Citadel: Won! (with New Summary and Rating)

 

Not to confuse beknight and benighted.

        

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 (Chet); 19 June 2026 (Quirkz)

Total Hours: 8 for Chet (not won); 24 for Quirkz
Difficulty: Hard (4/5)

Final Rating: 30

Original Ranking: 174/305 (57%)

Current Ranking:  356/588 (61%)

      

Summary:

 

Citadel: the Adventure of Crystal Keep is a single-dungeon, rescue-the-princess blobber in the tradition of games like Wizardry and The Bard's Tale, but with some real-time action mixed in. It covers 12 levels, features eight classes and 44 spells, and comes with a few riddles and a decent variety of navigational puzzles.

    

****

 

Guest post by Quirkz:

     

[Quirkz ended the last entry feeling a bit depressed with his lack of progress, although by that point he had mapped at least part of all of the dungeon's levels. As this session begins, he sets his jaw and enters the dungeon one last time.]

 

I backtrack to the eighth floor where there's a locked door I've never been able to open. I try "Blast Portal" on it, and it works like a charm. Inside is a woman named Gladiis, depicted holding an orb. She drops a key when defeated. The room also has some gold, a glowing shield (seems to provide 2 more protection) and some mithril banded mail that I give to Caltrop to replace his vanilla chain mail, improving his AC by 3.

    

How are you going to fight with that thing in your hands?

   

At first I think this key is going to get me past one of my obstacles, but it doesn't let me into any of the locked doors I know. I retest this room with "Open Portal," which just picks the lock instead of destroying the door, and find that Gladiis's key is for her own door. Now I'm starting to feel like I just broke into a woman's house and killed her. Testing a theory, I reload and drop one of my party members, approaching with a group of 5, but she does not seem inclined to join forces. (The hint book goes into a wildly unintuitive interaction here involving speakeasy-grade door shenanigans, fortune telling, trances, and secret attacks. I never would have guessed any of these things. It confirms Gladiis is an opponent, though, not a friend.) I leave her dead because I want the magical shield, armor, and gold.

     
Reviewing my party stash, I find that I've got a small collection of items of unknown purpose, including two chalices from early levels that have high enough sale value that's probably what they were for. The descriptions mention a liquid inside, which made me think I'd need them as a solution to something, but there hasn't been a way to use them. I've got the hourglass. There's the gold flute; I understand what it will be for, but not how, when, or where to use it. And now the slate.

     
On the obstacles side, I still don't know how to get through half a dozen enchanted doors on 9 and 10; I don't know how to claim that fourth skull wand that might free Synd; I've got a massively confusing floor 11 to map and navigate; and then there's most of the twelfth and final floor to complete.

      
More exploration on 11. I think I'm doing well for a while, until I end up at the end of a long hallway that should be familiar, but the stairs are going the wrong direction. "Locatus" shows I'm on a different side of the floor than expected. I need to use that more. I take the stairs down anyway, trying to get a sense of what's on 12. It's a short room that leads to more stairs up and then a whole chain of rooms, including at one point a one-way set of stairs. There's another door maze on 12 like those on 11. At this point I'm fairly lost and don't trust my map, but I figure that wandering at random will at least show me some new things. I find another invisibility ring, always welcome.

       
I end up in a room with an altar holding one large scroll. I grab it, which causes the altar to crack and a big fight to begin: purple worms, an arch devil, some deaths, and some others. I'm very careful around the worms, who I think can decapitate or swallow people. One or two of my fighters are hitting, but I'm mostly throwing axes. Afterwards, an icon says: "Hurry, the blood scroll needs to be brought to the light of a new day to destroy him forever." Is this Synd? From her prism? There's a doorway at the end of the room, but when I go up I'm inside the anti-magic room, and all the doors are locked from the inside. Clearly I've done things out of order.

 

An altar shattering just because you touched it is an ominous portent.

       

I try to backtrack, but when I go downstairs there's another scroll on the altar, which is intact again. A game bug? I grab this scroll, too, but it's a trap. Five of my characters teleport away, leaving me just with the wizard. I can switch parties, but only to the cleric, who's a human and can't see in the dark. Somehow Siobhan finds Mulk and joins up. I try to switch parties again, but the option isn't available. The other four guys are missing for now. I wander some more, hoping to find the rest of the crew, but nobody shows up. I end up back inside the anti-magic dome several times, and I realize it's doing the same thing as the pyramid a few levels back, with one set of stairs giving four different paths down depending on the direction of your approach. I also realize there are two altars. One must be the real one, one must be fake. Good to know, because odds are high I'll be doing this again.

     
I still try to escape, thinking if I can get to the surface maybe the bartender will give me hints about my lost party. I stumble on a locked gate and am surprised when the game tells me I have the key. I step inside a small room. Unexpectedly, I plummet several floors to my death. This was the elevator shaft, except the elevator was on 11, and I'm on 12. The weird thing is it doesn't show the hole in the ground on this level, and it looked safe.

    
Well, it was probably all going to be a reload anyway. I've now seen half of 12 and have a sense of the endgame. What I don't have is any clue how the penultimate chapter is played.  

     

The penultimate battle, which does not look much different from the other battles I've been seeing for the last three levels.

    

I start working on 11 again, making heavy use of "Locatus." I keep ending up in places I didn't expect, facing directions I didn't expect. I slowly catch on that when I step into the anti-magic zone there's a flicker, and it's not just turning off the magic, it's also teleporting me to other points in a symmetrical room. It's not clear whether there's a pattern yet or whether it's random, but I can solve this by casting "Locatus" every time I step out of the zone. I have to redo my map, but 11 is nearly a solved problem, once I get the stairwells aligned with the correct spots on 12. It also feels like I've been through most or all of 12, just maybe not in the right order.

     
Gains include a fourth spellbook and the cleric runes for "Morale" and "Cleric Touch" (Level 10, the highest party heal). I don't seem to need either. "Haelan Al" is more than sufficient. As for the spellbooks, Siobhan is juggling two because they have different spells in them and I can't afford to buy duplicate scrolls or pay the 10k gold needed for ink to create scrolls myself.

     
Thinking there has to be something I missed with Lady Synd, I go back and try that gold flute again. Four characters are teleported away. My remaining two take the elevator and circle back to that plaque about playing music. The flute has 8 keys, and lacking a code or song I start at one end and play five notes. This time the wall opens, and my party waits inside. I swear I tried this multiple times before. I have no idea what was different this time. Checking the hint book much later, it suggests there is a proper code, and we needed to ask Burliman to get it. But testing a second time, I am able to trigger an unlock without playing that proper code. I really don't know what's right here, but it's aggravating.

