Being lucky enough to have pretty much lived my life in parallel to the entire history of video games, I’ve also been lucky enough to have been blown away over and over again by every leap they’ve ever made, even if the height seems to have got a bit lower of late… I’ve said before that I reckon the biggest jump was the emergence of 16-bit machines and the incredible advances in both presentation and scale they enabled, but there were dozens more, often down at individual game levels, and almost on a monthly basis in the mid- to late-eighties in particular! Earlier on, some of these seem almost ludicrous now, like the “huge” fully destructible mothership on the last level of the VIC-20’s superb attempt at Gorf, but I guess Dragon’s Lair in 1983 was a one of the first times I thought I was seeing the impossible – especially when you think I was still playing Gorf around then too! In retrospect, I kind of was seeing the impossible there, with its LaserDisc technology making it more interactive cartoon than video game, but that one is still a stunner even now so we’ll give it it’s due!

That never took away from the impact of the more grounded gobsmackers that then kept on coming though, from experiencing the 3D realism of Chequered Flag on the ZX Spectrum for the first time to climbing into the cockpit of the Star Wars arcade machine and being placed in the climax of my favourite movie! As the eighties progressed, Sega took up the same reins with the likes of Space Harrier, Out Run and After Burner, consistently throwing out these exotic thrill-rides, and their Enduro Racer on the Spectrum set new standards for transferring the arcade to the home, together with the likes of Operation Wolf. And then came the 16-bit behemoths, and while seeing stuff like The Pawn or Xenon or Dungeon Master in Computer & Video Games magazine was simply science fiction at the time, I’ll never forget seeing Defender of the Crown in the flesh on an Atari ST for the first time – never experienced that kind of wow moment before or since!

A lot of these elements would come together again for Driller, which arrived in late 1987, and was a puzzle-based sci-fi adventure game built on a pioneering 3D game engine called Freescape, developed in-house by Incentive Software, who also published Driller, which itself was developed by Major Developments. Freescape was originally developed for the Amstrad CPC then ported to the Spectrum, Commodore 64, Atari ST, Amiga and IBM PC, and allowed entire 3D worlds to be created from geometric shapes, and as many of them as the host hardware would allow! It starts with a floor, then you add your shapes – cuboids, rectangles, pentagons and so on – as well as lines and a “sensor” element that allows for in-game position detection. There was also optimisation to make sure this thing ran (relatively!) okay on the range of computers I just mentioned, meaning restrictions in the overall size of individual regions, not allowing for fractional movements and no overlapping of objects. That all resulted in you being able to move anywhere and look anywhere with a sense of being there that was pretty much unheard of until then. I don’t think it was ever used outside of Incentive’s own titles, but up to 1992, Driller was followed by Dark Side, Total Eclipse (pictured above, from one of my Wonderful Sights in Gaming features), Castle Master, Castle Master II: The Crypt, Total Eclipse II: The Sphinx Jinx, 3D Construction Kit and 3D Construction Kit II, so you could make your own!

Coming back to Driller, as staggeringly impressive as it was at the time of release – more than equalling everything else I mentioned earlier – for me at least it was hardly love at first sight! Here’s the thing… It came out on the 8-bit machines first, which you might think would be even more impressive, given we’d never seen anything like it before, but to this avid C&VG magazine reader, it was consigned to a very drab single-page review in the January 1988 issue, totally overshadowed by the cool Rastan advert on the opposite page and the properly mindblowing prospect of being able to play Out Run at home elsewhere in the mag; the hard to make out black and white screenshots hardly helped either! I really don’t think it made any impression whatsoever as a result, but that would all change with the arrival of the Atari ST and Amiga versions later that year! I’m not sure I ever ended up drilling much at all, but seeing this beautiful space station (where you’re drilling to relieve pressure from poison gas buildups) in all its colourful, 3D glory was a true sight to behold!

Far more so than the actual gameplay though. I thought it stank – not much to do and what you were supposed to do was too hard. Still, hell of a tech demo, and the sense of scale on top of all that immersion was genuinely unlike anything I’d ever experienced in any game before. And that was more than enough to suck me in to buying it’s sequel… Twice! Okay, second time around was far more recent, and only because it came in a bundle of other stuff I didn’t already own on eBay, but I was there for the original bundle, the big box release of Castle Master and Castle Master II: The Crypt, when that also came out on Atari ST in 1990 – the very same year the original came out, in fact. Actually, it might well have been at exactly the same time from what I’ve read since, with this one just an expanded version that seemed to have been available alongside the standalone release; the sequel is more of an extra chapter built on the same engine than anything properly new, and I’m not entirely sure it was even available standalone outside of this compilation.

