Beyond Castle Wolfenstein (1984)

Name:Beyond Castle Wolfenstein
Number:252
Year:1984
Publisher:Muse Software
Developer:Muse Software
Genre:Top-Down Shooter
Difficulty:4/5
Time:1 hour 20 minutes
Won:Yes (113W/81L)

It's finally happened, we're here to kill Hitler. Er...chronologically. Because Wolfenstein 3D technically hasn't happened yet. Unlike the games of tomorrow, we are not going into this as some elite badass, gunning down hordes of nazis. No, we're going into this as a guy who is very fragile and has to sneak his way into the bottom of Hitler's bunker and place a bomb there....and still technically an elite badass, because we're one guy with a pistol and a knife.

I've felt reluctant about this one. Castle Wolfenstein was a good game for 1981, but three years is a lot in the 1980s. Things change fast. The king of the hill in 1981 is not necessarily the king of the hill in 1984. There has been considerable improvement in the genre, so standing still even a little could be bad news.

This was released on four platforms, Apple II, Atari 800, Commodore 64 and DOS. At first I tried the DOS port, but it was rapidly clear that this wasn't going to work out. For various reasons, neither the Atari or C64 port worked vey well, so that left the Apple II version. That wasn't working out much better, so the DOS version it was instead.

Behold, outside.

The game puts you in an empty room to start with. This is because you're going to need it, moving around is a challenge. The QWEADZXC cluster moves around, WADX cardinal directions, QEZC diagonals. S stops. This is important, because you can walk into a wall and you will stop dead for a moment, and this is a problem. I don't think there's a way of getting around it. You move constantly at one speed.

Shooting is down with the IOPK:<>? cluster, or at least, that's how you aim. The actual shoot button is L. Your shots at hitscan and the only indication that you hit someone is if they die. This makes aiming diagonally a lot of trouble, but as anyone who plays soon finds out, this is worth figuring out. H holsters, which is also very important.

Meeting the first guard of the game, note the door on the right, that's a closet.

In every room past the first, there tends to be guards. There are the usual kind, who walk around, scream halt through the PC speaker, then ask you to approach. Once you do so, they ask for your pass, at which point you have to walk up to them and give it. There are five passes, activated by pressing 1-5. One pass works for the entire floor, but give the wrong one and he takes it. Give two wrong ones, and you get killed or captured. At this point, it's probably better to just shoot him if you've given one wrong pass. Unless there's more than one guard in a room, in which case the other will activate the alarm. You can search their corpses with space.

Walking towards a guard with all five passes.

There are also desk guards, who in theory work the same way, but have some changes. They don't walk around and instead sit at a desk. Unlike the others, you can't walk around with a gun and expect to shoot him successfully, you need to do a pass. He sees you with a gun, he raises an alarm, endless Nazis start popping out. But where he differs is in what happens when you bribe him.

"What closet is it for?" "Meh, they don't tell me that."

You can bribe anyone with the M key, assuming you have money. This is apparently 100% successful. You'd really think Hitler's bunker would have people immune to this sort of thing, but apparently not. When you bribe a desk guard, they sometimes tell you useful information. Like what the pass number is on this floor or a series of numbers for a cabinet somewhere. Regular guards just treat money like a pass.

A worthwhile interaction.

Now that the whole getting around the game thing is solved, how about actually taking out Hitler? The bomb is in a closet somewhere, and in order to do that, you need to search them. How? You point your gun at them and then press space. This gives you a wide variety of things, from money, a first aid kit and the occasional pass, to useless objects like tools and Hitler's diary. Naturally, you can't search while a guard has a visible sightline to you, but otherwise you can search to your heart's content.

However, some are locked. In order to open them, you have to press the number keys, three in a row, until you hear a click. As the manual explains, if you press a correct number then an incorrect number, you need to press the first one again to get to where you were. But eventually, in one of these on the first floor, is the bomb.

Note the dead Nazi in the corner, it's more noticeable when you're the one to make the corpse.

The bomb changes the game around considerably. Now you have a timer on all your actions. You can of course, reset the timer as long as you drop it, but if someone sees you, alert, gunshot, dead. Basically, duck out of sight, reset it, then continue on. There's a lot of leeway on this, since it's reasonable for you to get out of the bunker before it goes off.

Don't mind me, just dropping off a special delivery for one A. Hitler.