     
Now we have a wand, probably the last one. Also a dancing sword, which sells for over 20k, though I'm still theorizing that maybe the dancing part is usable somehow, like a ranged weapon or something that works on enchanted doors. I don't sell it right away, even though it could buy a bit of training. We drop Mulk off at camp (he's too distracted by a pretty lady, I roleplay) and return to Synd. Brandish away! The gem dissolves, and Synd appears as an icon on the floor. In the party, we see that she is seriously buff, a level 21 Magus with 100 HP. That's twice as good as my best. She has AC -2 because she's got the sword Defender, the best weapon in the game. Also 95% magic resistance. 18s in intelligence and mien, 17 in dexterity, 16 in knowledge—these stats are better than any of mine. She also has a key on her, which is probably what I've been waiting for.
     

The moment everyone's been waiting for since they first saw the box art.

       

Now we can step through the square that the gem occupied, and behind it there are stairs leading down. Maybe this is a shortcut to the end? No, the stairs reverse and go back up across several levels. There's a pit in the ceiling, and I "Risan" up, expecting something glorious, but it's a small collection of duplicate magic items: another light orb, several elven arrows, a gargoyle, and a chalice, and somewhere in there I find a cursed necklace that locks itself on Synd. (The hint book suggests Synd would go this way looking for the blood scroll, before realizing it's down on 12. The game itself does nothing to support this idea.)

     
From there, I have to backtrack and determine whether it's worth selling the gear. Synd refuses to leave the dungeon until the evil is cleansed, evicting herself from the party on the doorstep. I hope she's there when I come back. It also means I can't uncurse her necklace. The gear sells for enough that I can level Jexica to 8 and DV to 7. On the one hand, I probably don't need it, and the 21 days of training feel like bad roleplaying, but on the other hand when Synd is 21, it feels foolish to delve to the deepest dungeon with a knight who's still level 6 and has the XP to be 10 or more.

    
Synd really is there when we re-enter the dungeon, thank goodness, having waited three weeks for us.

     

I could have used all of this in my party while exploring parts of 9, 10, 11, and 12.

        

We head down to Floor 11 and hit the central anti-magic zone. Synd's key fits the lock in the center, and we're able to step into the four-way stairs waiting there. I blink for a second as my brain shifts gears, because I've been thinking of this key as an exit tool and planning on retracing my torturous path up and down parts of 11 and 12, but this lets us bypass all that. I explored all of 12 without Synd, but with her you only need to visit one room. I'm not sure whether that's a crafty trick or terrible design. It certainly speeds up the ending once you know what you're doing.

    
From the anti-magic stairs, I know one of these four paths leads to the false altar, one to the true altar, and two to other areas.

       
I pick one at random and find myself standing in front of the real altar. I grab the scroll, re-fight the battle, and get the message to head for the surface. 

      

Those were his greatest minions?

               

The hardest part is getting lucky with the teleporter in the anti-magic zone, which has to send me to the south or west if I want to escape. It takes a couple of tries, but "Locatus" makes it easy to verify. At the elevator, I find myself confused because the buttons won't work. There's this weird, repeated thrumming sound every time I try to do anything, and it's got me convinced that the game has bugged out. I reload at the altar, re-fight the battle, and try again, but I get the same result. I decide maybe the elevator just doesn't work with the scroll, which the cluebook confirms later.

     
I'm stymied for a second, but I realize there is indeed one set of stairs up from 11 to 10. From 10, I've got 50 pits to "Risan" to 9. At 9, I have a very long pause to think, but I find there is exactly one square that lets me "Risan" to 8. This is why we map, people.

Floor 8 has the pyramid stairs to 7; 7 can "Risan" to 6, putting me in the "dead-end" treasure zone I fought with for half the game. From there, one more "Risan" to 5 puts me back in territory I've known since the first few hours, and it's trivial to rush for the exit.

     
When we're two steps from the door, Nequilar chuckles and appears before us, and a combat starts. For a dozen rounds, everybody misses each other, so I take the tried-and-true method of backing off and throwing axes. It takes a dozen hits or so, but that's it. There's no magic, no real strategy to it, just the same gimmick that's been making the last 8 or so hours work.

              

Honestly, I feel kind of bad about it, but I genuinely think my characters are supposed to be level 13 or 15 here, rather than 7 to 11, but the lack of gold in the game made that impossible. The guidebook shows experience up to level 15.

     
Anyway, Nequilar falls, Lady Synd calls us champions, and two steps later the end-credits roll, which coincidentally terminates my last save file. Reopening it just re-rolls the credits. If I want to play any further, I have to open an earlier file from before the altar.

     

I've got your written comments right here.

       

There are some loose ends. I never figured out what to do with the hourglass or the slate, or how to get past the enchanted doors, if there is a way. If there isn't, the game has six or so rooms you can never visit. I also never got to backstab anything. The thief and ninja have it listed as a combat option, but it was grayed out every time. I also never successfully picked a lock, despite that supposedly being a thing. There's a note in the manual to "use 'Inquire' often" but I can't find that at all. It sounds like a hint system, but maybe it means talking to the bartender about lost party members?

     
I also ended the game without really understanding any race or class benefits or restrictions (other than the vision). The manual hints but does not say what equipment is forbidden. I once had a spell go wrong when a cleric was holding a sword, but the manual says they can wear armor but not helms or shields, and my cleric had both of those the whole game with no ill effect.
        
While I'm nostalgic for it, and did find points of fun and satisfaction as I progressed, it is also an intermittently frustrating and imbalanced game, with a variety of problems and uneven challenges, and possibly some bugs or errors.

The first major obstacle is merely getting to character Level 2. Those early few-to-many hours are desperate, and it's very easy to get locked into a death spiral unless you know what you're doing or save with unashamed frequency.

      
The economy is ridiculously tight, to the point of being flawed, unless you make use of one or two different exploits, which are relatively easy to find and can completely break the game. The bad economy limits leveling, which impacts combat and spell effectiveness in a cascade of poor results and dissatisfaction. Full disclosure: I started a second run to test some things, and if you know what you're doing and also know what you don't need, the first seven levels do go easier, but it requires selling nearly everything, including most of the scrolls your wizard would normally scribe into a spellbook, and also limiting yourself to only one or two prestige class characters. After that, the gold still dries up, and unless you want to abuse wishes, you're not getting all of your heroes past Level 10.

