![]() And it isn’t just that Simon’s Quest breaks that taboo – it’s that it doesn’t even seem to notice it.Īnd that’s my best attempt at talking about Simon’s Quest. It is a game of non sequiturs and anti-climaxes. They’re memorable, and they’re memorably unlike the feeling that most games create. When Simon’s Quest comes up, people rush to its quirks: the stilted poetry of its translations, the meekness of its final battle, the act of kneeling in front of that cliff for just long enough that you begin to wonder if you’re doing it right before it works. Having this oddity squelching about in the middle of a retro dynasty like Castlevania really resonates with me, and I get the impression that I’m not alone in that. The whole thing creates an alien, frustrating, deeply charming sense of something that barely knows how to be a video game, but isn’t going to let that stop it. There are hints available through dialogue and hidden throughout the game, but these serve more as another layer of oddness than as a guide. ![]() It’s a whole lot of ‘what’ with a giddy dearth of ‘why’. Garlic can be purchased from a man in a hidden basement, then taken to a cemetery and thrown on the ground so that another man will appear and give you a silk bag. You can then hold the red crystal and kneel in front of a cliff, and a whirlwind will appear to carry you up to the top. A greyscale man will trade you a red crystal for a blue one. They feel all but completely arbitrary in both narrative and mechanical terms. It’s a distant precursor to Souls’ illusory walls, I suppose. Sometimes you have to jump through a wall that isn’t actually there, but looks just like all the ones that are. Sometimes you just have to go a different way. Dungeons contain huge dead ends – actual dead ends, the kind that there is no reason to visit and that you almost never see in games. Boss fights present no challenge, and death means nothing. The result is a sort of surreal anti-game, half-dressed in the trappings of a traditional classic. To put it more bluntly, it is frequently laborious, runs poorly, and makes no sense. The developers were attempting to coax the NES, the Castlevania framework, and themselves into doing things that they just couldn’t quite do. The trouble is that none of it actually works very well. That’s pretty interesting! Not many sequels are so bold, nor have their boldness so immediately undone. In short, it’s a complete reversal of the things that make its immediate neighbours tick. The knowledge of how to get that far in the first place is the hard part. Any player with the knowledge of how to do so can stomp Dracula to pieces in a few seconds. ![]() Grinding for currency is a relevant part of the game, but getting knocked into pits by medusa heads is not. There’s a day/night cycle, and rudimentary experience and inventory systems. It moved the focus away from a traditional action-platforming style and onto adventure elements, with progress being gated more by exploration and puzzles than by challenge. It represents a wild detour in the progression between those two games. Simon’s Quest falls between the original Castlevania and Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse. I can only dream of one day becoming an interesting failure. This honestly hits me at a personal level. One that has earned love and a place in history largely on the merits of its failings. But it is a failure that had stood the test of time. There have been plenty of those since 1987. Coming into it a little older and a lot more pretentious, I was struck by what a special kind of game it is. I recently replayed Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest for the first time in years.
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