Black Crypt (1992)

Name:Black Crypt
Number:259
Year:1992
Publisher:Electronic Arts
Developer:Raven Software
Genre:RPG
Difficulty:4/5
Time:9 hours 50 minutes
Won:No (115W/86L)

After finally getting around to Black Crypt after years of meaning to get around to it, I must admit, I have mixed feelings on it. Not just because the game crashed and I couldn't continue it, but because as a game this comes off as a bit of an oddball. There are a lot of things this game is trying to do, but some of these felt like they really counteracted one another.

This also applies to the game's development process itself, since given the 1992 release date, you'd expect that this for some reason just appealed to whoever was greenlighting games at EA back then. An Amiga dungeon crawler? In the US, that was on its way out then, even if the message wouldn't be fully received until this year. No, this was started in 1986 and the publishing deal was made sometime between the two points. This was just an unfortunate victim of bad timing and a strange unwillingness to not make a DOS port. Which made it the only game they made until X-Men: Legends to not be on DOS or Windows.

The premise is your usual Dungeon Master-clone idea. There's this evil bad guy, Estoroth Paingiver, who took four champions from the past to kill, and now he's about to take over the world again. You have four lousy amateurs, go survive in his dungeon where dozens have died in vain. Go through thirty levels of dungeon, while moving in a blob through a grid-based movement system. Go fight monsters in a circle, solve puzzles, eat meat that's been on the floor for god knows how long, and try not to get screwed over by spinning tiles. If you don't really know what that is, go play Dungeon Master, it's got a free port and everything.

Despite considerable room for improvement, this genre is ultimately just "is this still as fun as DM, despite being worse". The answer here is complicated, while that's true, whether this is playable really depends on your skill with Amiga emulation and having an idea of how to install a game to a hard drive rather than just using save states and hoping it doesn't kill itself. I didn't quit willingly, the game just stopped registering disk changes after the third area transition. If you can avoid that, it's worthwhile.

There's no control over party selection, you just choose the name and which portrait they get from a selection of people who look like they just got out of fantasyland jail. What matters is you get a fighter, a cleric, a "magic user"/magician and a druid, and attribute selection. This feels very Dungeons and Dragons derived at times, with classes which seem taken from the game, armor class and attributes mostly taken from the base six. Stats go up to twenty and you have no real knowledge of what they do beyond assumptions you get from previous games.

The fighter is more or less a straight copy of the class from DnD. At first the most useful character since he can actually fight, until your spellcasters can actually cast spells, at which point he acts as a meatshield while your druid brings down the forces of the four planes. (Ice, bees and chaos) He is useful when you need to fight in melee, of course, like when you've just cast fifteen attack spells at someone and they're still moving. Melee is just a lot less effective than the always hitting spells, since he'll be trailing far behind in damage and ability to hit.

The cleric is an oddity. In four character crawlers like this, it's tradition to have two melee fighters and two spell-casters in the back. The melee guys soak up the damage, the spell-casters do whatever, then use their bows. The cleric is also a straight copy of the DnD class, good defense, good variety of offensive and defensive spells, and a class aversion to hitting things with bladed weapons. Violence with a mace is okay though. For a while, this guy functions weirdly. He does less damage than the fighter, which should technically be augmented with spells, but outside of healing, he only has one effective attack spell for a while, which makes him the least useful character in the party until he gets his third spellbook.

The magic user, or wizard as I called them, is well...like a wizard in DnD. Not fully like, since the magic system here doesn't work like DnD and this has a strange selection of spells, but it's the same archetype. At first, somewhat useless. You can have him use throwing weapons or a bow, but ranged attacks from the people who will use a ranged attack are useless. He doesn't get an attack spell until the third level, and until then all he gets are a map spell and a defense spell. But when you get that second spellbook the wizard becomes the sort of universal problem solver, getting stat boosting abilities along with being able to remove glyphs and magic barriers.

The druid is the strangest class. It fits the usual druid DnD class, but the spells you would think to be lower level are sprinkled throughout later spellbooks, and what you get at the start are odd utility spells and the only starting attack spell. He also doesn't get another spellbook for a while, leaving him as the worst character you have, since it takes a while for that starting spell to get useful. It takes a while for him to get more attack spells, but boy howdy, does he start hitting hard when he does.