      
The interface itself is sometimes your enemy, and inconsistent and occasionally buggy results can leave you feeling stranded or confused about the next steps. The experiences with both the flute and the enchanted doors in particular strike me as inexcusable, and the intermittently interactive door to Synd's prison was a problem.

      
The save system is unintuitive and downright dangerous, if you ask me, and it proved as great an enemy to my progress as any in-game threat.

      
Among the worst elements: I never once killed a monster with a spell. For that matter, I never cast a useful cleric spell above level 2, "Haelan Al." I tried a couple of other combat spells from Levels 2-4, but as far as I could tell they were inconsequential. (Testing later, I did finally kill some weak enemies with "Gestuns," but it took casting six of them in a single combat.) Two cleric spells that would have been useful, "Awake" and "Dispellere," are not made clear in the game and can only be found in the hint book (or by absurd levels of experimentation). My wizard had several essential navigational spells ("Locatus," "Levitas," "Risen") but such limited spell slots she barely ever did anything else. She often had to memorize one spell at a time in the dungeon, as the situation called for it. Half the spells seemed underwhelming, ineffective, or had a purpose I still don't understand or want.

        
Melee combat went from brutally difficult to trivially easy to then being so ineffective that I had to resort to a quirk or gimmick with the thrown axes to prevail. 
       

"Dispellere," which I only got from the hintbook, is a kind of in-combat genocide spell for a particular monster type—but you need to pick the monster when you memorize the spell, and it has a limited list of possibilities. Vampires and ghosts are good choices. The rest don't need it. You'll wish that deaths and mantrees were on the list.

       

The riddles and mapping challenges were for the most part fair, even clever. I had some irritation at points, but only half of that was deserved, and knowing what I do now I could probably complete the game a second time in half the number of hours. I'm not sure if my problem with rescuing Lady Synd was a bug or something I did, but that probably set me back several hours just by itself.

     
If you like mapping, this one is for you. The game rewards meticulous notes in several places and different ways. It even has an in-game map pad that I didn't use, but I have to give it credit for being pretty advanced back in a 1989 Mac game.

    
A few promising features, like lock picking and backstabbing, are either unimplemented, or documented incorrectly, or have a bug preventing them from working. Splitting the party is rarely used, but it's an effective strategy in those cases.

     
I didn't take advantage much of leaving a slot in my party open, and from what I can tell it really only applied three times: recruiting Fra Elsof, rescuing Burliman the clerk from jail, and then letting Synd join the party.

      

           
I don't really want to do a full GIMLET because I'm not sure I understand Chet's point system well enough, but I'll run through the key points. [Ed. Quirkz offered the text. I put the scores at the end based on his accounts.]

     

• Game World: One dungeon and a menu town. There's a backstory. It doesn't get very deep. Score: 3.

• Character Creation and Development: The creation interface is as unique as it is annoying. Classes are distinct and most have value. Development is crucial, but hindered by the economy. They have an alignment system, but it's only used for about three things. Score: 4. 

• NPC Interaction: Maybe recruiting party members counts here; maybe the way Gladiis is explained in the cluebook counts. Otherwise, it's interacting with shopkeepers. Score: 2.

• Encounters and Foes: There is a good variety of creatures, but too many of them boil down to physical attacks that either plink once for 1 damage or twice for 2 damage. Then there are a handful that potentially deliver status effects, and those few are genuinely scary, including poison, unconsciousness, and level drain. It's possible there were others that I missed. Only a couple of fights are against spellcasters, and those tend to either succeed quickly or become decisive full-party wipes. There are a couple of okay riddles and plenty of mapping puzzles, but also possibly a few bugs that directly affect some of the riddles. Score: 4.

• Magic and Combat: The manual makes it look like there's going to be a lot of useful magical tools, but in practice much of it was useless (or my spellcasters were too low level to benefit), and it boiled down to a few essentials—healing and navigation spells, mostly. Lots of wasted potential here. Combat is real-time and somewhat tactical, but also either breaks down or becomes gimmick-heavy (maybe that's my fault for using the gimmick too much) in tight situations. It almost always feels the same, with few combats requiring a distinct approach or being a memorable fight. Score: 3.

• Equipment: Decent here, with a variety of weapons, armor, and several important accessories. Magic items, especially invisibility, are important upgrades, but clerics are weirdly under-served by the options. Keys, scrolls, and the skull wands all play a big part, and treasures that serve mostly as a way to get gold are welcome. There's some unneeded redundancy in the weapons list, and I still don't know what to think about the slate and the hourglass, which appeared to be important but never had a use. Score: 4.

• Economy: Starts either frustrating or challengingly tight, depending on how you proceed through the first few levels, but then just gets worse and worse until it's the primary obstacle in the game. There are exploits to get around it, but that would feel like cheating. Score: 3.

• Quests: One main quest, well defined, but no side quests and no alternate outcomes. If I were giving points I'd dock it one here for having bugs (or severe interface issues) that interfered with multiple key steps. Score: 1.

• Graphics, Sound, Interface: Graphics are okay for the era, though the lack of color was a disappointment that I'm not over even after 30 years. The screen is too small, and interacting with everything in town is annoying and fiddly. Navigating works well by keyboard and is mostly great. Combat requires mostly mouse control, and is generally okay, though it's also possible for things to go badly wrong: selecting the wrong character if two overlap, accidentally unequipping or throwing weapons when you don't want to, and sometimes a missed click triggers a "make combat speed up" mode rather than letting you take an action, which can get you killed. Sounds are sparse, but decent when used, and only occasionally annoying. 19-year-old me appreciated the Monty Python "run away!" line too much. Occasionally things get buried in the interface, as you can tell by my not finding the combat message window or the ability to withdraw until I was halfway through the game. Score: 3.

• Gameplay: Exploration and mapping challenges seem generally good (despite the problems I caused myself by trying so many things out of order). Combats rarely found a good balance point, and tended to either fall into being a little too easy or needing a gimmick to get out. The game is mostly linear and not very replayable. Score: 3.

     

All told I don't think it would rate highly, but despite the frustrations I'm glad I played it again. It's an obscure and rare Mac-only game and there isn't much available online about it. I'm very happy it will now have a place on the blog.

 

        

****

 

Chet here again. Thank you, Quirkz, for such detailed coverage of this title that I under-served. The sum of the ratings I assigned based on your comments is 30, which is exactly the same rating that I gave the game in 2018, although some of the categories are changed by 1 point each.

