The Palace of Deceit

The Palace of Deceit
Developer(s)Game Syndicate Productions
Publisher(s)InnerVision Software
Designer(s)Cliff Bleszinski
Platform(s)MS-DOS, Windows 3
Release1991: MS-DOS
Aug 31, 1992: Windows
Genre(s)Adventure
Mode(s)Single-player

Palace of Deceit is a video game written by Cliff Bleszinski in 1991 in his own company, Game Syndicate Productions, at the age of 16.[1] The first edition, subtitled The Secret of Castle Lockemoer, was a text adventure for MS-DOS. On August 31, 1992, it was remade for Windows 3.x and subtitled The Dragon's Plight as a graphical point-and-click adventure game with an entirely new plot and graphics. Both games are played in a first-person perspective and have been released as freeware. Bleszinski's inspiration came from video games like Déjà Vu and Uninvited.[2]

The Secret of Castle Lockemoer

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In the original game, the player plays the role of a man from the future brought to the medieval past by a good wizard to enter the castle Lockemoer and destroy the Evil Wizard. The game is a text adventure which occasionally uses graphics created using ASCII.

The Dragon's Plight

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In this remake, the player is the dragon Nightshade, captured by the evil wizard Garth and thrown into the dungeons. Nightshade seeks a way out of the castle and a way to destroy Grath for his campaign to wipe out dragonkind from the land of Salac. The game is a point-and-click adventure similar to Shadowgate and Déjà Vu, but lacks music and sound. Nightshade can die in certain encounters, forcing the player to restart or reload a save file. The game was coded in Visual Basic[3] and the graphics created using Microsoft Paintbrush.[4]

References

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  1. ^ "Cliff Bleszinski Reddit AMA Transcript".
  2. ^ Funk, Joe (2010). Hot Jobs in Video Games: Cool Careers in Interactive Entertainment. New York City, New York: Scholastic. ISBN 978-0-5452-1850-4.
  3. ^ "Cliff Bleszinski Interview". September 14, 2012. Retrieved July 21, 2017.
  4. ^ Eddy, Andy. "How Cliff Bleszinski went from bumming games to widespread fame". Retro. No. 4. p. 14.
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