The magic system uses spellbooks and levels to indicate what spells you can use. Your wizard can cast Shield at the start of the game, but not Fireball despite both being in the starting magic spellbook. In contrast, by the time you get his final spellbook, Libram of Darkmagic, chances are both Deathstorm (9th level) and Detect Traps (2nd level) will be available to him. I have no technical issue with this, except that the progression is odd, in that a druid went a lot longer between spellbooks than a wizard or cleric. Otherwise it's simple memorization, click on a spell in the spellbook section, it pops up above, then you can cast it. Once memorized, you can memorize it again after a set period of time which is reduced if you cast said spell first. Meaning, you can have multiple casts of the same spell at once.

Control-wise, the game is more or less what you expect from a DM-clone. The arrows move, and you turn with delete and page down, which kind of works. Spells are in the upper right corner, each caster can have five at a time, including multiples of the same spell. Switch between them with the symbols. Left click on a character's portrait and he uses his primary function, usually sword against monster, right click activates a secondary function, which is a spell with some enchanted items. Never really used that in combat, just accidentally whenever I meant to open the inventory. The bars are health, the row of six dots are status effects and that gold dot is indicating who the leader is. This only effects things like what plaques you can read and if someone with magic sight can direct the party. If you have your druid lead, he isn't going to be in melee combat. If you click on the skull, a little menu will open up allowing you to save your game or sleep in-game.

Right click on the character name and you open the inventory screen. This is more complex than it really needs to be. There's the armor, weapons and spellbook, but the bottom part seems odd. These are your packs, bags which hold stuff in them. You can have up to five, though in practice I just kept two/three per character. The manual says encumbrance is a thing, but I've never found out. As the game goes on there are more of bags you have to put in these slots to search through. You can't attack on this screen, so do so safely.

The icon below the shield is the class icon, in case you forget. This is actually a clue for later, because you can pick up smaller icons and give them to any character and get a small stat boost. I didn't notice a difference, but I'm not complaining. The three bars on the right are health, sleep (because magic just happens) and food/drink. So many meters the game had to combine one. Clicking on that will give you the hard numbers of your stats along with any status effects you have.

But there's one thing you can't pick up from context, it's that you have multiple sets of clothing. Yes, rather than doing so in an elegant system where everything is on-screen at once, you instead get a confusing inventory system where it takes in-game hours before you realize you can equip belts and rings! And also shirts. Which implies that if you take them off, that you could fight demons and goblins dressed up like the Celtic warriors of legend. (And probably die too.)

I clown on it, but it isn't that bad. Just click on the torso icon in the upper right. It's what seems the logical course of action the second you pick up something. It's just unnecessarily large and complicated, but it isn't that complicated. I get the feeling it's there to account for the whole bow and arrow/dagger ranged attacks, you put those in a quiver or bag and they automatically pop out. It's just less elegant than it could be. I really only dislike the combination food/drink meter, because that one just feels needlessly obtuse. People know if they're thirsty or hungry. These aren't really that tricky to fill, since usually every section has a water fountain early on and you get enough food that by the time you get a food summoning spell you won't end up in trouble.

Combat is very typical of the sub-genre. Click on a spell to cast it, click on whatever items you have equipped to use them, and sooner or later someone will be dead. Trade blows or engage in the usual combat waltz. Where it differs, I feel is that spells reign supreme while physical attacks feel weak. As I've mentioned, spells always hit and most spells scale with levels, while physical attack damage is more esoteric. Throwing weapons might as well not exist since they never seem to actually hit.

While I did have fun with it, the added depth of having multiple attack spells at the ready trivialized most of the combat I got through. The problem is that the game really encourages this route, because in the second section you fight against enemies which steal the items out of your hands. Right next to enemies which can poison you, when you have a limited supply of cure poison items. There is no way to deal enough damage to one of the item thieves without spamming a few spells. After this, you get enough spellbooks that you'll never run out of attack spells.

The most definitive characteristic of the game in my mind is that sometimes scrolls will tell you information that is outright false. For instance, in the opening section, you have to fight a giant, two-headed ogre to go further down. One scroll tells you that to beat it, you need to get the Ogreblade. Another tells you that said sword drains the lifeforce of the holder. The game includes the option to figure out if a scroll is real or fake with a spell, but I felt it added so much to the game I never used it.