Eventually, the guards start getting thicker, but chances are if you've made it this far, you won't be worrying about this. At least not for the reason you might think. On any one screen, only one guard needs to be shown your pass, the first one who spots you. If there are a lot, you need to spot the one you need to show it to and get past the horde around him. They won't cause an alert if you bump into them, it's just annoying and adds a slight bit of pressure. It's the one point you can actually lose after figuring out about the passes.

This meeting seems so boring that I'm surprised nobody's killed themselves.

Hitler is on the third floor, surrounded by his elite staff, constantly heiling each other. This is foreshadowing. All you do here is drop the bomb off, reset it, then head back the way you came. That timer isn't how long you get before exiting the bunker...technically, just how long before it explodes. Which then causes all nazis to shoot you on sight. Do you remember the way back, what the passes were and where the elevators were?

"Don't worry, it's fine if you can't walk out before it explodes, it isn't going to shoot off beams of light or anything."

As a stealth game, this leaves a lot to be desired. That I won it this easily is a testament to that. Random bunker layouts along with randomized passes are basically this game attempting to give itself more than a thirty minute playtime. It's annoying, but it's the only reason why you'd spend that much time here. Otherwise the game consists of you finding out what the pass is, acquiring said pass if you didn't already have it, and then showing the pass to everyone you meet.

Taking out single guards isn't that difficult, because it's just a question of remembering which aim key will aim at him and then hovering your finger over it. The only real way to lose in this game is user error. Whoops, pressed the fire button then the left button, now I'm dead. Or gave out the wrong pass, and it was one you needed. Otherwise it's bang, bang, bang, then constant cries of pass, then heil. Bumping into guards is like bumping into a wall, except the nazi starts going away from you. By the end of it, I wished I had killed more, simply because it would have been a mercy to us both if the guard didn't have to keep doing so.

Other aspects include first aid kids, which heal you if you have one, with F. There are also tool kits and keys. The first are used via CTRL+T for some mysterious reason which the manual doesn't explain. The keys are supposed to unlock the doors with CTRL+K, but I didn't seem much reason to do so since the combination lock is more fun. There's also a dagger, which you can switch to, and is silent. Since bullets are plentiful and there's no reason to attack enemies in rooms with more than one guy, there's no point to it.

The game also allows you to move dead bodies by pointing the gun at them and pressing space. This has no point because of the aforementioned factors. I get a lot of what the game is trying to do, but man, a lot of this stuff would only be useful if the game actually needed it. With that, to the rating.

Weapons:
Knife aside, I did enjoy the feeling of having to be a quick draw on your gun to win a fight. 1

Enemies:
There's guy you give money to for the answers to the game, guy you give a pass to ten thousand times, and guy who shows up and kills you if you start an alarm. 2

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
Despite the random nature of the rooms, it's clear that there are a limited amount of pre-made rooms which I don't think are enough to fill out an entire game. 1

Player Agency:
I kept accidentally pressing the wrong buttons for shooting. Most of the keys are self-explanatory, even if you need a look at the manual once or twice, but it kept happening. Perhaps it's me, perhaps it's the game. 4

Interactivity:
An odd amount of stuff to do despite the somewhat simple game. 2

Atmosphere:
Feels a lot less action thriller and a lot more German bureaucracy drama. If you use the wrong thing, it's another long wait for you. 2

Graphics:
Simple, kind of distracting. Enemies change their hat shape depending on which direction they're pointing. Otherwise you can make out everything you look at, at least. 1

Story:
Uh, you're in a bunker where Hitler is, take out Hitler. 1

Sound/Music:
Scratchy sounding gunshots and real speech from the nazis. Adds some flavor, but gets old quick. 1

That's 15. Four more than the last game and reasonable for 1984.

I have to admit, it's an odd choice to have a game depict stealth be as mundane and boring as this game does, even if it's not realistic for you to be gunning down potentially dozens of Nazis with no comment. I've spent hours on worse games and this was better than I was fearing, if only just.

Looking at other reviews, I don't see anything I didn't mention, but I will note that all the reviews I could find were from later on, none at the time. This is probably linked to the company soon going bust. There's nothing about it that strikes me as bad or uninteresting for the time, but it is sitting comfortably in the middle of the rating scale, so maybe I'm not the only one who thought of it as middle-of-the-road.

Next up, a Mobile Suit Gundam game on the PC-88, something which is sure to be interesting.