Retro Achievement Mastery 229 - The Castle

It was probably noticable if you’ve been the type to pay attention to my blog, but I slowed down on writing these posts. I actually slowed down in doing RA in general, and that didn’t help. From October to February I only mastered a single game. Before that, this was the last thing I had mastered. And there’s a reason for that.

This game kind of broke me.

So, there’s an NES game called Castle Quest. I’ve talked about it before, I mastered it like a year ago. I owned it as a kid, and have beaten it twice. It’s one of the most unforgiving NES games, filled with ways to softlock yourself with no warning. I’ve done research on that game cause it always interested me, and found it was actually the sequel to this game, The Castle. I’d done a bit of playing of this for like 5 minutes every here and there to see “oh yeah, it’s just like Castle Quest”. But In that fateful October of 2025, I decided, yeah, I’ll sit down and actually play it.

That might have been a mistake.

In The Castle, you play as a prince trying to save a princess from a castle. You start in the bottom left, the princess is in the bottom right. It’s a 10x10 grid of rooms, all single screen, seperated by doors, which you need to open using keys. Often throughout the rooms are treacherous obstacles like enemies or block puzzles you need to get past in order to proceed.

If you’ve played Castle Quest, you might know it is VERY succeptible to soft locks. This one is too, but actually less so, because it’s kind of linear. It’s TECHNICALLY open, but you’re following a pretty linear path of like, a snaking line right then up then left then up then right, etc etc. But you can absolutely still softlock yourself.

Your prince controls VERY strangely. Basically, you jump, and you move very slowly and floaty. You hang in the air for about two to three seconds, then float back down. You actually have a LOT of control over this jump, and every facet of control is important. Everything kinda works on ticks in this game, notable. So you’d take like, 5 ticks to get to the top of your jump. But, let’s say you get yourself stuck on a ceiling, then break free by moving to the left. You just get stuck on that ceiling for 2 ticks. Well, now you’re hanging in the air 2 spots lower. This is actually VERY important for some tricky jumps to avoid spikes. Yes, this is the level of percision that this game requires. Some rooms are KIND OF A NIGHTMARE. The jump may seem like an ugly mess at first, but by the end, it is your single life saving rope.

Like, here, let’s look at this room for a second. This is a room I called “The Tangela Room”. These enemies go from passable to impassable death machines every few seconds. Meanwhile, those platforms are moving side to side, moving once every tick. Your goal is to jump over to the other side, and probably ALSO to go up and get all those tasty points and extra lives up there, cause god you’ll need them. This room is hell, and is my utter nightmare. But it would be straight up impossible if not for that hideous ugly and awkward jump. God bless that thing.

While we’re showing levels, let’s show the OTHER kind of level you’ll find here. We’ve got the tough gameplay portion, but what about puzzles? Well, we’ve got lots of those too! They’re mostly block puzzles, so we’ve got some big sokoban energy going on. This is one of the middle of the road ones, honestly. Each attempt takes about 3-4 minutes of attempts if you know what you’re doing.

Also, take a look at that level again. Those things there are corkscrew elevators. They move up and down every few ticks. They can and WILL crush shit, including against the very top of the screen. Your goal is to move a block from one side to the other so you can grab that key. So yes you can die, but ALSO you can break your block. If your block breaks, you’re fucked, it is now unsolvable. But don’t worry! As long as you don’t leave the screen, you can just die, or press F1 to die and restart the room. If you DO leave, uh, sorry buddy. Time to restart.

Each attempt at this game takes about three hours. Oh, and it’s important to note, the musical loop is like 10 seconds, and its the only song in the entire game! And it sounds like it belongs on an ice cream truck. It will drive you absolutely fucking bonkers. This game is quite hard, and after 3 hour attempts, you will probably get further, and further, but need to start over and over and over. I actually beat this game. I beat this game…. and had to play it again. We need to talk about the cherry.

So. The cherry is an item here in the top right, right below the princess. If you pick it up, every single door will open. This actually means MOST block puzzle rooms can be ignored, cause the goal of most of them is to pick up a key, or to let a door be accessible. To open a door you need to be on the ground, so if they’re already open, you can just jump into em. This is an AMAZING item. But the obvious way to get to it, falling from the princess’ room, is A TRAP. YOU WILL SOFTLOCK YOURSELF. Which I certainly did.

There are two ways to properly get this. Either get all the way here with an invincibility power up, and letting the elevator push you into the ceiling (this involves dying over and over each level), OR use buffer overflow. In the room to the left is a box. Drop it down the hole, it’ll buffer overflow to the top, allowing you access to the cherry.

This actually is the best way to get through the game. Once you realize this, you can basically just ignore the stupid block puzzles, and it JUST becomes dexterity challenges. Which are actually hard, but y’know, it’s better cause you’re not wasting six minutes on some of these puzzles.

I played this game nonstop for like a week trying to beat it. Like I said, I beat it, got the cherry, and then had to do it all again because I had just walked past the damn princess to get that cherry and made the game unwinnable. My chat hated this. But I couldn’t stop playing it.

There’s something about this game. It really gets into you. Okay, no. It really gets into ME. I genuinely believe in the year of our luigi 2026, this game is for 1% of the population. Unfortunately, I am part of that 1%. This sucks ass. I want other people to get into this game, I wanna share it with people, but then if I do people are like “why are you torturing me”.

Is The Castle a good game? Uh, no, probably not. But it’s EXTREMELY interesting, and has a lot of good parts. If you want to play this but don’t want to play something that’s aged in such a way it might literally kill you, I’d suggest just playing UFO 50 and playing Barbuta. It’s another one screen game with like, a 10x10 map you explore around on, with clunky movement and dastardly puzzles, but it’s just modern enough. In many ways, I feel like Barbuta is DIRECTLY inspired by The Castle. Right down to the collectable cherry possibly inspiring UFO 50’s Cherries.

But if you want to play something old to the point of just a LITTLE too clunky, just a LITTLE too awkward, just a LITTLE too mean, check this out. DO NOT CHECK OUT ITS SEQUEL. I am currently attempting to beat Castle Excellent, the MSX sequel to this that was turned into Castle Quest, which is mean to the point of intentionally trying to kick you in the dick. It’s NUTS.

This isn’t actually THAT bad. It’s full of mean rooms, especially the fucking Tangela Room. But it’s BEATABLE. And it genuinely feels amazing to beat. I felt like a GOD finally getting that mastery.

….But it still broke me. I dream about the castle. I think about it constantly. After beating the MSX version, I immediately went to playing the SG-1000 version and PC88 version, and it drove my chat NUTS. I want to learn how to hack these games. I feel like you could do something magical with that.

I love the Castle. I hate the Castle. It doesn’t love me back, but it sure does hate me.