It's a very clever idea that makes the dungeon not just a series of stuff that makes everything better and tells you the truth. Too many games will just constantly tell the truth to the player about whatever it is they're about that adding in something that lies to you is a breath of fresh air. I wish the game did more with this. Have some of the plaques tell you lies, have items be traps of some sort. Why is a random piece of meat I found next to a corpse still edible? Why are all these potions of cure disease what they say instead of something like bestow diarrhea? This is a dungeon, act like it instead of making the whole thing one endless prize parade.

Now, I'm not saying this is something universally good, but outside of a few cases like this it doesn't come up. To the point that, in an odd way, a game that does this has it worse than a game that did in back in the day. If a game doesn't actively draw attention to the fact that it lied, then it's far more reasonable to assume that something wrong is happening on the game's end. Rather than necessarily saying we're all dumb sheep who trust what games tell us too much, game developers are just too stupid to pull it off. Which in turn, makes players look like dumb sheep for trusting what the game is telling them. It's a no-win situation.

Black Crypt is very mixed on difficulty. At first we get a situation where the game is building up to an encounter with a deadly monster who can only be killed with a certain weapon...which may kill you as well. Then a section where the only reasonable recourse was to spam spells at a monster so it wouldn't poison you or steal a weapon. Then for the rest of my experience it was more or less a smooth experience.

There's not really a lot this has over Dungeon Master. Most of the puzzles are odd. I liked having to consult the manual to find out what the answer to a question was, but the rest were not that memorable. The worst was one had seemingly no logical answer beyond brute force, and was designed in such a way that you couldn't quite figure it out through that either. Even map design wasn't much of a challenge, the game gives you a map spell which means you don't need to make one, you instead get one as you go along. Since by the time the usage runs out, you can cast another, there's no reason not to use it.

It's a shame because the game has a very nice mood to it starting out. Raven had a really good run in these early days making these dark, dying worlds and then just...not doing much of anything with them. All the mood disappears for what is basically Dungeon Master with nicer-looking graphics and a different spell system. Right down to the only ambient sounds being the footsteps of your enemies. This isn't necessarily bad, but knowing future games, it does paint Raven Software as only being capable of making nice, simpler imitations of other games. There are of course, gaps in my knowledge of their games, some of those non-FPS titles from the '90s, for instance, but it does feel like Raven is always following, never leading, in what they do.

Weapons:
A selection of weapons you can only figure out the damage of by trial and error, ranged weapons which never hit, attack spells which function more or less function the same except for damage, and various magical items which feel to valuable to ever use. 3

Enemies:
An interesting selection, where puzzle enemies still require standard combat, and a ton of enemies have one annoying thing about them which makes fighting them feel incredibly risky. 4

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
For what I got through, I always felt like I was going for some goal or another in the short-term in addition to my long-term goal. Most moment to moment stuff was just fluff, but in a fun way. 5

Player Agency:
No complaints for the most part, it's a Dungeon Master-clone and doesn't screw it up. The scroll system is mildly annoying, because it's difficult to use in combat, but that's also true of the inventory screen in general. That's why you don't do that stuff in combat. 6

Interactivity:
Nothing special, puzzles, the usual buttons and switches. 3

Atmosphere:
Starts off dark and moody, especially with the constant darkness, but soon enough just starts feeling more or less like your typical fantasy RPG. 5

Graphics:
Very nice-looking, even if it's once again the same wall texture for...thirty hours. At least this game shifts it up occasionally by...turning the walls blue or red. Enemies look properly sinister, but there isn't that much animation. 5

Story:
The backstory is referenced all the time during the game, but we're not getting much more depth that using various bits of it for puzzles. 1

Sound/Music:
There's one really nice intro tune which sets the mood, then just combat and ambient monster sound effects. They're nice, but since there's no sound when you've killed all the monsters, it can get quite silent for long stretches at a time. 3

That's 35, about what I expected. Good but below Dungeon Master.

You can sum this one up with one sentence. Do you know how to install Amiga games and like Dungeon Master? Though I feel like if you said yes, you've probably already played this one.

Most of the reviews are overwhelmingly positive, doing nothing but praising the game. So, I looked at whatever was actually critical. There was one, which...said mostly the same things I did before calling it incredibly difficult. Eh, I kind of get where they're coming from, since in one section you basically have no recourse but to savescum or be quick on the spell draw, but once you get past that it's quite smooth sailing.