While we’d now been familiar with the Freescape technology for a couple of years by then, Castle Master still had a few groundbreaking tricks up its sleeve… Ever heard of any other game using a five hundred line, thirteen page poem to set the scene??? I’m not talking Jim Morrison beat poetry with a single word on each line either – no “Poise / Delicate / Pause / Consent” here! No, it’s full-on Lord Byron, with huge, complex, old-language verses… “When gods lived not in taudry chapels, but thunderfooted rode the sky.” Twelve words in that line – take that Jim! Now, I’m not averse to a bit of poetry, and have even had a few of my own efforts published over the years, but I don’t want this as my game instructions, so let me give you the back of the box – spelling mistakes and all – instead! “Set in and around a dark and eerie castle, cross a shark infested moat and risk life and limb in a desparate rescue bid. Choose to free either the Prince or Princess. Battle with the evil spirits using just your slingshot. Search for keys, potions and clues to unravel the mysteries of ‘Castle Eternity’.” It then goes on to tell us we’ll be using all our senses to discover solutions to puzzles, hidden rooms and hidden traps. “All in SOLID 3D!” Well come back to that in a sec, but I’m not quite done with the book of medieval poetry yet…

As bizarre as finding an oversized poem inside your game box might be, if someone wants to spend their time writing this crap and Incentive want to spend their money printing it in huge manuals that’s up to them! What has always properly annoyed me about this manual, though, is the Getting Started bit at the end! Remember the back of the box talked about solving puzzles? Well, forget the first big one because not only does point number two in this bit give away how to find it but the first one actually tells you the solution before you’ve even had a chance to work it out yourself! Let me explain. Once you’re past the character selection, where you pick to play the Prince or Princess before the one you didn’t pick gets carted off by a giant pair of bird legs to Castle Eternity, presented on what must be the most bland loading screen featuring a castle ever, the portcullis rises on the game and you’re ready to head towards the distant castle…

You don’t really need a getting started guide to know you need to head towards the castle, so off you trot using your preferred input method from a choice of keyboard, mouse, combination of both of one or the other with a joystick – I always liked keyboard for movement and mouse for everything else, but apart from mouse-only being a bit fiddly when you need to select an icon for something like look up or down or crawl or run on the very forward-thinking and very streamlined user interface, they all work pretty well. In a very old-school, pre-FPS way! Anyway, we were heading towards the distant castle… But we really need to address the very slowly plodding elephant in the 2023-styled room first though! With a modern set of eyes, this game – like all the Freescape games – moves at a crawl, and you can pretty much count the frames per second on one hand. With fingers missing! However, looking with 1990 eyes, we didn’t worry about stuff like that; a bit like On The Buses twenty years earlier and its casual racism. And homophobia. And sexism… Happier days, of course, but hardly timeless and takes a few minutes to adjust to today! In Castle Master’s case though, more than made up for by a world that’s still surprisingly atmospheric – considering we’re talking sparsely placed, very straight-edged filled polygons – that, at the time, was nothing short of awe-inspiring however fast you walked. There was always the run button too, but remember, point five in Getting Started tells us it’s “best to walk within enclosed chambers and to run when outside or in corridors.”

Which reminds me, I was talking about being annoyed with this very bit of the manual before I got distracted by On The Buses. And not for the first time! Right, back on script, and we’ve finally reached the castle, but the drawbridge is up, and there’s sharks patrolling that moat – black fins circling the entire castle perimeter, over and over, in what is one of those wonderful sights in all of gaming that I totally forgot to include in either part one or part two of that aforementioned feature on those at the end of 2022 but has been in the list to feature in the next instalment ever since! In our current situation though, the most terrifying, slowly scrolling black triangles ever mean we need to get that drawbridge down if our rescue mission is going anywhere! What this should mean is that you need to explore your environment to find a way to get it down, just like the back of the box says, and given the general lack of any other objects between you and the castle and the mountains in the very far distance, a good place to start might be that hut you’ll eventually find around the back of the castle.

