Wolfenstein is a franchise now renowned for being foundational to the first-person shooter genre. It was one of the first shooter titles to hit mainstream success—the game that made Id Software a household name—and it continues to be relevant today. Though I haven't touched anything beyond Wolfenstein: The New Order yet.
But if we dissect that original title, an obscure truth is revealed. Wolfenstein 3D is called such because there was a Wolfenstein before it that was not 3D. The oft-forgotten PC classic Castle Wolfenstein.
You play an unnamed soldier of the Allied Forces, captured by the Germans and imprisoned in their HQ at Castle Wolfenstein. Ordinarily you would have no hope of escaping. You'd interrogated and tortured and left to die before long. But there is a shimmer of hope. Your cellmate, in his dying moments, hands you a pistol and some bullets that he had secreted away. It's not much, but with your wits, skills, and a little luck, it may be just enough to escape from the Nazi regime's clutches.
Castle Wolfenstein is a stealth-action maze game. The actual castle is randomly generated for each playthrough, though always in such a way that it can be beaten. You have to navigate its treacherous halls while avoiding being recaptured by the roaming guards. You can take out enemies with your pistol, but that is a two-way street. Your character is fragile and Nazis rarely march around alone. Sometimes it's best to keep out of sight.
What makes Castle Wolfenstein more than just a maze game with enemies is that you have a lot of options for interacting with the environment. Stealth is not just a matter of staying out an enemy's line-of-sight. You can find disguises to slip by in plain view or get enemies to second-guess before they engage you. If you manage to surprise enemies, they might throw up their hands and surrender to you. But if you then drop your guard, they might regain their courage and go for you anyway.
Crates and bodies can be looted for tools both useful and completely pointless. You might find disguises, ammo, body armor, or grenades, but may also come back empty-handed or find a joke item. Guards can also carry keys which open doors, but this is again optional. The layout may be so that you can go around a door for which you lack the key. Or you can use grenades to destroy doors outright, at the risk of alerting any Nazis on the other end. It's so fun they let you do that and it's addicting too. I never once found the right key to match the right door. I was blowing those suckers up any chance I got.
These innovative touches make Castle Wolfenstein very fun, but that enjoyment is hampered severely by its controls. You can move in every direction including diagonally with the QWEADZXC keys—like a compass around the S key—and aiming works much the same way with the buttons around L, which is also the button that fires your pistol. It's a lot of buttons just to get around and do your most basic combat with, but it gets worse.
You don't press the button and move one square in your chosen direction. No, no, no, you press that button and your guy runs off in that direction until he hits an obstacle or you press S to stop him. All movement is treated as if you're holding down the button. This again makes basic movement feel way clunkier than it needs to be. If you need to move and line up a shot, you now need to factor in that you need to press a compass direction to move, another compass direction to aim in, hit S to stop at the exact right time, then L to fire a shot. I am confident in my skills with a keyboard, but I regularly got mixed up using all the different buttons. Mistakes for which Castle Wolfenstein does not offer much leeway.
Other design choices are similarly... odd. Like opening chests for loot is a core part of the game, but doing so takes time. Literal minutes of time, in fact. Chests will regularly take up to 3-5 minutes to open, during which there's nothing to do. You just wait or grab a drink. The time you wait isn't even proportional to the loot or how many chests there are in the room. You might spend 10 minutes just opening chests, all of which turn out to be empty or have joke items in them.
Also, if you get caught or die, the game doesn't really restart. You're put back into the first room you started in with every state change preserved. All the guards are still dead, looted chests and opened doors still unlocked. You're acquired loot is gone, but you can just effortlessly retrace your steps to where you got caught. They even let you keep your starting pistol, which is polite. Or perhaps we have an infinite amount of cellmates entrusting us with their escape kits.
You need to exit the game yourself and specifically ask for a reset if you want to start over proper. Or generate an all-new castle from scratch if you prefer.
On the whole, Castle Wolfenstein is a neat blend of stealth and action, with innovative mechanics that would be neat to see revisited in modern games. I've played many other stealth games where the option to blow up doors instead of looking for stupid keys would've been most welcome. But for all its great ideas, it's held back by needlessly long wait times on completing actions and a control scheme that saps the fun out of everything you do. So while it's fun to revisit for a while, I don't see this becoming anyone's retro gaming addiction anymore these days.
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