Very short but decent non linear layout.

The very first time I played this, I jumped into the water, swam for a bit, pushed a button, got out of the water – and found to my great surprise that I had exited the map, one kill and about 45 seconds later. Surely that is quite a major design oversight? The second time around I did my best to avoid exiting by accident.

It's a cute miniature castle and looks nice for its time, but it feels very cramped and throws far too many items at the player for the minuscule space: you can hardly take two steps without picking up a new weapon or a quad or something, which really seems like overkill. Plus, a lot of it is excessively dark.

A charming concept, but rather disappointing in practice. 2 plus.

Good brushwork, bad gameplay. This map is just too cramped.

I have returned!

Well, it's a small DM-SP map. Basically he just threw in enemies and an exit. It's got some nice brushwork, especially for '96. The key flaw, for me at least, is that there's waaay too much health and multiple quads, and the level only has 29 enemies. It's not a bad little map but it's not really worth playing in my opinion. Good effort though. 2/5

Fear Castle on The Quake Grave

As posted above, the fact that you can exit the map without really killing anything is very strange. If you play the rest of the map beforehand, it's actually not awful. It's cramped and there are too many weapons and items to make it any sort of challenge, but it's fun if you just want to play a 3 minute map and kill some monsters.

However, the design decision behind the quick exit is odd. I assume it's all because this was 1996 and deathmatch was all the rage. This area is open so that the whole map is open to fragging. However, even stating that, the map areas are just to cramped for DM. I think most can move on from this map but if you're going to play it, I would maybe suggest the next version of this map Robert released.

People have been complimenting the brushwork, and I'm joining the choir on that one. I think the central room with the fireplace and id logo would be the highlight of the map. Also the Quake-shield after entering the castle is pretty cool.

You see the Q-logo every once in a while in a map, but this is the first time I've seen the id logo. ArrrCee said in his video that it was out of place. Well, maybe, but at least it was nicely done. xD

I also would recommend if you are going to play through this map play the second version as it is better designed than the first version. However i agree that the map is to short and pointless as it can completed rather quickly with very little effort by going through the moat along the bottom of the castle. This is a huge design flaw that i feel ruins the experience of playing through the map as their is little challenge presented to the player to complete the map. Fear castle gets a two out of five rating from me only because it is competent, functional map but not very memorable.