   

As we now know, the promised Citadel II: Dark Tower never appeared, and this was Postcraft's only game. It was a weird lark for the California-based company, which otherwise specialized in desktop publishing and typography software. I was unable to find anything about its director, David Pavan, and it does not appear that any of the design team ever worked on other games.

    

****

   

Previous entry in this series

   

For further reading:

• Wizardry (1981), the game that primarily inspired Citadel.
• My first take at a "Summary and Rating" from 2018, which also has some information about contemporary reviews.
• Quirkz Media, Quirkz's web site, with his various publications and projects.

 10/08/2026

Citadel: Try Ignorance

   

Delicious in Dungeon probably has an excellent recipe for "Door Lobster Steamed in Dragon Venom."

     

Guest post from Quirkz: 

 

On to the ninth floor. That grate is also unlocked. I hadn't been down this far to investigate. Lower levels all take the key. I know there are 12 levels, and the elevator spans them all.

      
All of the doors are weird here. The handles appear to be alive and skitter away from your hand when you try to click them. Even if you pin it in the corner it won't open, but sometimes clicking the handle seems to initiate fights with wandering ettins. (According to the cluebook, the doors should open if you click them properly, but I tried more than 40 times and never got it to work. Now that I know it's possible, I've gone back and tested and gotten it to work, but boy is this unintuitive. I am retroactively all the more ticked about how the next few levels went.)

            

The two characteristics of the floor seem to be "pits everywhere" and "organized like a hedge maze." You have to constantly dodge and often calculate your approach to a location from several moves away. Nooks and crannies abound. Jumping will get you pretty far, but "Levitas" is going to be essential. Half of the doors have pits directly in front of them. I also have to be careful, because a fall down a pit right now means a reload until I can find stairs. 

      

Bronze dragons on the left, mind flayer up top. Foes seem tougher in general.

               

Fights are more challenging still. Attacks frequently miss, and it takes a dozen or more hits to kill most things. In one fight with a couple of ghosts, they render two of my team members unconscious. There's supposed to be an "Awake" cleric spell at Level 6, but I don't know the runes yet, so I have the temple cure the condition. It's only 100 gold and a day of rest, which is surprisingly cheap.

     
I've earned another 10,000 XP on this floor but zero treasure. For variety, I try Level 10, but it's much the same, just harder. There are bigger packs of ghosts, and more unconsciousness. One fight with a swarm of reavers nearly kills me because they can cast a spell that forces you to drop equipment. I was constantly either disarmed or unarmored, and Caltrop even lost his invisibility. I do find an "Awake" scroll, which I guess means the spell is cross-class. Siobhan scribes it in her spellbook, but it's 6th level so it takes ALL her spell slots. This is only going to be usable in camp, for now.

    
A few fights run so long I resort to throwing axes because they're the only thing that hits. Occasionally, one makes a breaking sound when I throw it, but I still have it and it still works, so I'm not sure what's up with that.

       
In exasperation I turn to a freakin' "Wish." Well, two. I'm 15 hours in, on the ninth level of a dungeon, and two of my characters are still third level! Meanie sells one scroll for 12,500, a 25% overage from the 10K appraisal. The other goes for standard price. It takes 17,100 gold to level everyone one level, putting the fighter, wizard, and cleric at 7, the shaman at 5, and the ninja and knight at 4. Everyone could train again, but I need another 20,650. I'm trying not to abuse this, but this is aggravatingly unbalanced, and I'm starting to remember why I resorted to a "Wish" blitz back in college.

     
One level doesn't make much of a difference, either. Back on 9, mantrees wipe the party a couple of times. I can't stay ahead of them and can't seem to knock them out fast enough. But there's a secret door hiding a helm of invisibility in the southeast quarter, and it's too good to pass up. On a third try, I sneak past them.

      
On the far north side of the floor, I find a regular door and stairs down to 10. I still don't know what's going on with the enchanted doors or how to get past them, but it seems plausible that the solution is located back here. Problem is, I don't get far before I have a couple of fights with large packs of ghosts and half the party ends up unconscious. The only way I can beat them is standing out of melee range and throwing axes at them. I have to retreat before I can fully explore.

      
To recap: early in the game I could only last a couple of fights before I had to retreat for healing. Then the moment I started surviving fights, I had to retreat every couple of combats because my inventory was full of gold. Now I've moved into a third phase in which I still have to retreat every couple of fights, not because of health or inventory, but because of status effects and full-party wipes. I think I hate this phase worst of all.

      
I realize I'm not having fun right now. There was a point where things were exciting, but I don't feel like I'm making any real progress anymore (except the map, but even that is more painstaking than satisfying; I find myself wanting to just rush through corners and put an X on the graph paper saying "been there, done that" without futzing with the details). The equipment isn't making much difference; combat spells haven't saved me from a single bad fight; and come to think of it, I'm not sure they've killed one monster yet. I'm skirting by on gimmicks and cheats.

     
I think what I need is a break. I'll give it a few days and see if the itch comes back. [Ed. But it's too early to break the entry, so just imagine a day or two passing for Quirkz.]

     
Starting fresh, I look back at my notes for unfinished tasks. I go back to the room with Death to try again. 40+ rounds pass with no hits from my three best fighters. I back off and throw the axe twice and it dies. Something is really off with the to-hit calculations. I get a golden pharaoh mask as a reward. It sells for 4k gold, and I level up Siobhan, getting one step closer to the "Risan" spell. At Level 8, she only has 22 HP. And yes, she has the XP to go to 9 but not the gold.
    

Grim reaper? But I 'ardly even know 'er!

      

In the northwest side of the floor, there's a square with a golden flute sitting on the ground. Stepping into the square teleports away my first four characters, leaving only the cleric and wizard, my two weakest fighters, though at least Siobhan has the light. I can swap parties, but I find the other four trapped in a 1 x 2 room with no exits. There is a crystal wand on the floor along with a dancing sword—a copy of the one the shop had for 20K.

        
Given the shape of the room, there are only so many places my crew might be stuck. I swap back to the other two and run all over Level 10. After some searching, I have a decent guess. There's one enormous chamber to the west, with a 3 x 4 block in the middle which would perfectly contain a hollow section. A plaque on the wall of it reads: "Weep not for those gone missing, for they find a great treasure. Sing their praise, instead, with the music of the wind." That certainly seems like the flute I found. I try playing it, more or less at random. Sometimes the pop-up window closes after a few notes; sometimes I can play dozens. Nothing seems to be working. During my tour of the floor, I also found a set of silver pipes. That, too, could be a way to make wind music, but it doesn't seem playable. The flute seems more likely but there's no indication what to play, or what I might be doing wrong.

