Citadel: Summary and Rating

          
Citadel: Adventure of the Crystal Keep

Canada

Postcraft International (developer and publisher)

Released in 1989 for Macintosh

Date Started: 1 July 2018

Date Ended: 3 August 2018

Total Hours: 8 (not won)
Difficulty: Hard (4/5)

Final Rating: 30

Ranking at time of posting: 174/305 (57%)

Yeah, I'm bailing on Citadel. Sorry. I know it's kind of pathetic. You have to give me one like this every once in a while. Nine solid, thorough attempts and one half-assed one. Maybe I'll come back to it later. I'd certainly be happy to entertain a guest posting if someone is a real fan.

Since it's been a while, let me remind you that Citadel is a Mac-only RPG that showcases the Mac's strengths and weaknesses. It has detailed graphics but no color, the ability to move windows around (which I find more annoying than useful), and lots of mouse work. It shows a heavy reliance on the Mac version of Wizardry in that it's a multi-level dungeon crawler with six characters chosen from the standard set of races and classes, with the standard set of attributes, although with a little thesaurus work (e.g., "lords" become "knights" and "charisma" becomes "mien").
          

I don't remember what's happening here, but it's a nice screen shot.

        
Before I start complaining, let's cover a couple of things that Citadel does well. The graphics are nice. Instead of the featureless wireframes or tedious repetitive tile sets used by 95% of RPGs through this era, Citadel has a more hand-crafted feel, with little graphical touches like alcoves, chains, arches, and torch sconces. The levels don't have a uniform "block" design, but feel more organic, with multiple ways up and down. The levels seem to get bigger as we descend, as if the design is based on a spire. You can see monsters in the environment, which is unusual in this era except in the Dungeon Master line.
         

The corridors are more graphically-interesting than the typical game.

        
Unlike most RPGs, the dungeon isn't unrealistically packed with creatures. You don't find combat after combat. Each battle is a rare affair, maybe a couple of times per level, with significant consequences for the party's well-being and inventory. There are a satisfying number of puzzles, even if we were permanently stymied on the "how long does it take to fall 10 feet" one. There are some cute touches like the ability to give your own names to items. There's a good in-game help system (for mechanics, not hints). I like the realistic lighting system. Apparently, there's an automap once you find the right item, and NPCs can join and fight with the party. The sound effects are solid, and theoretically include digitized dialogue, though I couldn't get that to work.
      

"Key" seems good to me, but if I wanted to call it "Agagadl," I could.

          
But the game's positive aspects wither in the face of its annoyances and frustrations, which together led me to spend the past month resolving to play the game, opening its folder, staring mutely at the emulator icon for a few minutes, and then closing the folder with a sigh. Here they are:

1. For someone who loved the Mac in the early 1990s, it's surprising how much I now hate the Mac. That this is more of a platform/emulator issue than a game issue still doesn't change the fact that it hurts my enjoyment of the game. You can't right-click. You can't select a file and hit "Delete" to delete it--you have to drag it to the trash. You can't just kill the emulator; you have to "shut down." I hate the way the files don't have extensions, and thus don't make it clear which is an application and which is a data file.

After my first experience with the game, commenter Adrienne gave a good answer to some of the Mac problems that I complained about. While that takes away some of my disdain, Mac games still seem overly delicate, with too many penalties for not being a single-button mouse master. I find it easy to click on the wrong thing, or double-click when I should single-click, or vice versa. I end up in the Finder constantly because I'm a couple pixels off when I go to move a window. There's not enough keyboard redundancy.
             

I accidentally single-clicked.

          
2. The game is resolutely character-based rather than player-based. What do I mean by this? It acts as if different players are going to be controlling different characters. You can password-protect the characters. Each has his own gold inventory, both on his person and in the bank. It's a pain to transfer gold around (there's no "pool" or "distribute" options, among other things). If you buy items from the store, instead of going to the character, it goes to the party's "camp," but even in camp every character has his own separate stash of items, and it's kind of annoying to transfer them. It gets this idea from Wizardry, which had some of the same elements, and Wizardry was of course mimicking the multi-user PLATO games it adapted. By this point in the timeline, in a single-player game, it's absurd to make distinctions between character assets and party assets.

3. There's no development. I like the sparse approach to combat. But on the opposite side, the game doesn't seem to have taken the rarity of combat into consideration when structuring the character development system and the economy. Eight hours into the game, I still haven't reached Level 2.
           

When it comes to my last character, the game adds insult to injury.

            
4. My party doesn't stay in a consistent place. I save in the dungeon. On the next reload, it's a crapshoot whether they'll still be in the dungeon or whether they'll for some reason be back in the tavern, dispersed, and I'll have to form a new party again. It's almost as if, having not reloaded in a while, my characters got bored, left the dungeon, and went for a drink. That would be awesome if that was actually happening, but the game's not clever or consistent enough for that. It's just being weird.

