Castle of Dr. Creep

It is a complex fixed-screen platform video game, with a side view of a tangle of shelves, ladders and drop poles. Each castle is made up of numerous rooms interconnected by passages, each a different screen marked by a color.

There are 13 castles of increasing difficulty, but which can be tackled in any order, for a total of over 200 rooms. There is also a tutorial to learn the various elements of the game, which was not common at the time.

The player controls a man who is unarmed and with no jumping ability, but capable of activating switches and mechanisms. There is also a simultaneous two-player mode, who can cooperate in solving the maze; if the two have to take exits to different rooms, the game becomes alternate, until they find themselves in the same room.

At the beginning, and every time you change rooms, a map of the entire castle is first shown, where only the rooms already explored and the adjacent ones are visible. In this screen you can also save to disk.

Elements that complicate the rooms include switches, keys, hatches, teleporters, lethal electrostatic generators, and other devices. The enemies that can be encountered are mummies and Frankensteins, the latter also capable of using ladders and poles. We must avoid touching them, it is possible to kill them in the same traps that are lethal for the player, but even the monsters can partly make use of the various devices. By making wrong moves it is also possible to get trapped.

To reach the final exit it is necessary to visit all the rooms and use all the keys. There is a total time limit, while for lives you can choose between three or infinite. There are no scores, but there is a ranking of the best times, which can also be saved on disk, only for games without saves and without infinite lives.