The next Raven Software title will either be CyClones or Heretic, since I think both are '94. There's not going to be any particular order or anything. Just the whims I get whenever I finally reach that year.

Next week, I've unfortunately got a bit of stuff to do in the real world this week, restricting the time I have on this. Chances are I'll be doing a 1984 or 85 game which won't take too much of my time to cover.

Black Crypt: Lost

The other teleporter back at the hub leads to a red area. I guess yellow was too similar to the regular wall color. It's certainly...there. Not that I don't appreciate this sort of art direction, I love '70s Italian horror films, but this feels gratituous. We're not doing it for the cool factor, we're doing it because we can. This opening section has an openable door and a switch. The switch reveals a bit more hallway, with a plaque:

"A year of death
Counted in souls
One for each moon
Four is your goal."

So...find four keys? Four of something, I guess. What's behind the door?

Oh, niches with skulls in them. This feels like a trap. There were a ton of skull enemies last time. And it turns out to be correct. Pick one up, and a fireball spell is cast on your party. Use the skull you get and a skull enemy pops up. Maybe, I'm not sure. Hang on, we've just seen a plaque with a riddle on it. Maybe there's a connection? The fourth skull? No. The fourth on the left. Now what?

I sort of end up brute-forcing this puzzle. There's one right in front of the door, one at the end and then another one somewhere inside. Looking back, I can see two of them are clearly indicated, but I'm not sure how the last or the odd one out connects up. The last skull causes a click and a switch pops up which opens the passageway further. This has another plaque with months on it. February, April, July, October. This one I get, and might explain the last one, except that it wasn't the exact last skull. I guess I just dump the skulls then?

So I go to take the skulls based on what months they would correspond to. This doesn't work. Okay, maybe it's in the opposite direction. No, that's not it either. This is getting to be annoying. I bruteforce it and that does nothing. Okay, what am I missing? I take a peak at the guidebook and apparently these things were opened in a sequence. Looking at both plaques, I'm not sure how the sequence is being hinted at, since it goes third, seventh, twelveth, then sixth.

There's probably going to be a bit about puzzle design when I reach the final entry, but it can't be the months, since there's nothing to connect them to those skulls. I can kind of see a year corresponding to three, since the number of days starts with a three. The number of moons could also mean twelve, since that's sort of what a month grew out of. Souls I could see being connected to the death gems you find on the ground beforehand, but that's because I paid zero attention to them. Very gamey idea, in a bad way. There's no reasonable way to figure this out, I'm just grasping at straws after the fact. And I don't mean this in a sense that I usually do this, because usually the problem is that this puzzle could have been given hints much better. This ain't that, this is impossible for me to parse. There are no easily noticeable visual differences, though I think there are some if you can see one next to another one.

Moving on, there's some more of all three enemies that have been in this section, and another death gem next to a piece of meat and a potion of cure disease. Two locked doors and one I can open. This leads to a hallway which damages you for no explained reason. Presumably, it's due to the heat, but the game neglects to mention this. There's another water fountain, but more importantly, a key and a robe of the forest, which does some good on my druid.

The door this opens leads to a wall. I kind of figured this by checking the map, but I tried it anyway since it seemed like it might be a trap. The other door has a different lock, so this is correct. I wish it was, because instead it's a sort of walk-through wall maze. Sort of because, well, there's not really much maziness to it, but it feels like one. There's even a plaque mentioning that the druid hero of the great war died here. I find what might be his stuff, which includes a leather armor +2 I had no reason to care about, and fortunately, another key. The door this opens leads to a fountain and the first proper dark area of the game. That means I can finally take advantage of that light spell! How well does it work?

Now, I'm not going to use words like, awful, terrible, or even unforgiveable. What I am going to say is that is that this screenshot of me fighting something in the dark was very soon after I entered the darkness. This can't have been more than twenty seconds if I'm being generous. This is shorter than most grindcore songs, unless they're literal joke ones. This is a large area to go through, even if there's not much in it. Beyond a few floating skulls, there's a coffer with a scroll next to it. That tells me that the archdruid, Oak Raven is buried in a white oak coffin. Am I going to have to rob his grave? Sigh...

