I got through the three stages, at which point it loops back to the first stage becoming harder.
This is a good idea with bad execution. In the three stages of a forest outside the castle, inside the castle, and in the castle's dungeon, you need to defeat all the guardians of the stage to advance to the next stage. The first stage has 3 dragons to defeat, one at a time. The second stage has 6 wizards, with two on screen at a time. The third stage has 9 devils, with 3 on screen at a time. The thing is, they're invulnerable and deadly to the touch unless you've touched a magic item (a bat, mouse, and teleporting skull, depending on the stage) to "energize" your knight. When you touch that stage's magic item, you have about 10 seconds to touch a guardian, thus defeating it. The biggest issue is the second stage, as the mouse is just as fast as your knight and always runs away from you. It's frustrating enough to simply catch the mouse, and then you have to chase down the wizard(s), which from the time I played, seemed to have a knack of being about as far away from the mouse as possible at all times. The bats are also as fast as your knight, but they tend to just randomly fly around as well as staying still, making them relatively easy to touch. I found the last stage to actually be the easiest, as the teleporting skulls take a while between teleportations and don't move otherwise. The devils also tended to stick together, making it easy to knock them out, three at a time. When the stages loop, the first stage becomes much tougher, since the bats go from being green and visible at all times to being black. The paths are black, so they're only visible when they fly over the green vegetation tiles, at which point you can't touch them. So, it's a lot of luck to simply run into a bat. The amount of time you're energized seems to be cut in half, as well as the amount of time the special items being on screen being cut in about half. The special items do various things like speed up your knight, double the time you're energized, stop the guardians for a short amount of time, and, probably most useful, energize your knight. You can only use these items once and if you pick up another item, it replaces what you have. The special items tended to show up really far away, to where I could barely make it to them most of the time, and many times couldn't even get there, even on the first loop. It is nice that when you die, the guardians you'd defeated remain defeated.
I'm not sure what Intellivision games generally have for music, due to very little experience with the system, but the music in this game is very good for its time.
