Missed Classic: The Palace of Deceit: The Secret of Castle Lockemoer – WON!-ish and Final Rating

Written by Will Moczarski

Thou shalt not pass.

First of all let me say: what a fantastic community we have here at The Adventure Gamer. I had five people respond to my request for assistance with great advice – alas, it was not to be: The Palace of Deceipt indeed appears to be a game of deceipt, it is unwinnable in its present state and I’ve boldly gone as far as I could have gone in playing through it. However, the good news is that the remaining text bits of the game are somewhat readable as parts of the main .exe file, so I will try my best to provide you with a second-hand account of what the other parts might have played like.

Let’s resume our story, and go back to the armoury where I found a shield with my family crest on it. When I try to take the shield, I hear a deep rumbling from within the suit of armour next to it. The suit comes to life and proceeds to attack me with a sharp sword. If I try to kill the knight, the game informs me that I left the knife (you know, the cutz-o-matic one) with the carcass – however, there’s still a sleeping lion next door, right? I open the door and...the lion springs at the knight and knocks him over. He proceeds to tear him to pieces, and then turns to me. There appear to be multiple solutions for what happens next: holding up the shield either results in the lion shredding it to pieces of metal but then blacking out because there “must have been something in the meat”, or the lion’s head “clangs off the shield, and he drops to the ground, knocked out, several of his teeth scattered around the room. […] There are now 19 knights here, a knocked out lion, shreds of metal, lion's teeth, and a frustrated adventurer (you).” A frustrated adventurer? You can say that again. It’s strangely meta to read this parser output after THE CRASH.

Missed Classic: The Palace of Deceit: The Secret of Castle Lockemoer – Half-WON! with REQUEST FOR ASSISTANCE

Written by Will Moczarski

This, my friends, is only a half-won, a won-ish, a sort-of won post which must be a first for the blog. What does this mean, you ask, and how did this come about? Have a little faith and a little patience and I shell tell you all how I succeeded at playing through The Palace of Deceit: The Secret of Castle Lockemoer after a massive amount of parser-wrangling, cursing, keyboard-smashing and wailing – and yet I did not succeed. I will thus start my post with a request for (software) assistance, unusually, because maybe if not all is won at this point, maybe not all is lost either.

Request for (software) assistance

Basically I am looking for someone who can explain and (ideally) fix this error message:

Illegal function call in module PALOFDEC at address 01A2:1470

I assume that either the code is broken here OR this is as far as the shareware version takes us. However, I haven’t found any registered versions on the internet, so if the latter assumption turns out to be true, I will be unable to finish the game. Ironically, I have done what this situation would have required back in 1991, and tried to contact the author of the game, Cliff Bleszinski. Unfortunately, I was unsuccessful as of yet.

If nobody is able to help me, I will post an as-if walkthrough of the remainder of the game because all of the text is right there in the open when you open the main executable file, and attach it to the PISSED rating. That would be somewhat unsatisfactory but I’d be out of other ideas, as it is.

Missed Classic 92: The Palace of Deceit: The Secret of Castle Lockemoer (1991)

Written by Will Moczarski

The beauty of the days gone by.