Darkestville Castle

I have a soft spot for small studios swinging hard at a genre dominated by LucasArts nostalgia, and Darkestville Castle from Epic Llama is one of those cases where the swing actually connects. You step into the pointy shoes of Cid, a self-appointed demon who has terrorised the town of Darkestville with laxative-laced pigeon feed, mutant chicken armies, and the occasional arson, all described with such cheerful self-satisfaction that you find yourself nodding along. When his arch-nemesis Dan Teapot hires the Romero Brothers (a trio of demon hunters) and the whole arrangement collapses around Cid's ears, the story shifts into a genuinely funny three-act chase across the village, Cid's castle, and a few stranger locales that I will leave unspoiled. The mechanical DNA is pure 90s: a classic Talk, Grab, and Inspect verb set applied to every person and object on screen, a pocket inventory where you hoard increasingly absurd items, and chain puzzles where talking to the right person in the right order is the key. A highlight button shows you every interactable object in any scene, which quietly solves the worst pixel-hunting frustrations of the games this is imitating without removing the satisfaction of working out what to actually do with those objects. Item combination puzzles land well when the logic is in-universe weird rather than arbitrary weird, and most of them are. The occasional puzzle that asks you to exhaust every dialogue branch before an option unlocks can stall momentum, and a small number of solutions require the kind of lateral leap that sends you to a FAQ. Neither problem is severe enough to sour the experience, but players who expect tight, consistent puzzle logic throughout will notice the cracks. What keeps you going is Cid himself. His voice performance carries the whole game: bitter commentary on every item he inspects, dry mockery aimed at characters who have no idea they are being mocked, and a running monologue that sits somewhere between Futurama and early Discworld in its comedic register. The supporting cast is thinner and the voice acting outside of the lead can feel stiff, but the writing compensates enough that secondary characters still land their jokes. The art direction leans hard into a Tim Burton-adjacent palette, all high-contrast cartoony shapes and slightly unhinged proportions, and it runs beautifully at a steady framerate with seamless room transitions that keep the pacing from dragging during backtracking sections. The soundtrack is upbeat in a way that feels deliberately old-school without being self-consciously retro about it. At five to ten hours depending on how much you click on things just to hear Cid complain about them, Darkestville Castle knows exactly how long it needs to be. There is no padding, no collectible system grafted on to inflate the runtime, no bloat. A secondary Cat Mode replaces all dialogue with cat sounds and is essentially a novelty that dissolves after about ninety seconds, so do not factor it in as replay value. The Mac version is worth flagging: as of writing it is incompatible with macOS Catalina or later, so Linux or Windows is the safer PC pick. On those platforms the cursor-driven controls feel exactly right in a way they demonstrably do not on consoles, so this is genuinely best played at a desk. For anyone who grew up clicking through Monkey Island or Day of the Tentacle and has been quietly waiting for a modern game that earns that comparison rather than just claiming it, Darkestville Castle earns it. Its Metacritic standing reflects a game that does what it sets out to do with craft and personality. It is not rewriting the genre. It does not need to.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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