     
Since I can't figure it out and don't want to explore with only a wizard and cleric, I have to reload. But I did notice that I ran all over both 9 and 10 with my two weakest characters for half an hour trying to figure this out, and I only encountered a few monsters, all of which I successfully ran away from. Either I've thinned out the crowd or I was very lucky, but the levels feel a lot more survivable today than they did yesterday. I think I can settle down and map.

      
Also, many doors on 10 have the same enchanted handles. I need to figure that out sooner rather than later. I spend a bit of time brainstorming, but all the damage spells (fire, freeze) only work in combat. I can't use or interact with most other items while exploring. Playing flute doesn't do anything, nor does arrows. 
       

This clue seems clear enough. I will not be happy when the riddle is solved.

        

I re-acquire the silver pipes, which sell for 7,200. Fights are back to small and easy. There's a morning star that improves Wort's flail (a starting weapon) from 2-7 to 2-8. Wowee.

    
The other characters be damned, I need to fly. Siobhan levels to 9. Clicking the "carouse" button 24 times in a row to make the time pass in the tavern has got to be the dumbest aspect of this game. Because of the spell slot size, she can indeed now memorize exactly one "Risan" and no other spells. I also check and find she is already eligible for Level 10.

     
Floor 6, here I come! I dash down the stairs and as I burst through the last door . . . the game hangs. Total system crash. They really don't want me to do this, do they?

      
On a retry, I get 2,000 easy XP, 1,500 gold, a golden flute (an apparent twin to the one on the tenth floor), the dagger Sting, and some gauntlets that don't appear enchanted but sell for 3,400. Sting only does 1-4 damage; while it would have been useful six hours ago, now it's only worth selling for 4,600 gold.
      

How come there's never a temple of receiving, eh?

     
The other half of this quadrant is a large temple of/for Lady Synd herself. A plaque reads in part: "You must give of yourself to find true knowledge." At the back of the temple is an altar. On earlier passes, I hadn't messed with it while already feeling trapped, but I also hadn't noticed the message. This sounds a little like it might be a gold-to-XP sink, which obviously this game does not need at all, but I try putting 100 gold on the altar to see what happens. A freaking secret passage opens up in the back, connecting this temple to the rest of the floor. You mean I could have done this part at any time after all? Audible shouting was produced.

      
I level up four of my characters: DV the Knight to 5, Mulk the shaman to 6, Wort the cleric to 8, and even though it's unbalanced, I send Siobhan the wizard to 10. I do the latter because I only had the spell slot for one "Risan," and I want her to be able to hold more spells. Except after leveling, she still doesn't have any more spell space. Not cool, Citadel, not cool.

     
Out of curiosity, I check Siobhan. For the first time in the last 13 game-hours, one of my characters does not have enough XP to go to the next level She needs 35,000 more (that's out of 176,000, so she's most of the way there, but still).

    
With "Risan," I grab the wand from the pit on 8 and apply it to Synd. I can't tell if I've got one or two more doses of crystal left, but I've been assuming it's four total.

     
Back on 10th floor I find a section with three visibly trapped squares. Even after trying to shoot them (the tip from the hint guide), I can't trip them, so I just soak it up. We get high-level scrolls of "Morale" (boost party damage), "Dopplegang" (clone party member), and "No Potionis" (cure poison). It sounds like good stuff, but I will never use any of these. I should have sold them instead of scribing them into my spellbook.

     
That's all I can reach on this level until I figure out the enchanted doors. Trying Level 11, I exit the elevator into a solid wall—or, rather, the illusion of a solid wall. I step in and face doors on three sides. I open a door and look into what I think is a 1 x 2 room with three doors at the end, but when the door closes behind me I realize the display is a little weird and I'm in a room with doors on all four sides. I've also turned some uncounted number of times while sorting out the room, and am already lost.  I go with it and just move at random for a while. Most of this level appears to be just a series of doors like this, one after another. Sometimes you can only go in three directions instead of four. Occasionally I hit a long hallway. Once I find stairs up to the tenth floor, right by that gold flute I'm not touching for now. Another time I find stairs down to a small section of the twelfth floor that is totally empty.

     
I don't find anyone to fight at all. But every now and then there's a circle on the floor. Sometimes these do nothing and sometimes these explode as a fire trap, doing ~5 damage to the party. I can take a few hits before healing, so it's not life-threatening. At one point I find a diamond-shaped area where everything is shown in inverted coloring. Coincidentally, I try to heal here and discover it's a no-magic zone. There's a smaller section in the middle walled off, with identical doors on all four sides that I don't have a key for. 
     

Theory: anti-magic fields are generated by blacklights.

   

We wander for a bit, hoping to stumble into anything useful. The sound of opening and closing doors becomes maddening. Eventually I luck back into the starting square and can elevator myself home. I'm going to need to try again with a very meticulous mapping session.

     
But first, since I've already been to Level 12, why not see if I can just end this? We take the elevator to the bottom of the dungeon. A short hallway takes me to stairs that lead back up to a large room on Level 11 that I didn't see before. I find another golden apple and a scroll of "Fyr Striken," a 9th-level fire storm spell. There's a fight with a large pack that includes two reavers (who unequip items) and two deaths. I only make progress by throwing axes, but that does the job pretty well. A plaque gives me cleric recipes for what turn out to be "No Potionis" (cure poison; a thing I've seen once) and "Gifan Shift" (cure blindness; a thing I never experience in game).

    
The apple funds training for Caltrop and Wort, getting the fighter and cleric to 9. Maybe because I'm using more low-level spells for the cleric, I have close to 20 useful spells memorized, where I can only memorize one large and maybe two small spells for the wizard.

     
I have a theory that one of these new spells, either "Anti-Magic" or "Terror," should take out the mantrees that killed me so many times on Floor 9. Neither spell helps at all, but I'm able to keep on top of them by spamming "Haelan Al," and the fighters make quick work of them. At least I can stop worrying about stumbling across that group now.

      
This is also the last time raw damage poses a threat to me in the game. When foes hit, it's only for 1 or 2 at a time, and even if a fight drags on for ages, a simple "Haelan Al" or two will keep everybody completely healthy. No other foe will cast any significantly-damaging magic. The only thing that will cause an interruption is a status effect, mostly unconsciousness, rarely a level drain or the reaver's force-unequip spell. I won't know this until it's over, and I'll stay on edge until then, but in retrospect, it's pretty disappointing. Combat has become almost entirely trivial, except for when it's extremely dangerous and I have to switch to the "one weird trick" of throwing axes to take out the most lethal enemies.
     

