Horror Game Review: Voodoo Castle (1979, Alexis Adams)

Posted on October 7, 2026 by Jedadiah Leland

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.

Game Review: Ghost Town (1983, Scott Adams)

Posted on October 5, 2022 by Jedadiah Leland

You are in a deserted ghost town. Why are you in the town? Who knows? What can you do in the town? You can search it and try to find 13 hidden treasures without falling prey to ghosts, rattlesnakes, or the weather. Good luck! There are many puzzles to be solved. Hopefully, you’re better at puzzles than I am.

Ghost Town was one of the many text adventures to be written by Scott Adams in the early 80s. Every text adventure film that has come out since owes debt to Scott Adams but that doesn’t make his games any less frustrating to play. Basically, with this game, you get bare-bone descriptions and a two-word parser. Don’t try to have a conversation with anything in the town. Don’t try to get too creative with your choice of verbs or with any of the things that you find in the town. This is from the early days of PC gaming and it’s as basic as can be.

Once you make the adjustment, though, it’s not a bad game. Even the minimal descriptions of each location encourage the player to imagine the place for himself. (Basic games like Ghost Town actually encourage the imagination more than games that devote paragraphs to intricate descriptions.) It’s also a timed game, which was a big deal in the early 80s. The ghosts in the town keep their own schedule and one of the challenges of the game is to keep up with them. Spending too much time on one puzzle or trying to guess the verb can lead to consequences. The puzzles are complicated but there’s a walk-through so you can cheat if you need to. Just don’t make the same mistake that I did.

Play Ghost Town!

Video Game Review: The Count (1979, Adventure International)

Posted on October 3, 2019 by Jedadiah Leland

You have just woken up in a bed in a Transylvanian castle. Why are you there? You’re on a mission. What type of mission? It’s Transylvania and the game is called The Count. You figure it out. You’ve got three days to figure out how to kill Count Dracula or you’ll suffer a fate worse than death. Make a mistake and you might become a vampire during the night. Try to leave the castle early and you’ll get torn apart by the angry villagers.

The Count is a very early text adventure game, one of the many that was created and designed by Scott Adams in the days when having a personal computer was considered to be a luxury instead of a necessity. The Count has everything that you would usually expect from an Adams game: minimalist descriptions, silly humor (“The signs says ‘POSITIVE NO SMOKING ALLOWED’ signed Count Dracula.”), and puzzles that often take more than one run-through to solve. It also has a simple two-word parser that, for modern players, might require some getting used to.

Historically, The Count is important because it was one of the first games to have a fixed time limit. Timed challenges have always been my downfall, as anyone who has ever watched me play any of Spider-Man‘s side missions can tell you. Solving The Count is not as challenging as catching Howard’s pigeons but it will still probably require a replay or two.

Like all of Scott Adams’s game, The Count has been adapted for other Interactive Fiction interpreters and can be downloaded for free.. The 1982 re-release, which came with graphics, can be played at the Internet Archive.