How About That Thing?

Have you ever found yourself trying to remember the name of a super obscure video game, and having no luck? Furthermore, every attempt to search for the game has left every gaming expert, search engine, and AI application scratching their head, wondering what the fuck you’re talking about? Believe me, when I say obscure, I mean obscure. So obscure, you only have very faint memories of renting it that one time, never renting it again, and yet, it somehow managed to leave an imprint in your mind despite it.

I myself have actually encountered this scenario MULTIPLE times. Sometimes, it’s a Sega Genesis game, and sometimes, it’s a Nintendo64 game… But you get the idea. It’s a game so obscure, so hard to locate, you begin to wonder if the game actually existed in the first place.

It’s the kind of rabbit hole I find myself going down more frequently than I like to admit. It’s led to me wondering if I might be mad on one or two occasions. There’s still that one game or two I haven’t found yet, but recently, I’ve been able to cross one item off that list of titles I swore existed at one point. That title?

Ah, Castelian. AKA: Nebulous, AKA: Tower Toppler, AKA: Sublime… Good lord, no wonder I couldn’t find this game! Nobody can apparently agree on what it’s called! At least if the Wikipedia article is anything to go by, anyway.

Let’s just call it Castelian for now, and move on.

Castelian was definitely from that golden age of gaming where everything was complete and total random nonsense, and we were okay with that. the plot was nigh nonexistent, the enemies were a hodgepodge of random things, the objective was as simple as it was puzzling, and that’s the way we liked it, god damn it! Video gaming would eventually evolve, and we as gamers would evolve along with it and ask all the important questions. Like, what is that green character on screen? And, is there rule34 of it? But back then, we were content with with knowing screw all about what was going on.

Castelian was a puzzle platformer at its core… And I think that’s one of the reasons I struggled with it as much as I did when I was younger. When I rented this game, I was a wee little roach. I think I might have been about six years old, or maybe even five. Either way, I barely understood how video games beyond Super Mario Brothers worked, and puzzle games like this, that asked you to think just a LITTLE more critically than “move right, jump on turtle” went over my wee roach brain.

It also probably didn’t help that this was what a lot of the levels looked like.

Yes sir, not a whole lot in the way of eye candy. Unless purple is your favorite color, in which case this is probably your favorite level.

Each “tower” had its own unique color scheme… But this was basically what you had to work with. There are various enemies trying to knock you off the tower, and various obstacles like disappearing platforms and elevators designed to make your life that much more challenging.

Your little green piggy thing would start at the bottom of each tower, and have to climb to the very top. Once at the top, you go through a doorway, and unlike all the other doorways, it doesn’t appear to go to another part of the tower. After a couple seconds, the creature pokes his head out of the entrance, the tower… Falls apart, I guess. A score is calculated, and then we’re brought out here.

I remember thinking this was a bonus world at one point, but looking at it now… I guess it’s a sort of hub world? For sure, the entrances to the towers seem to be at this part of the game. I’m pretty sure you still have to play the towers in order, though, which begs the question of if this is actually a hub world or not… I don’t know.

All I know is the towers get increasingly sillier names as you go, and the towers themselves get tougher and tougher. I myself could never see my way past tower 3, as memory serves, and that was AFTER I saw my dad beat tower 1 and tower 2 when he wanted to check the game out.

And… Well… That’s pretty much it. The plot clearly centers around the towers, but I have no idea what we’re doing there, I have no idea why we’re blowing them up… And I suppose if I was having fun, I probably wouldn’t have cared all that much, in the grand scheme of things. If there was a story in the instruction manual, I’ve long since forgotten it. In fact, there’s probably a good chance I didn’t bother reading it in the first place.

I watched someone play through it on YouTube after discovering the name at long last, and I got to say, I might have judged it too harshly as a six-year-old. It’s definitely a strange one, but part of me wonders if I’d be able to take on the challenge if I had another shot? Compared to the kind of idiot I used to be at that age, I’m much more into puzzle gaming nowadays. Who knows? Maybe I’d actually be able to make it to the end of the entire game in one go.

For now, I rest a little more contented, knowing that the mystery of “that tower climber where you played as a green piggy” has come to an end. Now if only I could figure out the name of the one where you alternated between a blue guy and a tiger.