The game gives me these two recipes twice and all other spells once, but it never gives me the recipes for the Level 6 spells "Dispellere" and "Awake," which are listed in the hint book. I assume this is an error or bug.

      

As I start hopscotching over endless floor pits back to the elevator, I realize these obstacles are also the answer to one of my problems. Floor 9 is riddled with pits, more than 50, scattered everywhere. Conveniently, "everywhere" covers a lot of ground. There are lots of places on Floor 10 I can't reach because of enchanted doors, but the pits from 9 provide me access to most of them. I drop into five different fairly large rooms from above. Most have one or two fights. One seems to possess an unlimited number of spiders. Since Siobhan can only memorize one "Risan" at a time, I have to drop into the pit, clear it, then re-memorize the spell. I'm not usually attacked, though occasionally a wandering monster finds me.

     
There's one plaque with some cleric spell recipes, but I realize it's a duplicate of the one I saw before, for "Gifan Shift" and "No Potionis." I'm not sure whether this is a bug or intentional, but while I've found recipes for spells leveled 4 and 5, and then  7 and 8 twice, I still haven't found hints for spell Levels 6, 9, or 10.

     
I find an enchanted bastard sword for Mulk, his first magical weapon, and also pick up a dragon shield that ends up being cursed. After uncursing, it's worth 5,600 gold, so not a bad prize. I can afford to train Jexica, DV, Wort, and Caltrop after this outing.

     
On 9, about a quarter of the floor was unmapped and I was about to gripe there aren't any pits on 8 to get me down there, but of course I can reverse the technique I've been using and go up from 10 for a few spots. I've gone from "most of this isn't reachable" to "most of this is solved" with two new tricks, so that's actually pretty clever. (Note from afterward: Again, it's not actually clever. It's a poor interface that I'm failing to figure out, but cleverly working around. The manual hints at treasures in the rooms I missed, plus another copy of the elevator key.)

      
When I'm done, I've been able to reach several more rooms, and still have six doors with unaccounted space behind them that I can't find a way to crack. That means there's probably another way to beat these doors, but when I try the Level 9 spell "Blast Portal," it does nothing.

     
That said, the last three hours have felt generally unimportant overall, more like sweeping up crumbs than making progress. The only possibly interesting find is a slate. It doesn't appraise for much, isn't usable, and I don't have any idea what to do with it, but it's something new. Otherwise, I've filled in squares on the map, but the added gear is trivial. The gold for leveling up was nice, but the XP earned outpaced it. I don't feel any closer to finding the villain or beating him, and don't think I've found any important new clues or quest items in ages.
     

[Ed. We will end things on that bleak note, but since the next entry is the last one, clearly the situation turns around.]

    

****

   

Previous entry in this series

   

Next entry in this series

10/06/2026 

Citadel: Meditations in an Emergency

 

The heart of a dead star? Your mom? Pizza?

       

[Chet here. Sorry that I delayed the rest of Quirkz's entries. There are probably two more after this one, which will carry us through most of the coming week, when I will be traveling. I should be back to my own schedule by next weekend (10-11 October). Quirkz has been shy about linking to his non-CRPG Addict material, but given the favor he's doing for us, a little promotion is in order. See Quirkz's web site here, where you can learn about his various projects and publications.]

      

Guest post by Quirkz: 

      

As this session begins, I go use the wand I found last time (the second one) on Lady Synd. Some more of the crystal dissolves. 

    
Now that I have the elevator key, there are new paths in front of me. It will grant me access to several of those previously dead-end locations on six and seven, plus provide entry to every floor below that. I'm feeling pretty buff from my recent level increases.

       
The first ones to get it are those squirrels on the sixth floor, which turn out to be black dragons. Their breath bypasses my invisibility, but only occasionally. Caltrop beats one of them while accidentally dual-wielding one sword and one sack of coins. 900 gold is a sweet reward, but training is now up to 2-4,000 for one character, so I need much more than that.

     
I try the seventh floor next. I've been here before but had not been mapping. The interconnected tangle of corridors sprawls over the entire western half of the floor. Either I've missed a secret door, or the eastern half is detached. Other than maneuvering around a bunch of floor pits and finding one staircase down at the far end, there isn't much to it.

     
There is one unsolved riddle from a talking head. "What was once hot, then cold, serves good and evil alike, and can bestow death and honour?"  I tried IRON and STEEL with no luck. Maybe I should have tried SWORD. 

         

At one point, I am standing by a closed door, looking at the map, when the door bursts open and three cutthroats attack me. I didn't realize monsters could open doors, but clearly they can.

      
I'd rather use the elevator than the stairs for now, so I backtrack and take that to the eighth floor. The elevator gate here is not locked, unlike almost all the other floors, which makes me wary. I know an ominous invitation when I see one.

    
Most of the walls on this floor are see-through, like thick glass. There's a vague haze in the air showing where they are. It's not exactly hard to navigate around them, only slightly disorienting. The map tends to put ceiling holes at junctions, which does help spot them as you move. The main feature is you can see more things in the distance, sometimes tantalizing things you don't know how to reach.

     

There are walls on both sides of the square in front, plus a pit in the ceiling.

          

I find some black platemail and an hourglass. The shopkeeper doesn't offer much (especially for the armor) so I sell it unappraised and see it listed in the shop afterward as a cursed item with a 4 AC penalty. Good riddance. Not sure what to do with the hourglass, I stick it in a backpack. It has the feel of a quest item.

     
I belatedly discover a hidden room in the corner of the sixth floor that seems like a lost armory. It's loaded with gear, most of it low-value, including too many arrows. But it's got a couple of pieces with promising descriptions. For example, of three long swords, two have plain blurbs ("gray iron with leather-bound grip") while the third's info pane reads: "gold filigreed blade, jeweled hilt." We haul it all back to sell but end up keeping a lightly enchanted long sword, a shield +1, and a ring that lowers AC by 2. The ring goes to the wizard, of course, who was walking around at an unimproved AC 10. There's also another suit of plate mail in the shop finally, so I buy that to replace Wort's ring mail, improving his AC by 4.