Inside what turns out to be a wizard’s hut, there’s a table with a big piece of cheese on it, a very magical looking chair next to it, a rug you might want to return to later, and over on the wall there’s a picture hanging, which brings us back to the point number two… “2. Examine the hanging pictures to study the clues.” Now, I’d have quite liked to have puzzled that out for myself, and again, given the general scarcity of places to look for clues, I’d have probably got there in the end too, but okay, I’ll take the hint and have a look, or I would do except the clue it contains when you do is already totally given away by the first point in the Getting Started guide! “1. A well aimed rock will bring the drawbridge down.” Really?!?! Framerate might not have existed back then (though I’m still not convinced it does as much as some people insist today!) but spoilers certainly did, and for a game built in an engine that not only intentionally chokes movement speed but play area size too, I’d have definitely liked to have puzzled that one out for myself!!!

Whatever, right click or the mouse or however you fancy chucking one of your endless supply of rocks into the little slot at the side of the drawbridge, down it comes, and we’re on our way! We should quickly familiarise ourselves with what’s on the screen before we go much further though. Most of it is taking up by the viewing window, where you’re playing totally first-person, with a central crosshair just keeping things oriented then a pointer icon for rock throws and other actions. Such as picking up more pieces of cheese from the filthy stable floor and eating them! Along the bottom, there’s a set of dumb-bells indicating your current strength, a spirit level (which you want to keep low), a key rack showing how many you’ve collected, and a message window that also shows your current location. Then, if you’re using mouse controls, you’ve got those icons for looking up and down, for movement – including U-turns, ninety-degree turns or slight turns – as well as really cool icons disguised as castle windows down the left side for walk, run and crawl. Finally, click the title bar at the top and you’ll get a separate information screen showing score, number of spirits destroyed and so on, as well as all the settings controls for saving, loading and turning sound effects on or off.

I might as well cover sound effects while we’re here because there’s not a huge amount to them (unless you get caught in a room with a shrieking ghoul!), but what’s there is mostly effective – footsteps when you walk on a wooden surface, creaking doors, the regular sound of thunder and that kind of thing. It’s very much spot effects rather than continuous sound, and they seem to have been sampled although not necessarily directly from what they’re representing, unless they found the weirdest sounding portcullis ever! The soundtrack, on the other hand, is absolutely superb, and possibly even my favourite on the ST! It’s about five minutes of digitised church-rock, built around an atomospheric big-bell melody that comes and goes around some really spooky electro-synth hooks, backed by a bassline that’s very mid-eighties The Cure. At the time, a bit of theme music taking up a relatively huge 80K of your memory space was as lavish as the overall production here, but even so, the sound itself is a bit fuzzy and low-res, with the drumlines particularly suffering and falling way back into the mix. Have a listen to the Amiga version is my reluctant advice. Good tune either way though!

With all that talk of poetry earlier, I think I skipped over most of the story! In short, a thirteen-thousand-year-old shaman called Magister got all upset when the Normans came along and built a castle on the hill he lived in and woke him up from his five-hundred year slumber with their digging. In his weakened state after all that lying around though, they just sent him packing when he went around to moan about the noise, and thus banished to a hut just outside the castle (yes, the one with the cheese in) he plotted his great revenge, and one night, while they were busy having a big feast, he turned them all into malevolent spirits and took over the castle. Which is where your twin was wandering around when they went missing, one year ago to the day… The game itself is built around freedom, meaning you can go wherever you want (assuming you’ve got the keys to get there) and do whatever you want, sometimes even in the way you want, with the puzzles that generally block your current progress not necessarily having a right way to solve them, although they may need to be done in a certain order. And what you’ll be aiming for overall is taking out all the various spirits roaming various locations before finding the big boss guarding your sibling’s cell. Haunted locations are quickly apparent as you enter them, not only from that shrieking noise I mentioned just now, but also a mad strobe effect and the ghost itself flying around like an even more mad thing, making chucking a rock to dispatch it before all your strength is sapped a not insignificant task! Kill a spirit, though, and that spirit level gauge will move to the left a bit, but as time passes, it will keep moving to the right, and if it gets too far that way you’ll be overcome by spirits and game over, just like if your strength is sapped too far.

