Review: Darkestville Castle-nostalgia back to the living room

Review: Darkestville Castle – Point & click games are perhaps a genre that not everyone is enthusiastic about. Yet every so often a game appears that reminds us of the golden days of games like Grim Fandango and Monkey Island. Developer Epic LLama and publisher Buka Entertainment hope to bring a touch of -. The game was already released for PC in 2017, but now the game has also found its way to consoles. Is Darkestville Castle worth playing or is it better to restart the well-known classics?

Cid, the demon of Darkestville Castle

The story begins with a poem about a quiet village that one day receives a visit from an unexpected visitor, a demon named Cid. He terrorizes the local population with all kinds of antics and through all these antics he creates enemies, such as Dan Teapot. His nemesis hires three demon hunters, the Romero Brothers, to lock Cid in their demon chest. The story is charming and has a good pace, but that has some obstacles in the form of presentation. The current goals you have are not displayed on the screen, so you have to backtrack to the client every now and then to find out what you had to do again. That has some influence on the tempo, so if that had been placed on the screen, it would have made the experience a bit clearer and smoother.

Jokes and fools about Darkestville Castle

What Darkestville Castle mainly relies on are the funny references and humor. The kind of humor reminds us of the humor that made Monkey Island so popular. This can range from jokes about political correctness to silly silliness. References to The Lord of the Rings, Pokémon and the silly song Narwhals are just some of the examples we can quote. The fourth wall – between player and game – is also regularly broken. So it is a game that knows it is a game. We had to laugh regularly and that is mainly the purpose of this point & click experience.

These jokes and gags are mainly voiced by one Stephanos Rex and he does it with verve. Not only the voices of the characters are well done, but also the music that accompanies you throughout Cid’s adventure is as we would expect. Besides the good audio, the same can be said about the graphics, where there is little to criticize. The game has its own cartoonish style and contains dark as well as very light and colorful areas. Audiovisually everything is fine and this creates a good atmosphere, with the result that you can empathize with the story. The game also usually ensures that it is clear enough with which objects you can do something and which are for decoration. This way you push up on the d-pad and you will be presented with which objects are interesting to pay extra attention to.

Point and click

The controls of the demon Cid are as expected. With your left stick you move the cursor and if you press anything, Cid automatically moves to that specified location. You can also interact with objects in three different ways: you can just look at them, talk to them or pick them up. Cid regularly tells you what works and what doesn’t. However, some trial & error is sometimes required. So the solutions were not all logical, which could occasionally lead to very long searches and some frustration. This is not too common, although we do think it took us over an hour longer to complete the story than we needed to.

Finally: In a conversation with an NPC you always have several dialogue options from which to choose, but these do not ensure that the story runs differently. However, the characters are interesting enough that you want to get all the information out of the characters yourself. In addition, there is a handy mechanism where a double click ensures that the walk to go to the next area is skipped. This is extremely efficient if you have already visited all areas and you want to move faster. Pressing square will take you to all of your inventory, although each item can also be used directly by using your R1 and L1 keys, which will help you move through your inventory faster. This ensures that you can play more efficiently and that benefits the gameplay.

However you turn or turn it, Costume Kingdom consists of barely elaborated parts. You would almost think that you are playing a concept of a game, which can be fully developed after approval from a developer or publisher. It is unbelievable that this can appear in the market. We assume the developer’s intention was good, but Costume Kingdom is simply a complete disaster. It also makes it clear that anything and everyone can publish a ‘game’ on the PlayStation Store, which is not necessarily a good thing. It is not to be hoped that this will encourage more developers or well-intentioned amateurs to bring their ‘games’ to the PlayStation 4 or later to the PlayStation 5, because this is nothing.