      
Back at the eighth floor, I am busy prepping a new page of graph paper when we're jumped by enemies. It's a large, mixed group: two vampires, four elementals (earth, air, fire, water), and a giant lizard just for kicks. The vampires attack immediately, triggering some kind of visible and audible alert, but I've missed what it was. I have my invisible characters square off with them while the others spread out and take on the elementals. I get the message window open and see that the earth elemental is trying to suffocate me and the water elemental is trying to drown me. I become more wary, because while these might just be the wording of their attacks, I'm not sure if there's a chance of an insta-kill. It's a long fight with a lot of missed attacks on both sides, and it grants over 3,000 XP, two or three times more than the next largest battle I've seen. When it ends, I confirm DV was level drained, twice, and is now level 1. I check in town but there doesn't seem to be a restore option at the temple, and I don't have the money to mess with this, so I reload.

     
I take a look at the party's armor status and realize Mulk in the back just got all the upgrades and is -1, while DV up front is 3 and Jexica 5. Invisibility has been helping so far, but it's not everything. Knowing I'm likely to run right back into the same group of enemies in a minute, I retool and give DV the best stuff, hoping that will get him through the next fight unscathed. I also have the clerics memorize a "Faer" and a "Fortis Al" for combat benefits along with some "Gestuns" for damage. I haven't needed to rely on spells other than healing so far, but this seems like the time to get prepared.

    
Naturally, the next time I visit, that group is nowhere to be seen. I fight battles with some other common monsters and earn about 900 gold. This is enough to level Caltrop the fighter to 5.

     
On another outing, I have a disastrous mis-click in what should be an easy fight. Two characters are overlapping each other, and while trying to move one I instead end up activating Jexica's weapon and dragging it away from her, which in the game interface causes it to be thrown. You can throw almost anything, but in this case it hurls the +4 rapier in the direction of Siobhan and kills her in one hit. Sheesh. That's a reload. (It's also the second time this has happened.)

      
There's a plaque that lists the symbol-words for three fifth-level cleric spells, "Cural" (improved party heal), "Sanctifis" (extended bless), and "Freosan" (freeze foes). The manual only gave the words for the first three levels, but plaques have now provided the next two levels of spells for me. (The hintbook has them, too, but I'm ignoring that for now.)

   

Exactly twice, we will face these enormous white dragons. It seems like an under-utilized capability of the game. The big ones don't turn into tombstones when they die. They just sit there, which is confusing.

          

While I'm on the subject, this is my third core memory from the past. The game will eventually give me most of the other cleric rune combos, but it will confusingly leave out a couple that are in the hint book, plus there's an upcoming event that will make me think even the clue book is incomplete. So I set out to discover the secret spells on my own. I methodically made a list of every combination, starting with all the 2-letter words, and working up to every possible 7-letter word in the game (EEEEEEE, EEEEEEA, EEEEEEF, EEEEEEW, etc.). The short words were easy to do on the fly, but I kept losing count on the long words. So during a tornado warning, while we crouched in the dorm's basement hallway for an hour, I wrote out by hand the entire list. Then I went back to the game later and tried every single combination. Just memorizing that many elemental runes took decades of in-game time, and my characters aged tremendously. (I don't remember if this did anything.) What I do remember is I didn't find a single new spell.

       
I have wasted time doing more misguided things in my life, but this one is pretty well up there.

     

One locked door has a circle on the ground in front of it, like that fire trap from earlier. Wise to its ways, I fire an arrow at it, but nothing happens. Maybe I did it wrong? I shoot another arrow across the square to the door, and then one aimed at the circle's edge. Nothing. Gritting my teeth I step forward and it still doesn't trigger. What gives? I don't have the right key for the door and have to leave it for now.

      
In one corner I see foes lurking through the glass. More dragons. They're hazy but far sight pulls them up in sharp detail. I never find a way to get to them, though. 

      

Dragons, like undead, are best seen from afar.

       

Fights come along at a decent pace. Not frequent, but you can't let your guard down. Post-combat looting averages 400 gold pieces these days—an improvement, but managing the inventory is challenging. I no longer run home for healing, but now I have to run home every 3-4 fights to offload gear. Sadly, 900 cash won't even cover a third of a training session. One fight with four elementals (but no vampires this time) delivers 3,300 XP. Everyone might be ready to go up 2-3 levels; they just need gold. Very frustrating.

     
On the north side of the floor there's one 3 x 3 block of solid rock, with stairs going up on all four sides. One of these leads up to the down stairwell I found on 6 but didn't use before. I'm guessing the others lead to fragmented sections covering the remaining half of the seventh floor. I skip them for now.

      
The second half of the floor goes quickly, and again finding ways to carry gold is the only obstacle. I decide I'm going to leave helms and gloves back at camp, because they don't give much protection and take up a full inventory slot that could be a bag of gold. I get firebombed by the same laughing magician a couple of times. 

    
We find another magical shield and a "boomerang axe." Damage is listed as only 1-6, which is low for a weapon, but if it's reusable and can replace a bow (which consumes arrows, a limited resource that also takes up too much inventory space) it might be worth it. When I test in combat, the axe is consistently doing 6 and hitting often, while a few tests with bows do 0 damage. I'm not sure if some monsters are simply immune, but Siobhan is still using her starting dagger and doesn't have enough spell slots to be effective as a caster yet, so I give her the axe. Her aim isn't great (the line jiggles like crazy) but since it boomerangs she can do this repeatedly from outside melee range as long as no party members are too close to her.

     
I pop back up to 7 and try the riddle door one more time. It was SWORD after all. A secret door slides open.

     
Beyond it, I'm charged by some vaguely salamander-looking creatures with a weird name like "lermenysty." Nobody can seem to hit them, and it's 30 rounds before one lucky strike kills one. I start having characters try to throw their axes, and that seems to work better. I have a fuzzy memory of doing this in tight spots back in the 90s. I think there's something weird in the differences between melee and ranged combat, and for whatever reason missile weapons connect more often.

     

$10 for anyone who can figure out the etymology of "lermenysty."

            
If I had to speculate, I would guess that melee combat uses a typical D&D-style to-hit table, and my low-level characters are mostly whiffing against tough foes. But when it comes to throwing objects, since the game interface provides a visual interpretation of bad aim (low level and low dexterity make the throw line jump all over the place) I think that stands in for the to-hit calculation. If you miss a throw, it's because you literally missed the correct angle, but if your line of sight is true, it hits, regardless of your level or ability. That said, thrown axes do miss some of the time, but it's less than 25%, whereas melee attacks might only hit 5% of the time.

