Count Christo has been cursed by his enemies and is currently in a coma.  Your job is to search his castle and gather together both the clues and the equipment necessary to reverse the spell.  If you take too long you might get hit by the curse as well.  So, don’t waste any time!

Sometimes, I miss the simple and innocent text-adventure games that used to be a mainstay for personal computers.  I’ll get nostalgic for the puzzles and the simple commands of “n, w, e, s.”  I miss the familiar pattern of: “Get object,”  “Look object,” and  “Inventory,” to make sure that you still had the object with you.  I’ll fondly remember when you could play and beat a game without having to spend hours sitting in front of a screen.

Then I’ll remember how frustrated I used to get with games like Voodoo Castle.  Like many of the early test adventures, Voodoo Castle takes a bare-bones approach to story-telling.  Later editions came with simple graphics but, even then, it never really made you feel as if you were actually a part of the story.  Searching the castle isn’t a problem.  Figuring out how to cast a spell when the game’s parser can only understand two words at a time is the bigger frustration.  There’s at least one puzzle where the game itself specifically tells you what to type and for that, I was thankful.  Good luck figuring out what to type to cast the spell necessary to awaken Count Christo, though.

Voodoo Castle is available to download from a lot of abandonware sites.  There’s also a buggy version on the Internet Archive, which loads slowly and gets hit by errors.  The best thing about the version on the Archive is that it opens with an open letter from Scott Adams, the husband of the game’s author, in which he encourages you not to give the game to your friends.

Before anyone panics, this game is no longer for sale and Adventure International no longer exists so you can safely download Voodoo Castle or share it with friends if you wants.  I still wish I had seen this message when I was younger.  I had no idea I was a pirate.  I feel guilty now.