The Bitmap Brothers called this game an RPG without the
trainspotting element.
Uh, trainspotting? Trainspotter,
originally just the British term for a railroad fan, has become
a slightly derogatory term for anyone paying too much attention
to technical detail or generally have an enthusiasm for acquiring
or hoarding detailed or humdrum information. Of course, this
nicely illustrates the reputation RPGs have, or at least had
at the time, within the gaming
world. Two years later, Robin Matthews and Paul Rigby wrote
about role players in The PC Games Bible:
Considered to be the strangest of computer gamers, wearing anoraks, having long beards, and taken to spending hours over boardgames and talking to people who aren't there. This is the traditional view of Role Players, and is of course totally wrong—they don't all have beards.
Reviewers can't seem to agree about the genre Cadaver should belong to. Chris Burns calls it an RPG, the PC Games Bible puts it under arcade, Abandonia under adventure. In the end I decided to list it as an RPG—without the trainspotting, of course. But it does have experience points.
You play the role of Karadoc, a mercenary dwarf who has agreed to dispose of an evil warlock for pay. To do so, he first must get to him through five levels of haunted castle, fighting monsters and solving puzzles:
There's a lot of diversity in the puzzles, and some are quite hard. For the most part, there is no specific order in which to solve puzzles. You are free to move around in the castles, and often you have to go back to rooms with new items you obtained, or because something changed. There are also often several possibilities to solve something, and you could circumvent some puzzles. For example, sometimes if you can not figure out how to make a monster disappear, you can just kill it. Or when you cannot open a certain gate because you can't figure out how to get the key, you can just run through the level, collected all possible items, and make a huge pile out of them. Then climb up the pile and jump over the gate—and the level is solved, just with a quite empty backpack. In short, this game is a lot of fun, even if it can be frustrating to not figure out a puzzle.—Wikipedia
There were a few issues with the DOS conversion. The graphics were in VGA and therefore indistinguishable from the original. The sounds aren't bad once you choose AdLib or Soundblaster (the default setting is speaker—beware). But the fact that the game was practically unplayable with the keyboard, it was designed for a gamepad or joystick, probably reduced its success on this platform.
On the whole it is preferrable to play Cadaver with a joystick or gamepad, if you don't, figuring out the keys can be difficult. Here they are:
 |
 |
Function |
|---|---|---|
| RETURN | Displays the whole rucksack. When pressed a second time, it returns you to the small rucksack display. | |
| SPACE | Displays a single item from the rucksack When pressed a second time, it returns you to the main game. | |
| H | Toggles a held object on and off | |
| S | F5 | Save the game position (only available if you have enough money) |
| L | F6 | Load a saved game position |
| 1–0 | Save/load a game after the appropriate key has been pressed | |
| P | F7 | Toggles Pause/unpause |
| F1 | F1 | Map |
| up/down | +/– | Zoom In/Out of the map |
| F2 | — | Toggles between using fire or ENTER to access icons |
| F3 | — | Toggles between icon displayed as soon as you make contact with |
| F4 | — | Toggles between moving in 8 directions or moving in 4 directions |
On the PC, you must use the Return key on the numeric keypad, the main one won't work (at least under DOSBox).
My main criticisms of it are that there are a few very illogical puzzles. Also, the fact that the game will let you do practically anything to most objects makes for more head-scratching moments than games that 'force' you to only interact with objects in a certain way. That said, it's one of my favourite games ever, on any platform and if you haven't had a look, you really should!
