What mysteries lie within Castle of Secrets and what will you uncover as you explore and attempt to solve the many puzzles in this dark and beautiful game
Castle of Secrets is a side-scrolling mystery puzzle game developed by Aliens Games and published by A.D Games. This is their second game and describes itself as a storyline-based psychological adventure horror game. The game is visually stunning and brings its own twist to the puzzle game genre.
During Castle of Secrets, we play as a young woman known as Ms. Susan as her life seems to have fallen into tragedy since the death of her family and eventually her own murder. She must now piece together who was behind her untimely demise and why? Along the way she encounters many strange characters, who seem to have their own motivation for helping her.
The game is what you can usually expect from a typical puzzle game. You search around an environment looking for objects to solve the various puzzles in each level and complete a checklist. Simple right? Not quite. Castle of Secrets adds another layer to this by giving the player the option to zoom in or out of the environments of each level. This adds more depth to the puzzles as the player is required to explore more of the levels if they want to solve the puzzles. This also allows the player to figure out alternative ways of uncovering the mystery and hopefully piecing together who killed Ms. Susan and why.
One of Castle of Secrets‘ strongest features is its atmosphere, which is done incredibly well and makes each level feel unique while still providing consistent gameplay. The best example of this is how different the tutorial and the first two levels are from each other. The tutorial itself is a simple corridor that guides the player through it as the game explains all its mechanics and how the player can use them.
The atmosphere in this area is warm and welcoming. Until it guides you to the first level. The first level itself is cold, bitter, and feels miserable, which is nothing like the atmosphere of the tutorial. Now contrast both with the second level, which is now once again warm and comforting but it is also lonely and uncertain, much like how Ms. Susan feels during that part of the story.
Another one of Castle of Secrets‘ strengths is the sound design. You may remember that the atmosphere makes each level feel unique, and one of the biggest reasons for this is thanks to the sound design, this makes the world so much more alive. From the sound of pelting rain hitting the windows to the rustling of autumn leaves being blown by the wind, the world feels dynamic and allows the player to better immerse themselves into the game better. The same cannot be said about the voice acting.
The voice acting of Castle of Secrets sounds decent enough but most of the time it doesn’t match with what is happening on screen. In addition to this is the dialogue, which, probably due to a translation error, has a few grammatical errors; for example, when encountering a character known as Mr. Cat, Susan asks, “What has happened with me?” Instead of “What has happened to me?”. It cheapens the overall experience and breaks the immersion that the sound design worked so hard to provide.
Castle of Secrets features a rather unique art style. Each level is rendered as a 3D environment whilst the characters themselves are 2D. This gives the game an almost pop-up book or shadow puppet look to it. Thanks to this, the entire game feels like the player is walking through a fairytale, one that is, however, a lot darker than most. The storybook feel is further emphasized by the game’s gorgeous 3D environments.
Castle of Secrets environments are filled with huge amounts of detail, from dust particles scattering through beams of sunlight to the ornate molded detail of a candelabra. Everything in Castle of Secrets is packed with detail. This looks amazing but can make finding clues a bit difficult as they blend in too well and get lost in the environment.
As for the 2D elements of Castle of Secrets such as the characters, they are painted beautifully and they too have been packed with plenty of detail. However, the 2D elements come with their own set of drawbacks. The issue with using 2D characters in a 3D environment is that 2D characters are often drawn with a predetermined light source in mind. This means that the characters don’t sit properly in a scene and feel like flat cardboard cutouts gliding through the environment.
A good example of this is with Mr. Cat, whose character sprite is painted as if he is being illuminated from behind by a white light yet appears to be lit by a warm light source on his left side. This ends up making characters feel out of place or make it feel as if they don’t actually belong in the scene. Another drawback is the animation.
The artists seem to have used only one single 2D asset per character and have animated that instead of drawing separate expressions and movements for the animation. This does work with the “pop-up book” look but makes the characters move in a way that is incredibly stiff and uncanny during cutscenes.
Castle of Secrets has beautiful and detailed environments with great sound design that immerses the player in the world, and it has a fantastic atmosphere that makes each level unique. But the voice acting cheapens the experience. The character sprites don’t always blend in with the environment, and also the puzzle clues tend to get lost in the detailed environment and can be hard to find.
Besides a few minor issues, Castle of Secrets is a beautiful puzzle game that adds its own flair by mixing both 2D and 3D elements to give a truly unique experience as the player uncovers the many mysteries hiding in its macabre and beautiful world.
Overall, Castle of Secrets is a very solid game and the controls were easy to use and responsive; it even features controller support! However, the game is best experienced using a mouse and keyboard. As moving things to and from your inventory can prove difficult with a controller. There is one notable glitch. After the tutorial the language defaults to Ukrainian. This seems to occur only when booting up the game, as even after restarting and then continuing from the last checkpoint, the language changed at roughly the same spot.
Castle of Secrets is currently available on Steam and also stay tuned to GamesCreed’s game reviews for the latest updates.
