Designed by Steve Brown and Richard Leinfellner, Cauldron originated as a licensed game of the horror film Halloween.

The following year, Palace released a direct sequel titled Cauldron II: The Pumpkin Strikes Back.

In the flying segments, players must search for randomly scattered coloured keys to access underground areas that contain six ingredients.

While traversing the game world, the witch encounters Halloween-themed enemies such as pumpkins, ghosts, skulls, and bats, as well as other creatures like sharks and seagulls.

[1] Stuart Hunt of Retro Gamer, however, attributed the switch to Mary Whitehouse's campaign against violent horror films in the 1980s.

[1][7] A port of Palace's 1984 game The Evil Dead, originally programmed for the Commodore 64 by Leinfellner, was included on the second side of the Spectrum cassette.

The group complimented the gameplay, specifically the adventure aspects, and considered the large game world a positive component.

[8] Clare Edgeley of Sinclair User praised the graphical quality of the ZX Spectrum version, but commented that the colors occasionally overlap and the screen flickers.

The reviewer lauded the graphics and gameplay of the flying segments, but bemoaned the platforming aspect and described it as a Jet Set Willy clone.

[7][8][9] Retro Gamer's Craig Grannell described the game as "unforgiving", citing difficulty landing and excessive precision required in the flying and platforming segments respectively.

[10][11] The commercial success of the two Cauldron games prompted Palace to give Brown more creative freedom for his next project, Barbarian: The Ultimate Warrior.