Revisiting: Citadel: Adventure of the Crystal Keep (1989)

 

       

Well, I was hoping I wouldn't have to do this so quickly, especially after the series of guest entries that we just had over the summer, but as usual, the first month of the new semester has left me exhausted and buried. Fortunately, commenter Quirkz has provided some material to tide us over: A completion of Citadel: Adventure of the Crystal Keep (1989), a Wizardry-inspired game for the Macintosh that I "tried" over eight years ago. I got frustrated, probably too quickly, with various interface elements and a combat system I couldn't quite figure out. When I "throw" a game like this, I appreciate it when commenters urge me onward, but I appreciate it even more when they step in and help.

    

Guest Post by Quirkz:  

      

I've been hoping I wouldn't have to do this for eight years, but I've talked myself into it. Back in 2018, The Addict started playing Citadel: Adventure of the Crystal Keep, and my excitement rose. This is one of the relatively few CRPGs from the 90s that I already knew well, and unlike most of them, had even played through to the end.

      
I was a Mac user in the 90s with a limited teenager's budget. Other than The Bard's Tale and the Gold Box series, games were mostly glimpsed over the shoulder of a friend at his house, or only existed as tantalizing writeups in Dragon Magazine. Dungeons of Doom made a brief appearance in a computer lab, passed around on a floppy, but disappeared again as fast as you could guzzle a swirly potion. Funnily enough, for 20 years I forgot that game even existed, until this blog unearthed old memories and helped explain why Roguelikes had felt so weirdly familiar even though I thought I'd never played one.

    
That's one of my favorite things about this blog: all the material that it unearths, sometimes in the most unlikely places.
       

So I was squirming with anticipation when Chet picked up a game I hadn't played since the summer of 1995. I had approximately three coherent memories remaining, and couldn't wait to see it all brought back. Then he bounced off it, hard, just a little way in. I'd been hoping he'd circle back to it, gunning for revenge, but as the years passed and I kept wanting to see it in print, I concluded that it's my nostalgia begging to be humored, so here I am.

     
Citadel was a splurge—some internship money put to good use on a rare Mac-friendly game from the catalog. It shipped with the cluebook, and I definitely used it then, but I'm going to try to limit in on the replay.

     
In 2026, I'm emulating it on Mini vMac, with a Mac II system ROM running Mac OS version 6. A warning for anyone tempted to play: the game seems to have problems now with many emulator combinations, including visual bugs in OS 7 or later, and more bugs and crashing when I tried any full-color Mac emulators. I've had some other people tell me that they didn't experience these problems, but they've been consistent for me. I know they didn't occur on real hardware: I played the game originally on a full-color Mac LC II back in the day. In fact, my first reaction upon launching the game was immense dismay that it was only in black and white. The ad would have been in full color, with no screenshots (one doesn't need to wonder why) and it wasn't even clear in 1995 that this was a 6-year-old game. It did at least have animation and some sound effects. I'd been burned on black-and-white ports before (The Bard's Tale) and would be again (the Mac version of Wizardry). Many of the ports were either just that old, or they were written for maximum backward compatibility.

      

The menu town in Citadel.

      

Launching the game now, I find the interface painfully small and unintuitive. I have to second Chet's statement that all this used to feel normal, but today the tiny, low-res window with too many pop-ups to fit on one screen is a real mess. I spend my first 10 minutes of game time just trying to figure out how to view characters. You get some details on one screen, different values on others, and the menu town with eight different locations will send you clicking back and forth in a daze just trying to get a list of your party's classes or hit points.

     
I'm going to assume that everyone will backtrack to read Chet's starter articles on the game, so I'll gloss over most of the early stuff. [Ed. I read over my first entry on Citadel. I don't usually laugh at my own writing, but that one cracked me up.] I slowly build a party, which in great ancient tradition means rolling up a handful of flops for every one I keep. The process is slowed because the manual leaves some mysterious gaps. Races, for instance, exist in the game, but all the manual says is elves and hobbits have "Far Sight" (what is that?), dwarfs and gnomes have excellent night vision, and hobbits have okay night vision. Nothing about stats or classes, so it's unclear whether the default RPG tropes apply whether the choice is meaningless. It offers neuter characters who are supposed to be better spellcasters, but it's not stated how. The manual is also contradictory about the stats themselves, citing wisdom in some places and knowledge in others and also conflating coordination and agility.
   

A very rare case in which I rolled up a character who could be anything they want when they grow up.

        
Once you've finalized your class, you're allowed to train for one to four years. This is supposed to boost your primary stats, with more years offering a higher boost, but I've seen mixed results. Sometimes three years only raises one stat point. Sometimes another stat goes down. Also, most characters can't afford more than a year anyway. The game will actually let you overspend here, but then you end up with a character who starts off in debt. 

