Castle of Secrets - The castle doors are officially open

Racula
Jun 10
4 min read

Hello Gamers, Racula here and welcome to another exciting XPN Gaming review!

Primarily known for developing and publishing games on Steam, SQ Game Studios have a released a story-line based, psychological mystery, adventure game, known as Castle of Secrets. What secrets shall we uncover? Well lets open the castle doors and explore further.

What is Castle of Secrets?

Castle of Secrets is a dark fantasy, point and click, puzzle and side scrolling game and it follows the protagonist, Susan. As she embarks on a perilous journey, one that will take her into the very realms of the dead. Along the way, Susan will encounter ghostly inhabitants, forge unexpected alliances and face formidable foes, all while uncovering the truth and answering the most haunting question of all: Who is responsible for the massacre of her family?

Gameplay/Mechanics

The game has been bult upon a peculiar mix of 2D and 3D, as in the environments and objects are in 3D, letting players zoom in and out (using the scrolling part on the mouse) at any point to find new objects to interact with (by pointing and clicking on the object) but all the characters are in 2D.

Primarily the game is keyboard and mouse and characters can be moved about, using A and D on the keyboard, also when controlling Susan, you can jump either using the spacebar or W button. You can also run, by holding down on the left shift key, but I wouldn't exactly call it running, more like a quick walk.

Gameplay, it's split into short distinctive levels that are played sequentially, which unfold more of the storyline one step at a time. In each level, players have a set of tasks to do, in order to complete the level and progress on. Also, each level is contained within either one large area or room, everything you need is there, you just need to find the objects, figure out what to do with each item and solve the puzzles. More or less like the puzzle game: The Room.

Now this game does have at least 3 endings along with several choices to make, which will shape Susan's fate and endings. Which ending you get, will depend on the choices you make and how many karma points you have earned. Will they be good, bad or neutral choices?

Beautifully hand drawn art and audio

As mentioned before, Castle of Secrets has a mixture of 2D and 3D effects, which makes the whole graphics and gameplay stand out, with the ability to zoom the camera in and out at any point, making the focus either solely on Susan or on the environment as a whole. The background, surrounding environments and objects are all in 3D whilst the characters are all in 2D, making them stand out more against the surrounding environments. When the graphic setting are set to Ultra (which if you can, I would do so) the ambience level goes way up in my opinion. Having that dark ambiance throughout the entire game, intended by the developers, fits really nicely with game's overall narrative. So if you can, keep the shadows option on the settings as high as possible. The 2D art work helps quite a bit with setting the tone, bringing all the melancholy and proper seriousness to the characters and the story.

The voice acting and sound affects are both fairly good, both support the game's tone and frequently outweigh the background music at times. Though I will admit, I'm not overly keen on the AI mouthing on the characters. To me it doesn't really fit on the artwork done for the characters and you can see it looks sort of photoshopped as well, where the mouth should be. The soundtrack does complement the mood of the game, even though there are times it does completely vanish, but it does pick up. Usually during the cutscenes, when the characters are talking and the plot starts to gradually develop, revealing new mysteries to find out.

Final Thoughts

Now I'm not going to lie, I did have some issues at times whilst playing, which were trying to interact with and put away the objects needed to solve each puzzle. When performing an action and you have the wrong item in hand, it's a bit difficult to put the item back in your inventory. You end up having to drop the item somewhere in the room and then try and pick it up later, which comes to my second problem. Trying to interact with an object or item, I found you have to be in the right spot and pretty much nearly on top of things, in order to interact with them, which again proved difficult. Having said this, overall I enjoyed playing Castle of Secrets, solving puzzles, finding out the truth of what happened and seeing which ending I got, did I get the good, bad or neutral ending? Now that would be telling and spoiling. If you want to find out what happens, then I recommend you trying this game out for yourself and see which ending you get.

Castle of Secrets is available to play on on pc:

Steam