I wasn’t expecting much from Raid on Nightmare Castle (1983), despite the awesome title. You can see right on the kind of weird Jeff Easley cover that your protagonist is going to be a kid accompanied by a dog and bird and no bet that the animals are A. Capable of speech and B. Use that power to whine ceaselessly.

All of that is true, and yet, somehow, this is top five for the series so far? Genuinely shocked. There are some crummy endings and some weirdly repetitive sections, but the good stuff is good. The kid is a human raised by elves who think he’s inferior, but it falls to him to rescue an important elf from the castle with, like, the intrinsic gumption of being human, I guess. Moral lessons, feh. But there is a nice selection of monsters. James Holloway, who usually seems so rushed for EQ, is actually pretty good, delivering in particular some gnarly spiders and trolls.

There are two main paths, neither particularly challenging, which is par for the EQ course, but the story remains engaging along both. Snag this one if you see it!