5. Healing is unbelievably annoying. By 1989, most games offered some pretty fast ways to rest and heal, particularly if the party was back in the safe town level. But Citadel retains Wizardry's conventions, in which a night at the inn only heals a couple hit points, and you need your cleric to truly heal. But where Wizardry allowed you to pop in the dungeon and use a sequence of easily-memorized keyboard commands to cast one healing spell after another, Citadel makes you go through a tedious, mouse-intensive process of "memorizing" spells one-by-one based on rune sequences, then casting them, then memorizing them again--rather like the Gold Box games before they introduced the "Fix" command. Come to think of it, if Citadel's authors played anything other than Wizardry, it would have to be Pool of Radiance. That would explain the codewheel and their weird Gold Box approximation of combat.

(Incidentally, mages are supposed to find their spell books in the dungeon. I haven't found a single one.)
         

The tedious clerical magic system involves first meditating on runes, then stringing them together to makes spells, then casting the spells.

          
6. Rewards are paltry. In five dungeon levels, I've made about 50 gold pieces. That's been enough to buy a few torches and a night or two at the inn. The few random combats that come along never seem to drop gold, suggesting there's a fixed amount of money in the game.

7. Combats are bizarre and too difficult. This has to be the weirdest combat setup of any game in my chronology. When battle begins, party and enemy icons are scattered across the combat screen. You have to drag your characters and drop them next to the enemies you want them to engage. After you do so, rounds pass with excruciating slowness, and hardly anybody ever hits anybody. It's like Infinity Engine combat slowed to 1/10 the speed. But when an enemy does hit, it often kills a Level 1 character.
         

Combat options with Tasmanian devils.

          
After offering breezy battles with skeletons on the first few levels, the game suddenly served up near-impossible mummies and "Tasmanian devils" on lower levels, with nothing in between that would allow me to grind and level up. My party gets slaughtered almost every time I try to explore further than I've already been, and I don't have enough money to raise even a single character.

8. Okay, this is a fairly minor one, but still. You have to refer to the manual a lot, and the pages in the manual are in Roman numerals. I know how to read Roman numerals, but the mental delay is still long enough to be annoying.

A few words on my explorations since the initial entry. Having lost my access to the elevator by taking it to the top level and then falling down, I mapped out the small areas of Levels 1, 2, and 3 and part of 4. Levels 1 and 2 had no more than 20 squares and staircases. Level 3 offered two large rooms with small hallways spinning off. There was a combat with skeletons in the first room, and one with various giant bugs in a corridor off the second room.
          

Fighting skeletons and giant bugs.

        
In another corridor on the level, a skull said that "to pass, you must know when I came to this keep." Assuming that the skull meant the big bad, I went back to the game's backstory: "I can still remember the fine spring day when the mysterious, cloaked figure arrived and asked directions to the citadel." SPRING was the answer and it opened up a second stairway down.
           

How am I supposed to know that "I" is the evil necromancer?

           
The first stairway to Level 4 led to a crossroads where I had a vision of Lady Synd in a crystal. I tried to approach, but the illusion broke apart and four guys in executioner's masks attacked me. After that battle, there was a pit to jump over but not much else to find on this section of the level.
          

An occasion for the "jump" command.

         
The other way down to Level 4 opened up into the largest dungeon section so far, including an alternate way back up to Level 3. At one point, I found a wand in a glass case that said "In emergency, break glass," but I can't actually figure out any way to break it. In a door beyond this area is the actual Lady Synd entrapped in a crystal. My guess is that you have to find various items to free her throughout the dungeon.
          

It's good that she had time to pose before the crystal froze her.

        
I took to the Internet hoping to find validation of my complaints. In March 1990, Dragon gave it 5/5 stars, which could of course mean anything. (Perhaps in response to my constant needling about their inflated rating scale, they note at the beginning of the column that: "These days, most publishers are providing gamers with superior software entertainment. This is one reason why you don't see very many negative reviews in this column.") They seem to have fallen in love with the cutesy character creation system but did not actually get very far in the game itself. Dave Arneson offered a more satisfyingly negative review in the January 1991 Computer Gaming World. He sees through the silly "nursery" system of character creation: "Everything is almost immediately translated into numbers . . . once the data is converted into numbers, the background is never again referenced . . . so one can only ask 'Why bother?'" Like me, he'd rather just have a series of menu options than a group of corny signposts to click on. He notes the slow character development system, the lugubrious combat, and the tedious clicking involved in casting cleric spells.

Some comments at the beginning of Arneson's review suggest that Citadel was originally supposed to be published by Mindscape, but something must have fallen through and Postcraft ended up distributing the game themselves. Postcraft seems to have specialized in font and graphics software; I can't find any evidence that they made another video game, let alone an RPG. Moreover, although the manual gives a Valencia, California address for the company, the company headquarters seems to have been in or near Ontario, Canada, and all the developers (whose names also do not appear on any other RPGs) are Canadian. I have thus modified my spreadsheet accordingly.

My best guess at a rating is 30, but I'm not going to try to justify it. You can see what I gave to each category in the spreadsheet.

As I was wrapping this up, I happened to find the cluebook for the game, Citadel Secrets, published in 1990. It's clever. Like the Bard's Tale hint books that were published earlier in the 1980s, it offers hints in the form of fictional narrative separated into non-linear, numbered paragraphs. Maps at the end of the book offer numbers that reference those paragraphs. I never use hint books. Maybe it would be fun to literally go through the game step-by-step using the hint book as a guide. Maybe I'll come back to the game and try that. Right now I just need something to take my mind off how hot it is.