A nice touch here is that as your strength is depleted – indicated by the weights on your dumb-bells disappearing – you’ll lose the ability to run, then even to walk, and you’ll be left only able to crawl, before death then inevitably turns up. Unless you find a bit of that cheese someone seems to have left all over the castle pronto; and there’s a few strength potions to find too. Just stay away from green cheese, and while I think of it, stay out of the ladies’ loos too! As well as some early gaming toilets (although Jet Set Willy was pioneering that years earlier!), I guess there’s around a hundred locations here, with a lot of the action taking place in the four towers on each corner of the castle, each of which has four floors, but there’s also a big chapel, the stables, the hut, the corridors and catacombs to get to grips with – in-play it feels really huge and I remember following the manual’s advice and drawing my own map for this one. Within the four towers, you’ll also find kitchens, vaults, libraries, barracks, great halls and so on, each surprisingly recognisable by what I reckon is a maximum of about fifteen polygonal objects per location!

A bit of exploring will eventually reveal some of those keys, and once you’ve collected one you can enter the information screen and clicking on one on the key rack on the left will tell you what it’s for, giving you a bit of direction. At the beginning at least, if you’re following a relatively “safe” route (as opposed to jumping down a well or climbing through a secret passage) you should make some fairly rapid and satisfying progress, with the first key opening a door right next door, revealing another key, then an obvious route as you backtrack that you probably missed before when you were facing the other way which contains a really simple switch-based puzzle that opens a gate and on we go. Puzzles aren’t always as simple as pressing a couple of switches but generally do involve doing that, or positioning yourself in the right place, or bulking up your strength or just chucking more rocks at things! They’re not always so obvious either, and the same goes for where to go next, so you really need to make a note of mysterious holes hidden under pulpits or almost in plain view above you in a ceiling – your new-found freedom of camera is, understandably, your best friend, so you need to make sure you’re taking in everything from all angles, despite the challenge of doing so as you negotiate that almost binary movement… Oh for a right stick to look around with!

Progress is generally logical though, once you’ve found a start point, and there are enough clues dotted around the place to keep you moving, but even using the in-built save and load functions, this thing’s going to take a good few attempts and a good many hours to both solve and actually make it through intact. Even going back to it again now – which wasn’t for the first time since 1990 but the first in a while – I certainly wasn’t clearing it in anywhere near the well under an hour I’m now seeing walkthrough videos doing it in! However long it takes, the final boss and ending cut-scene make it worthwhile, but I think it’s a worthwhile experience however far you take it – even if the tech isn’t quite as breath-taking as it once was (which, honestly, was the main reason you’d have played it in 1990), it’s a really decent adventure even if you you take all of that away! Coming back to the manual one more time, it also suggests a few things to provide a bit of longevity for “advanced players” – hitting a million points, completing the game, competing the game as the other character or going for a 7.5 million maximum score! I’m not entirely sure how score works and I’ve never tried as the lady character (which is very unlike me – she’s obviously wearing too many clothes!) but I did find the one about completing the game at all interesting, given what I’ve just said about only playing it for the tech.

I think we’ve probably covered most of it as we’ve gone, but I should maybe summarise on that tech now we’re about done here. Okay, it’s not what it once was, and if you struggle to go back to original PlayStation games because of not enough polygons with too many jagged edges then this is a whole other level! However, there are still reasons to be impressed, even now… We’ve got an entire castle, with everything you’d find in a castle, built out of simple, coloured shapes forming a 3D whole that you can walk around and explore in its entirety. And not only that, it’s all been authentically dressed using even more simple, coloured shapes, restricted in number but creatively positioned so as to build not just a level of recognition but, combined with a tiny spark of your own imagination, an atmosphere that has no right to be achievable here! It’s a proper castle!

As I said earlier, the Amiga version is a bit more of the same and probably the place to play it, if only for that outstanding music! The 8-bit versions are, understandably, a bit less of the same but a remarkable achievement all the same, although probably not the place to play seriously today! And that “sequel” such as it is definitely more of more of the same, picking up the story where we just left off because it turns out you’re now trapped in the castle and need to get out! It does expand on what came before though, with the titular new crypt area and more elaborate puzzles, but honestly I’ve never spent enough time with it to tell you any more than that. I’ve always just been happy enough with the original game to not really need to start all over again with a new take on the same thing! Which I think is why I’ve never really gone nuts on the other Freescape games – I’m good to get my fill in this lovely old spooky castle and remember that absolute thrill of loading it up for the first time and being immediately immersed. That said, I do have a bit of an Ancient Egypt obsession so maybe we’ll have a look at that Total Eclipse sometime here soon too!