      

Note that poor Siobhan here has -10 GP. You can't buy much gear with negative gold.

        

One last gripe and then I'll move on. After minutes building up the ideal character, the one thing the game doesn't show you is the character's hit points. You have to leave the nursery, go to the tavern, drag the character into the party box, and then either double-click him individually or leave the tavern and go somewhere else like the hostel before you can see the HP. Invariably, the ones with the best stats will have 3-4 HP, which seems like a death sentence, so you have to throw them away and start over. In 50 or so tries, most characters had 6 HP or under, even fighters, even with very high health. I've only made one 8 so far. Chet has a screenshot with a level 1 character with 11 HP, and that feels astronomical to me. 

       

I have to admit, while I'm not inclined to cheese out extra funds by making dozens of throwaway characters just to steal their starting cash, by the point I get through this generation marathon and find yet again I've made six new useless characters all with 3-5 HP, it kind of feels like the game owes me a little.

     
Once you have your party, you shop. Here you find that the shop doesn't have enough gear to go around at first, even if you do have the funds. There aren't enough suits of armor; there's only one pair of gloves; and if you've got a couple of wizards and a thief, you might not even have enough knives. There is some aspirational gear on hand: one suit of plate for 400 gold pieces and a magic "dancing" sword for 20,000 that you'll be drooling over for a long while. The nice thing about the shop is it does restock over time.

      

The shop.

      

As you distribute gear to characters, the game could be more intelligent. It attempts to put things into the right places, but it makes some inexplicable choices. Each character has one hand devoted to wielding weapons, and one free hand for holding another item (such as a torch, but it could be anything). Some other gear can be worn, like armor, and accessories, but also weirdly some weapons. Gear that's not wearable has to stay in hand or be put in a pocket. Conveniently, there are backpacks which provide several pockets, and most armor has one or two, plus that free hand. But it does mean you can't hand two torches to one person. They'll take one, and then you have to juggle the other one through the stash or rearrange windows to drag from one place straight into a pocket elsewhere.

    
After distributing the gear, I had to go in and tweak everybody because the game had decided to do things like hold a sword in the offhand, wield the chain mail as a weapon, and wear the shield and helm. One character was wielding their backpack. This is a game you have to watch. It can also be very finicky about where and how you can unwield one thing, sometimes refusing to let you unwield until you've disposed of an item, or sometimes unwielding only to auto-wield some other poor choice. Luckily, I learned how to juggle in high school. 

 

The chain mail actually comes with a damage rating (0-2), but it would be better if it didn't. Then again, this game will allow you to literally throw the gauntlet at an opponent.

        

It's nearly time to enter the dungeon, but first clerics (and knights and shamans; the knight is a prestige class fighter who has cleric spells, while the shaman is a prestige class cleric who can use fighter weapons; that makes them nearly identical but the knight will end up with fewer spells while the shaman will have less HP) need to meditate to memorize spells. 

     
The cleric spell system is a little unintuitive at first glance, but it basically boils down to the Dungeon Master-style rune system with some extra steps. There are four runes: earth, air, fire, water. The cleric first meditates to generate tiles of these runes, which takes 1-4 hours, respectively. You then assemble the tiles into words, which you quickly memorize as spells. You can build up a repository of the tiles in advance, for quick in-dungeon memorization. The manual warns you not to risk spending time in the dungeon generating the tiles or memorizing wizard spells, at risk of being attacked. Only one cleric can meditate upon tiles at a time, which feels wasteful from a time management perspective, though I'm fairly sure there's no real deadline in the game. (Weirdly, it gives your character age down to the number of days old you are, another detail that seems unnecessary but also prompts some worry about time passing.) The manual gives you a list of low-level spells and the rune-words for the first few levels of them. Some spells are unique to either wizards or clerics, but some spells can be learned by either class.

     

Mediate, then assemble, then memorize. Bottom, top, middle. Your natural reading order.

     

For now, I just memorize several of the same spell: Earth-Air spells "Haelan,: this game's version of "Cure Light Wounds." It affects a single target and theoretically ranges about 1-6 HP but seems to frequently just do 2. Both the cleric and the shaman are able to memorize four apiece before the symbols gray out, which indicates they're at capacity.

    
Wizards and magi need spellbooks before they can memorize spells. Hopefully, I find one (or two, since I have a wizard and a magus) soon. They can cast spells from scrolls, but I only received one or two at character creation, and the cheapest ones in the shop are 500 for a "Haelan" and go up to 8,000 for some bigger spells.

