I have been looking into the Westfront games by Paul Allen Panks as some of them have decent ratings and as I enjoy playing around with Commodore BASIC code as well, I do enjoy to play around with such sparsely implemented and hardly tested games. This c64 game is a bit special as it does not have the word "Westfront" in its title but it is in many ways "just" a cut-down version of Enchanter: Westfront to Apse (first ever game by the same author), but it has a different and smaller map and a few other differences and puzzles, enough to call it a unique game, not just a reduced version of the original C128 game.
For the record, later on, Paul managed to squeeze the original C128 game (Enchanter: Westfront to Apse) into a C64 by putting all location descriptions on disk instead of memory. That C64 game is also called Enchanter: Westfront to Apse and should not be confused with Mystic Castle which this review cover.
Mystic Castle is quite slow so I recommend to play with a C64 emulator and increase the speed. On VICE I recommend to use Warp speed, which runs even faster if you disable sound. However, you will then need to disable keys repeating at that speed with the poke:
POKE 650,127
[ You can enter it by going to the monitor in VICE and type:
> +650 +127 (remember the ">" as well) ]
Once it runs at a decent speed, we have a small and primitive game with some appeal for fans of nostalgia if it wasn't for the many bugs and spotty implementation.
The game is initially about defeating the evil wizard Mordimar and you do that with randomized turn-based combat. Theoretically, you could go to his throne room immediately but you won't stand a chance so you have to increase your skills and HP by solving puzzles and killing other inhabitants in the land and there is also at least one bugged puzzle which can increase your HP further.
In the end I had to look at the code to figure out that one important bug prevented me from increasing my HP and having started to look at the code, I cheated for the remainder of the game by giving myself sufficient with HP and solving the last puzzle to see the ending. The game is a typical untested BASIC game, though with some randomized combat, and if you are curious about the Westfront games (and related like this) and like to look at BASIC code, you might enjoy playing it like I did. However, I rated it based on my initial playing experience, not my poking around in the code.
It can be hard to distinguish a bad parser from some of the bugs but it is quite primitive. Nouns have removed spaces (e.g. magicring) so the parser does not handle spaces in nouns. The good news is that you are told all verbs. The parser gives a lot of strange and/or inappropriate responses though.
For a homegrown C64 BASIC game, the atmosphere is decent, especially if you feel nostalgic about the fonts etc. Luckily, this game is "advanced" enough to print both upper case and lower case letters.
Except for obvious situations (obvious AFTER making a mistake), I think this specific game cannot be unwinnable despite the many bugs. "Obvious" example: If you sell objects without value in the shop, you can't buy them back and so on.
Some of the puzzles are okay but because so little is implemented with no response, it sometimes feel like searching for a needle in a haystack.
If you, like me, enjoy looking through the BASIC code to find all the hidden stuff I couldn't find in a real playthrough, you may raise the score to 6 but rated as just a game, I can only give it 4.