The Phantom of Ghastly Castle and Other Killer Puzzles

The Killer Puzzles series was authored by Kjartan Poskitt, and spanned four titles released in the mid-to-late nineties. They diverged from the Usborne Puzzle Adventures and other series of around the same time in several aspects: apart from a rather twisted sense of humour, they were also extremely difficult, to the point that Poskitt received almost as much correspondence asking for help from adult readers as he did from children - because the series also did not include any answers or solutions.

Killer Puzzles also had one other selling point: if you managed to complete every puzzle in the book, then you could solve its big secret. In three of the four entries (to wit: Decode the Deadliest Joke in the Universe, Titus O'Skinty's Gruesome Gameshow and Attack of the Killer Puzzles), this was a coded message of some kind, although the specifics as to how you decoded it and how the puzzles gave you the key were very different in each book. The other book, Find the Phantom of Ghastly Castle, took a totally different approach: for one thing, it wasn't just a puzzle book, it was a sort of adventure gamebook.

And "sort of" has always been good enough for this blog.

Here, with the level of high-quality professional photography you have come to expect from me, is the first puzzle of Find the Phantom of Ghastly Castle:

As you may have guessed, rather than individually numbered sections, the gamebook portion of FtPoGC requires you to work out how each room connects via the illustrations of the doors linking them together - so you need to flick through the book and find the door that matches the one in the room you're in to figure out where to go next. Each room has a puzzle you have to complete to pass through it. There is a rudimentary inventory system, with certain rooms having certain items in them that you need to get into other rooms. There is one rather odd moment where you can make the book unwinnable by taking a one-way door into a room where the only other entrance needs to be unbolted from the other side - presumably in those circumstances you are meant to start over from the beginning, but the book doesn't say. I have now surmised the gamebook mechanics of Find the Phantom of Ghastly Castle in their entirety.

Should you successfully complete the book, you will find that there is one room that you cannot reach from any of the others, which is where the titular Phantom is hiding. As you may have also guessed, rather than a coded message, this book's secret is hidden in an illustration in the inaccessible room - you also need to find the instructions hidden elsewhere in the book to view the illustration correctly in order to see the hidden image.

Now, the other three books in the series are pretty much cheat-proof. There is simply no way to read the secret message without playing through the book fairly and solving all the puzzles for yourself. Finding which room in Ghastly Castle you can't get into is probably the same - there are some extremely clever red herrings and rooms where it's not apparent how you get to them without some robust thinking - but where the book falls down a bit is the hidden illustration. I'm not going to provide a picture of it here, because whilst the books are long out of print you can get a second-hand copy for £3 including postage online if you so wish, and if I've seriously piqued your interest enough here I reckon you should go for it (you can assemble a complete collection of Killer Puzzles books cheaply and they are a lot of fun). But anyway, when flicking through the book to work out its geography, the reader will probably eventually notice the conspicuous full-page illustration in the hidden room that isn't really part of a puzzle. Illustrator Steve Cox does his best to avoid drawing attention to it, but there is no similar illustration elsewhere in the book. What might have been really clever would be to include some similar pictures as red herrings that don't actually have anything hidden in them at all.

The book also includes an error which could, if not make it unwinnable, at least confuse the hell out of any player, and this blog being what it is of course I'm going to point it out:

The illustration going over the centre of the page unfortunately means it is not clear that there are some exits in the maze you shouldn't be able to get to; apparently some later printings fixed this, so if you have a copy that looks different to mine, do get in touch.

The Killer Puzzles have one spiritual successor; author Kjartan Poskitt later became much better-known for the Murderous Maths series, the numeracy-based equivelant of the Horrible Histories books, and that series had a puzzle book, Professor Fiendish's Book of Diabolical Brainbenders. One presumes the Killer Puzzles were out of print by this point, as this book reused many of their puzzles; sometimes as revised versions, but sometimes more or less word-for-word. To give a good example of the former, compare this puzzle from Decode the Deadliest Joke in the Universe to its revised version in Brainbenders:

I think maybe I have provided enough photographs of the books to be going on with... but perhaps I haven't got across just how difficult, yet entertaining they are, and it is a shame that they seem to have fallen into obscurity given their author's other successes. As I said, they can be picked up fairly cheaply online, and it is worth doing so. (There were also apparently several translations into other languages, which I would be interested to see, given they would have required pretty extensive reworkings of some of the puzzles to still be playable...)