For those following the ongoing saga of my gaming schedule, yesterday saw me break said schedule to go to Ikea with my wife.
I bought a new chair to go in my study, which contains all my retro consoles and computers, because I came to the conclusion that the “gamer chair” I picked up a while back (actually, my workplace at the time paid for it as part of working from home arrangements) actually wasn’t all that comfortable. And thus, given my renewed desire to enjoy my retro consoles, I thought it worthwhile to have something comfortable to sit on.
Naturally, having acquired a new chair in which to enjoy retro gaming action, it made sense to enjoy the remainder of the evening sitting in said chair enjoying retro gaming action. And I am happy to confirm that it is indeed very comfortable. So I call that a win. I also had a thoroughly pleasant couple of hours playing Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse on the Mega Drive in my new chair, so I also call that a win.
Anyway, enough talk of furniture; this is a site about video games, so let’s talk a bit more about Castle of Illusion (as we shall refer to it hereafter), a game that I had a passing familiarity with from back in the day, but never really played; a pal of mine had its 16-bit follow-up World of Illusion and we used to enjoy playing that in its two-player mode, but Castle of Illusion is not a game I owned back in the day, and thus it was mostly new to me.
For the unfamiliar, Castle of Illusion is a Sega-developed, Disney-themed platformer starring Mickey Mouse. It first released for the 16-bit Mega Drive in 1990 and was subsequently ported to Master System and Game Gear — though it’s worth noting that those 8-bit versions are substantially different from the Mega Drive version and well worth playing in their own right.
In Castle of Illusion, Minnie Mouse has been kidnapped by the witch Mizrabel (see what they did there), who wants to steal her youth and beauty. Mickey, in hot pursuit, is told that in order to confront Mizrabel, he will need to collect seven gems in order to create a rainbow bridge that leads to Mizrabel’s lair. Unfortunately, said gems are scattered throughout the Castle of Illusion, guarded by Mizrabel’s henchmen, the Masters of Illusion.
Thus begins a platform adventure through five (yes, five, not seven) stages, in which Mickey must make his way through three substages on a common theme, then defeat a boss. In the first three stages, Mickey receives one of the seven gems for defeating the boss; in the latter two, Mickey also receives a gem at the midpoint of the level. One wonders if the game was originally supposed to be bigger, but Sega either ran out of time or cartridge capacity.
Being a Castle of Illusion, each room Mickey enters in the castle presents him with a stage that is very different from the last. The first sees Mickey making his way through a forest; the second sees him battling against toys that have come to life; the third takes him through a stormy canyon and into an underground passage; the fourth shrinks him to a tiny size and sees him leaping across library shelves, swimming through cups of tea and hopping across biscuit platforms inside milk bottles; and the final stage is, I guess, the castle’s “true form”.
Mechanically, Castle of Illusion is quite simple, but has a few interesting quirks on the usual platform game formula from the era. Perhaps most notable is the fact that while Mickey most commonly defeats enemies by jumping on them Super Mario-style, it’s not enough to simply land on them from above; Mickey must be performing a “bum-bounce” manoeuvre, which requires a second tap of the jump button in mid-air to perform, otherwise he will take damage upon contact with an enemy. When you first start playing, it’s very easy to forget this, but it’s easy enough to form a habit.
Mickey can also acquire items of various descriptions — themed per stage — that he can fling at enemies. It’s a good idea to try and hold on to these, because while they’re not essential to defeating bosses, there are a couple of encounters in the game that are significantly easier if you can eschew bum-bouncing in favour of flinging items from afar.
What really struck me about Castle of Illusion while playing is how… straightforward the levels are. This isn’t a criticism, either; there are secrets to discover in each level, so exploration is a possibility, but the important thing is that in each one you have a clear goal, and the game isn’t just a sprawling, vast map to uncover a bit at a time. Instead, each stage is completely self-contained and, in most cases, quite different in feel from the last.
This got me thinking: we don’t really get platformers like this very often any more. By far the most common type of platformer we see in 2023 is the open-structure exploratory platformer, often with procedurally generated elements, designed to take anywhere between 10 and 40 hours to beat. By contrast, the short-form, linear platformer with self-contained, hand-crafted levels is a bit of a dying breed; it’s not dead by any means, but it’s by no means anywhere near as common as it was back in its 16-bit glory days.
That’s a shame, but I also completely understand why: it’s all to do with perceived value. Castle of Illusion has five levels and can easily be breezed through in less than an hour if you know what you’re doing. That sort of thing is absolute anathema to today’s gamers, who are obsessed with how much “content” a game has — and, in the case of PC games, whether the developer provides regular “updates”, lest the game be declared “abandoned” or “dead”. I mean, heaven forbid a creative project be finished at some point.
Bear in mind that Castle of Illusion would have been somewhere in the region of £40 (in 1990’s money — around £94 today accounting for inflation!) when it originally released and it becomes all the more remarkable by today’s standards that it was pretty much universally praised by press and public alike, and regarded as a near-essential part of many players’ Mega Drive libraries. It just goes to show how times change.
Of course the fact that Castle of Illusion is technically less than an hour long doesn’t mean that you’ll only spend less than an hour playing it. For starters, unless you’re supremely skilled at platform games, you’re unlikely to clear it on your first run through — with no save system and only two continues, you can easily hit a hard Game Over and have to go back to the start. Granted, it’s not a super-difficult platform game by any means, but it’ll still likely take most players at least a few attempts to be able to clear it reliably.
And then after that, replay value is added through a scoring system that rewards you for various things, including defeating enemies, collecting items, discovering secrets and finishing the level with more than a sliver of health (confusingly referred to as a “Technical Bonus”). Plus, you know, it’s just a fun, beautifully presented little game that is enjoyable to play through, even if you’ve beaten it before. Sometimes it’s nice to just revisit things you’re already familiar with, even if you know them inside out.
And, of course, with the fact that Castle of Illusion is no longer £40 to pick up today — I got mine for £12 boxed (albeit with no manual) — its short length stings a little less. Hell, I actually like the fact it’s a game you can beat in the space of an evening; amid the 100+ hour RPGs and potentially endless games that are around today, it’s thoroughly nice to have something you can roll credits on pretty easily, assuming your skills are up to the job.
So you know what? I’d actually like to see more stuff like this make a comeback. And if today’s devs are too afraid of the gamers whining about “not enough content” to do that — well, I have a ton of short-form platformers I missed out on from back in the day to catch up on, I guess!
If they made high quality platformers that were short but priced accordingly, I’d probably go for it!
Castle of Illusion on both Mega Dri e and Master System are still so fun to play. As you said, they’re simple games to play, but there’s a charm there.