Look: 8/10 Hate platformers with overly long death animations >.> Nothing to write home about, but functional, classic c64 look, and the wizard sprite, well, looks like a wizard at least! Over time, the look grew on me (surprisingly). The colors, the look of the ladders, the UI and level title reminding me of Manic Miner. I liked the look of Rat Mountain

Oooo and Dark Tower too, I think the level was called

Sound: 5/10 Eventually muted it. Not included in final score, though. (Though I really should start doing so... perhaps with a less weight compared to other factors)

Play: 8/10 Wow! What a variety of difficulty levels, plus Construction/Level Creation ability... Very forgiving collision masks, which is nice and makes the game at least doable for me ha, and not a lot of overuse of precision jumping (or at least, it eases it in). Pretty cool feature where you become, like, vapor and float up or down. As always, I like when you can jump to and from ladders/etc. fluidly, not common enough in early platformers (now, if only you could move mid-jump too!). Not a fan, though, of the bird thing that sometimes appears when, seemingly, you go the wrong way or the wrong route? Not sure exactly the story behind it, but it seems unavoidable if go a certain way. (after hours of gameplay, I'm still not fully sure how it works, but it seems any time you walk off an edge, jump a distance you can't jump, or sometimes go a route you're not supposed to? confusing ha. it's not an enemy though, it's more like an instant death animation.) And as always, not a fan of early platformers' exploitation of the fall-too-far-and-you-die mechanic. Always a hassle to learn.

Nice that you can jump straight from the upper left rope to where I'm standing here, but not so nice having to trial and error discovering that the top of the screen is instant death (i.e., if I can jump from that rope to this platform, I should have been able to just jump from the upper left platform straight to where I'm at now). But whatever. That would've been really frustrating back in the day, trial and erroring through those petty quirks (can't imagine it's limitation based considering this is a 2-disc game, tho I guess with 40 levels and level construction...), but with savestates now it's not as tacky and irritating as it must've been back then (even just having to start back from the beginning of the level the one time of trial and erroring was enough for me ha). (Well, lol, after all that blabber above, I wound up discovering that where I landed is no bueno cuz when I went to the right--which is logical of course--the game had that annoying unavoidable enemy appear signaling I was going the wrong route. So I had to jump back to that upper platform lol--after all that blabber smh--and go down the rope.. then--surprisingly--the game allowed me to climb the center ladder up and jump to the upper-right platform and end the level... figured they'd make me go some convoluted route ha... can only imagine the later levels where you have to get certain treasures to unlock the routes). Other goofy quirks is when you can and can't grab on to a rope mid-jump.

Pro-tip: often the hidden ropes are indicated by the yellow platforms (tho you have to collect certain treasure for the yellow platforms to reveal themselves, it helps with locating the path down or up via rope)

Another pro-tip: some of the treasures cause inescapable traps in later levels! Don't always be greedy till u get to know the levels and/or savestate at the start of levels!

Feel: 8/10 I always like early platformers with set endings, so I have a goal to reach to. With just the goal of getting the key and getting to the lock, this is really fun. Can't imagine trying to go for hiscore. Gotta love how these early platformers often had level construction abilities--seems so advanced for then! And turned out that the manual gives a lot of info for that. I bet I would have a blast with that when young, early game design engine feel! Maybe some day I will explore that, especially since the controls are relatively reasonable for an early platformer, but though I pushed through more levels than I expected considering the usual frustrating gameplay, it's still not a favorite warranting making a bunch of levels like I did with Super Mario Maker, RPG Makers, or the Pajama Sam/Freddi Fish/other Humongous Entertainment side games that often allowed level creation (ooo just remembered that, and got me excited yet again for the 90s and on... almost there heh... 84 has been a brutally long year in this project, and I know it's because I was backlogging every darn game that year lol). Lol yessss to the kitty cat enemies. And I like the feel of this level design, for some reason reminding me of Oddworld (which platformers often do) and the look in general is growing on me

Attachment: 8/10 But as with many of these early platformers, it wound up feeling a lot like a chore. Of course, I eventually had to turn to the manual cuz I wasn't sure about Spells, which are mentioned at the bottom. Level 7 "Great Ball of Fire" sure jumped up in difficulty (and amount of keys!), so I had to learn the deeper mechanics. (and oh shit.. there's 40 levels....... oh boy).

Day 2: Well, as frustrating as the game is (as can be expected with early platformers), it's really growing on me! I know I know, platformers always do and I almost always push through even the most infamously frustrating or ridiculous ones. Sure I don't use cheats, but I do start using savestates at the start of levels once I'm down to one life. I think a big part of what pushed me through was finding the manual and learning how to use spells for those later levels. Still, I'm only on Level 9 at this point... lol... we'll see if I continue feeling this way as I get deeper and deeper into the mechanics creep heh.

Day 3: Well, this was both a good and a bad feeling: good to feel like I accomplished 10 difficult levels! (the task of just getting the key and getting it to the keyhole with the right route kept the satisfying cycle going, pushing me level after level despite my mind telling me to move on to the next game heh), and bad to realize I'm only 10 out of 40 in...

A lot of replayability with this not only with the trial and error platformer style, but also the different ways you could play it--just for the key and move on, try to get highest score, or try to explore all potential routes. Level 31 and on (which is Day 4 now) had such a Level Creator vibe to them, I don't know how to explain it but most games that had a Level Creator (again, for me, Humongous Entertainment side games come to mind like Sock Works, Dog on a Stick, etc.) had this sort of goofily insane "difficulty" mostly through placing several things next to each other. Like this level, for instance

(which wound up being surprisingly easy.. mind you i was only going for key then keyhole, but every level from there and on had a characteristically exploitative quality, next was Totally Tubular exploiting the transporting mechanic, or most exemplary--the Madhouse heh

In the end this was an all around great early microcomputer platformer, and the biggest thing lacking is better fall/fall-to-death mechanics (and, I suppose, the ability to move mid-jump). Level 38 and on were insane. No clue how someone could have gotten those memorized without savestates back in the day (I suppose people probly used cheats instead). After all that torture, the last level (Level 40) felt a bit easy, but again, that was only to get the key to the keyhole, not about getting all the treasure. Quite the anticlimactic "ending" tho it seems the levels just then repeat infinitely in a random order, it's just the usual every-10-levels screen. But regardless, at last--I'm done! Another brutally hard early microcomputer platformer done, 1984 is taking forever indeed!

Completion: All 40 unique levels, Score 80,300 Playtime: ~3.5 hours