   
Finally, into the dungeon! First, you're prompted for a code from the code wheel. There's a PDF available online. It's not super convenient, but it works.

      

The dungeon view.

      

When the door opens, you're standing in a small room, well lit by torches on each side. I try to move with WASD and find W prompts "open what door?" I'll repeat this every time I enter the dungeon for a while. You can move with the arrows or the mouse. I prefer keyboard. It's nice that most or all of the other commands are available as keys, but I probably won't memorize them.

        
I monkey around with the controls a bit. I remember you can take torches from the sconces, but apparently not the ones at the entrance. I take a few steps away and am quickly immersed in darkness. I go back and light a torch, and basically if/until I discover a light spell, I will be perpetually paranoid about them from here on out. How long do they last? Will I notice when it runs low? You can only light one torch from another lit torch, so if you let it lapse, you're out of luck. I bought a few. I find a few more around the corner in sconces. These come out readily. But it won't ever be enough to satisfy.

      
I try to drop a lit torch back in a sconce because you can't have two separate character inventories open at once, and this is the only way to pass the torch, as it were. I miss the sconce, drop the torch on the ground, and am immediately blanketed in darkness. Crud.

    
As I try to recover, I am transported to a new screen. Combat! Skeletons have found me, but only a couple. The combat system could be a little confusing but I remember the basics. It's a real-time, free-movement, 2D depiction of the area. Click and drag to move, until a line appears showing you're close enough to target an enemy. Repeat to move other characters in or out of range. There are a couple of different combat stances, but mostly you'll use the default melee attack. Your characters and the mobs take turns attacking each other on some invisible timer which is both frustratingly slow when you're waiting for your next turn, but then too fast if you need to make adjustments. There are a couple of hits and a couple of misses, and the fight is over soon with only minor injuries.

 

The combat interface can toggle a melee range guide, but it's never really necessary. It only makes things look busy.

      

Afterwards, most of my characters get some experience; a few do not. It will take a while to figure out that they need to either physically attack once (even if they miss) or cast a spell to get a share of the experience. Testing indicates that all characters get the same experience, and those who don't participate simply miss out—the fighters will not benefit and get more experience points if the spellcasters sit out.

      
On the ground are a couple of bags of gold, worth 10 gold pieces each, that I drag to my inventory. Newly claimed prize money comes with inconveniences both to your inventory slots and your encumbrance. Back at town, I'll be able to deposit the money bags, and then it becomes a weightless bank credit.
    

I find my way back to the light, get another torch out, and begin exploring again. The level is fairly small, one big room and two short arms. One leads to a locked grate with what looks like a pit or well behind it. I know already this is actually an elevator which spans all the floors, though for now most of them are locked. I also know this is technically the second level, because that elevator can take you up one more.
      
There's only one choice left: take the stairs down to the next level. Like the first one, this level is also not large, just a big room with three arms, but visibility only goes out a few squares so it's hard to tell at a glance.

     
I notice a monster in the distance, looking like another skeleton. I'd given my thief a bow so I attempt some long-distance combat. This requires opening the inventory, toggling the wield from the melee weapon to the bow, and then finding a "shoot" button which lets you aim and fire an arrow. It makes a little noise but I can't even tell if it's a hit, or what amount of damage might be done.

      
The monsters close on us and melee combat begins. This time there are both skeletons and some other thing that might be a dark crab or an ooze or slime with arms. I can't find a way to identify monsters and won't find the right window for about another six hours. I get a couple of people into position and then spend half the fight trying to figure out how to toggle the thief back from the bow to a sword. Then the second half of the fight, I struggle finding a way to cast spells. The solution to both is moving the character out of combat range, which activates grayed-out parts of the menu for inventory and spells. With "Haelan," you cast it and then click on the recipient to target them from a distance.

      
The fight takes a little longer but goes well. Only my wizard fails to get any experience. There's a real Catch-22 here, where if you can't fight, barely have any hit points, and don't yet have spells, you can't level up to improve your abilities or hit points. I assume this will even out later, especially with mass damage spells.

     
I collect a few more torches and a knife and return for a round of healing and spell memorization.
     

In the words of Jim Morrison, "You cannot petition the guild with PRAYER!"

       

There is no way to directly see a character's experience. This seems like a poor choice. I eventually realize you can check your progress by going to the hostel, and then from the Town menu select "Petition Guild." I don't know why that's hidden. At this point, I realize the game manual doesn't say anything about levels, either. Only the hint book has a table (1,600 XP and 450 gold to get to Level 2 for regular classes; 2,400 XP and 900 gold to level up prestige classes). So far I have earned . . . 20 gold. This may take a while.

   

09/19/2026