     
I return to 8 and try the other three stairwells back up to 7. I think what's going on here is on the 8th floor, the stairs are separate, but on the 7th it's one square that behaves differently depending on which direction you approach it from. (Looking at the hint book much later, it talks about a weird pyramidical staircase, which I guess is supposed to represent this, but I can't figure out how that's morphologically possible.)

      
I explored the north side before, so I go up from the west and end up in the east. It's a compact, zig-zaggy zone with a lot of mirror symmetry and floor pits laid out like the five pips of a die in one spot and a diamond in another. You need "Levitas" to hit all the squares, but you can loop through most of them with checkers-style jumping.

       
Fights seem tougher, even though I trained recently and have also done the other half of this level already. They hit me a little more often. I miss about 80% of the time. But it's still a slow bleed, easily fixed by a "Haelan" or its full-party version. As I've leveled up, it's started doing 4-6 per casting more often (rather than 2), and in a few more levels it will be healing 8 or 10 HP on some castings.

     
After a fight with a bunch of air elementals or dervishes, I get a scimitar called Defender, which conveys -4 AC and 10% magic resistance in addition to doing 2-10 damage. Pretty good. I give that to Jexica, who needs the armor boost, and move the +4 rapier to DV.

     
The section traces a long, winding path and ends in a floor pit, with not much else to show for it. Suspicious. I check the map for the floor below, and this pit lines up with an unexplored box, probably a single square. I don't like it, but I save and jump in.

    
On the ground is a skull wand, so this is clearly a necessary visit. But I can't get out! I try Levitas and check every command and option three more times, also scouring the game manual for any other suggestion, like a higher-level flying spell, but there's nothing. Maybe there's an item that will let me fly? I know I could "Wish" myself back home, but then the elevator would be trapped on the wrong floor. I think I could probably get back down via pits, but the whole idea feels both risky and unnatural. I have to be missing something. For now, it's a reload. I mark the spot for a future return.

    
I try the other stairwells. One takes me to a single empty square. Huh.
       

The fourth set leads to a winding zone with lots of pits to jump. The far end is a 7 x 7 section filled with pits. Far sight shows me something lurking in the middle of one solid square. I "Levitas" over and find two scrolls of "Levitas" (think you're funny, do you?), a statue, and a spell book. This is my third. It has a lot of spells filled in, including spells from levels 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. Powerful stuff, if I can ever gain the levels to use it.

     
Another branch in this section leads to a single pit. This one, like the wand pit above, seems to be positioned over an unexplored square.  

      

I reconnoiter from the eighth floor. Peering through clear walls into this spot, I can see waiting treasure.

          

I feel like this is going to be another waste of time, but I have to check. In the hole there is an ivory gargoyle and three scrolls: "Cista" (magic chest), and two "Risans."

     
What the hell is a "Risan"? It's not in the manual, which is weird. Based on the name, it sounds an awful lot like it might be a flying spell. Is this what I've been looking for the whole time? I curse at the game for making this so obscure, and for the bad luck in jumping into the wrong pit first.

     
Like D&D, you can cast a scroll one time, which consumes it, or use the scroll to scribe it in the book, whence you can memorize it as many times as you like. Only a fool would allow a limited-edition, secret item to be destroyed. 

      
Siobhan studies "Risan." As the hours tick by, we get attacked by vampires. During the fight, DV is level-drained twice again, putting him back to first level. Worse, in the aftermath we find that the spell didn't make it into the book but the scroll is gone. It was destroyed by the interruption.

      
The manual told me there'd be days like this. You better believe that's a reload.

     
Back in the pit, I think smart and try to thin out the wandering monsters by having my clerics memorize some spells first. I'm interrupted three times in a row. They are tough fights, but no vampires. I'm seeing mind flayers and scanners—beholder ripoffs—along with other repeat enemies. The mix does seem partly randomized. After three interruptions, I try to scribe "Risan" again—it takes more hours than expected, like half a day—and I'm done! Now to memorize it.

     
Well, it's level 9. Siobhan is only level 5. She can't learn it. What the heck?

     
I guess that's why they gave me two of these scrolls. I invoke the remaining one, get out of the pit, and step clear. Two humanoid figures called "mantrees" attack. I've fought off some before, and they're dangerous because they sometimes cast a damaging area spell, "Flaming Hands." This time the two spam it so quickly and consistently half the party is dead before I know what's going on.
     

When the game has you cursing at it four times in ten minutes, it's time to step away for a while.

    

After a reload I ascend again without getting attacked this time, and rush home to save.

    
In camp, the gargoyle burns Meanie when he tries to take it for appraisal. I think this is an alignment thing. It's the first time I've seen it applied.

     
I sell the other statue for 2,900. I have to give the gargoyle to a neutral character to sell. It appraises for 8,000 but I can only sell it for less than 6,000 due to lower mien. Still, this is the most money I've seen in about three floors and three game hours. Everyone is so far behind on training it's not funny.

     
I have enough money to train either three base classes (cleric, fighter, wizard) from 5-6 or to get two premium class characters from Levels 3-4. I'm starting to regret the premium classes. I figured the greater XP requirements would slow them down but didn't imagine cash would be such a bottleneck. I pick the larger group.

     
Caltrop goes from 33 to 42 HP, Wort from 21 to 26. Siobhan gains a single point, up to 17. I'm worried her health is going to be a real problem. I confirm all three could go to Level 7 already if I had the money, and I'm guessing it's really 8, maybe close to 9, which is the level I need to be to memorize "Risan."

     
It's time to review my to-do list. With a few minor exceptions, I think I have explored all of floors 7 and 8 now. The remaining items include one locked door I can't get past and the pit with the wand. It bothers me that I still have roughly a third of the sixth floor remaining—the part with easy fights, lots of gold, and a magic dagger—but I can't get back out of that section without "Risan" or a "Wish."

     
It starts to dawn on me what the game probably intended for the order of my exploration. I was supposed to lose access to the elevator early. Doing the first five floors more or less in order was correct. As I ventured into floor 6, I would have regained access to the elevator. Then, because 6 and 7 were blocked, I was supposed to use the elevator to skip them and investigate floor 8 and proceed through it, climbing back up into 7 from there, only getting the elevator key right about now. The elevator grate being unlocked on 8 wasn't a trap: it was a feature. None of this requires a "Wish," either, and it flows fairly naturally, other than it offends my sensibilities to be doing things out of order. I guess that's how I know the big bad Nequilar is evil.
    

****

   

Previous entry in this series

   

Next entry in this series

10/07/2026