Despite an agonizingly slow cursor speed, this game will appease fans of the old point-and-click adventure games.
In this game, you wander in first person through the castle solving puzzles until your final confrontation with the Warlock you must destroy. Doing this requires a lot of pointing, clicking, and reading, though most time is spent moving the cursor. Like the old adventure games, you manipulate and examine things through familiar commands like taking, opening, hitting, and looking. Everything you do requires two to three presses of the A button, which isn't bad. The problem is how slow the cursor is. If it moved a little faster, it wouldn't feel so cumbersome.
Of course, the game also has a bit of time limit. Throughout the game you'll find torches. There's a finite amount, and when your torch burns out, you'll die in the darkness, so you need to constantly pay attention to this detail, as you have to manually light your torches.
Puzzles is this game can be quite hard for those unfamiliar with the unmerciful difficulty of old interactive fiction and adventure games. The solutions are not always obvious. It will certainly test your puzzle solving skills, and old fans of the genre can relive the pain of trying to figure out the strange logic these games always had.
The graphics are nice on the handheld being exactly like it's NES counterpart. It would have been nice to see a few changes, like more color and animations. The interface isn't that bad, in terms of design. Everything is clear and easy to navigate. Seeing your gear and such is as simple as just scrolling down the screen. The cursor really should move quicker, though.
The sounds in this game are identical to those on the NES version. You've got a few different background tracks that play in certain areas of the castle, and a few sound effects to accent specific things you do. It's all very fitting, but pretty nondescript. The game is relatively short with a simple plot, but still enjoyable to play. The slow mouse cursor is really the only major flaw of this game and really makes it feel like it's holding you back. The odd logic some of the puzzles have and lack of clues can easily frustrate players, especially those weak in the puzzle area.