The 7th and arguably most accomplished entry in the Castle Quest paper adventure series. After the lukewarm reception of the bloated but somewhat boring Castle Quest 6, the developers picked up their slack and delivered what many consider the best paper Castle Quest.

In these games, you played an adventure game from the Sierra/LucasArts golden age, but on paper. Everything was similar to the electronic version, except that a narrator flipped pages and told you what happened when you tried stuff. This is what I spent most of my childhood making, until I learned programming and started making actual electronic videogames.

These games could range from 20 to 100 or more pages. Some were completely massive. Not all of them were equally well put together, but this one actually made a lot of sense and quite a bit of complex puzzles as well. I’ll give you an example below.

This is the interface, with (spoilers!) all the items you need to connect to complete the game (you only get to see this page when you finished the game – there is an empty interface page as well):

Early in the game, you are presented with a puzzle (Dutch, sorry):

Later, you found this laboratory:

Hint: I was a big fan of Queen. If you mix the Q, E (twice) and N potions, together with an opal, acorn and apple you found elsewhere, you could concoct a potion to get past the big ugly dangerous mouse that was blocking the pathway to the cellar:

Phew! That’s some hardcore adventure gaming right there. Good job team!

After Castle Quest 7, the series took a different turn and went for photorealistic graphics and cutscene-heavy gameplay in Castle Quest 8.