I am tempted to buy The Castle… as a fan of Maniac Mansion, and after having read your comments… do you suggest to spend 5 euros to buy it?
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are you crazy? It’s worth much more than that. 
Don’t fall in the temptation to read the walkthrough. Rather, when you see a room object that’s suspicious, use everything on it.
Bought it, I´m curious. Let´s see 
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be prepared. 70% of the puzzles are very hard and fair, 30% are very hard and unfair.
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Sounds good 
Uhh, similar to the first version of Maniac Mansion!
I’d say Maniac Mansion has fewer unfair puzzles, or none. out of memory. Right now I don’t recall one. Which ones would you call unfair?
#1: when Dr. Fred goes to play Meteor Mess game… if you didn’t fix the wires in time, he will never play again. And if he will never play, he will never set a new Hi-score. And the new Hi-score is SUPER important to win the game…
#2: there are a limited number of dimes to use with the telescope. If you fail to understand what to see, you’ll never get another chance.
#3: if you use the paint remover on something other than the paint bloch on the wall, you’ll be in a dead end, because behind that paint there is a door…
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wow, I didn’t know that.
There is a thin line between dead ends and unfair puzzles… you are not talking about object combinations that make no sense, or that make sense but for which there was no reason at all to focus on that.
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Why didn’t you post about it before?
Ah well, it is only 5€/$
Not sure about #1. Unless you use a walkthrough, you are not aware of the puzzle until dr Fred tries to play and makes a comment. I am 100% sure you can solve it then and you’ll get another cutscene later. But perhaps that first cutscene starts a timer were he won’t play again if…?
I have even seen the opposite happen: he’ll play it again, setting some new scores and effectively changing the code to the door.
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Just like it’s 1986!
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Yeah. Basically, the trick in this game is to first understand which room objects are important and which room objects are only scenery. If the room object has a suspicious or unusual description, even if short, this means it must be used with something. Isolating these objects is 70% of the difficulty. then you try everything on it.
Unfortunately even this is not always sufficient, because sometimes you need to combine two or even three inventory objects, (the third one for no apparent reason), before you have the composite object to combine with the room object. But this happened only once.
And once I found a room object that had no suspicious description and there was no reason at all to do something on it and not on similar objects…
No, I don’t suggest to do this.
Wait until it is released on itch.io and then spend at least two times the value on it, or three times.
I’m not aware of such problem. Is this reproducible? Maybe it was fixed in later versions of the game?
I agree with #2 and #3.
Another unfair one would be intercepting the packet where you have to either be lucky or already know it.
And also ripping the envelope open.
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Yes that’s true. Often dead ends are unfair (e.g. opening the envelope), other times they are OK (e.g. most deaths are foreseeable).
Moon logic is the problem I have seen you describing the most with The Castle. E.g. you have to use everything with everything because you don’t have any other clues and it doesn’t make any sense.
She posted it on her blog on 5th of August. You clearly should read more Spanish blogs!
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I knew the game by chance by comments on twitter.
Yesterday I saw all the traffic coming to my blog from this forum. I didn’t know it despite I’m a huge fan of Thimbleweed Park. This is a bit off topic but I have a few gameplays on my youtube channel: casual mode, hard mode, all the books in the library, all the phone messages…
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Yeah, the The Castle posts deserve a separate thread anyway.
Oh wow, all the phonebook messages! 
And I’ve found the library videos:
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Yeah, we frown upon off-topic here 
The very same ones!
Hey! There are mine!
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So you would recommend it?
I tried it on the weekend but it was more or less just a technical test
But it’s great from what I can say from following the development process. And reception from other backers match with my expectations.
What I can say is that the settings menu is great. Redefinable controls etc. You can access the credits from there and use up/down to scroll through them (that’s a nice feature for Kickstarter projects with thousands of backers in credits, e.g. Broken Age).
They support achievements and co-op on GOG. So technically it makes a very good impression.
And I like the art style anyway.
Expect an in-depth review from me in 5 to 10 years (btw. I haven’t redeemed my copy of
Gibbous yet, tsts).
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