased intelligence gives you more mana for attacking and recovering, but greater constitution means you don’t have to heal as often. Heavy armor offers more protection, but it lowers your agility in battle and leaves you less inventory space for the abundant loot hidden in the dungeon’s depths. And on every level up, you’re rewarded for your efforts with a new spell of your choice; it takes a while to exhaust the useful options, and the right choice at the right time can be critical.
But pretty much all of the traits that make Castle enjoyable are genre mainstays. There’s little in the way of innovation, and one dungeon floor is much like the next, so it’s just as well that it’s a short game. Still, it’s an excellent diversion while it lasts, and even if it doesn’t aspire to be much more than that, it’s quite good at what it does. It doesn’t need to be revolutionary: first and foremost, it’s fun.
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