The end of it appears to be a small room in the center of a large outside hallway. Only, it isn't, it just has some minor stuff, I missed another room. I do get twenty seconds, but it is annoying to rush this way. The second room, on the side, is where the actual loot is, a shiny new helmet and the key. This level is starting to feel long in the tooth, and it seems the developers agree with me, because the last part is just answering the questions about the archdruid I just mentioned. But you know, not as two words, as one word. Sigh...

Among many other other defense items, including vaguely named magical helmets Mage Bane and Helm of the Triton, I find the Wisdom of the Druids, a spellbook for the druid. This has Pestilence, Chant of Doom, attack spells, Cure Wounds, healing, and Cure Poison, self-explanatory. Good to have, even if poison hasn't come up in ages. There's also the key down, allowing me to reach the next section.

...At which point the game won't let me continue. As I've sort of glossed over, you need to do a disk switch between major sections. I've done it about half a dozen times before, but there are three sections so far, the times in the past were to get water. This time the game just says the disk is write-protected (which it isn't) and fades to black afterwards. Nothing. At first I thought I might be able to fix this by just saving, but this prompts the same kind of error. Neither reloading a save from the start of this section or redownloading the game files seems to work, so this, alas, is where I'm ending the game.

This Session: 1 hour

Final Time: 9 hours 50 minutes

Black Crypt: Le Soleil, La Lune

The rest of the fourth floor was relatively simple for the most part. Nothing really new popped up, just more of the semi-invisible worm enemies. I got another character level. Curiously, my party doesn't all do it at once despite never having died, but it doesn't really work quite logically. Fighter and cleric both do it at the same time, but it then goes wizardess, then druid. I mean, I guess that makes sense, neither is using their weapons anymore, no point when they never seem to hit, but shouldn't my cleric be ahead of my fighter, since he fights and casts spells?

At this point, I end up stuck a bit. There's a magic wall I can't cast dispel on, so I assume I'm just missing something. Based on past evidence, I need to find some hidden button. Once again, I succumb to weakness and look it up the map. Nothing. The walkthrough? There are two scrolls of dispel I dropped because I don't need that when two of my spellcasters can do that. A lot of the more generic magic items which seem to serve no purpose I've just been ignoring. I don't need health potions I'm not going to use.

Inside is more armor, a remove glyph scroll I have a funny feeling I know where it goes, a key and another magic user spellbook. Reminder, my Druid still only has his first spellbook. All he has is a measly attack spell I'm not sure is doing the 2-8 points of damage per caster's level it alleges, a dispel magic spell which apparently isn't that helpful, a read runes spell which is actually useless, and a protection spell I keep neglecting to use. Second he gets another spellbook he'll actually be useful. Probably.

Anyway, this Wizard Word spellbook is a mixed bag. Create Wall, create a illusionary wall for some purpose, Ethereal Shield a better protection spell which affects the entire party, Refresh, "remember all spells below 4th level", which I can't use yet, but sounds insanely useful when I do and Lighting Field, damage spell. Wait, Lighting or Lightning? Oh, well, we'll find out when we use it.

The scroll of remove glyph works on the skulls from earlier. Though since it only has one use, I have an awful feeling I might be accidentally screwing myself over. There's nothing that special here, just some armor my frontline fighters can't really use and a few odds and ends. That's okay, I knew this could be a possibility. The key, meanwhile, opens a door near the start of this section and it's straight down three more floors to the next section. Which prompts another disk swap.

The very first thing I see on this floor is this plaque. Oh, good, does this mean the game is going to go after me for using spells? Wait, can plaques lie to me? Since the game is introducing the possibility, that's a valid theory. I can reload if it kills me for casting fireball.

Oh, look, it's my new most-hated enemy. Kidding, mostly. Even if the game can get frustrating, this is some top notch enemy design. I spam spells at it until it dies with a few melee attacks. My fighter and cleric are starting to become less useful in a fight and more like meat shields. Oh, well. There's another glyph blocking my path after this, but fortunately this is done in by a spell. There's also a plaque warning me that there's something dangerous in the dark.

Further up is another plaque, one which I have to switch to my cleric to read. A druid needs me to complete his task, presumably, not my druid. "For sun and moon", which by examining the nearby...door/wall relief, I believe refers to two items to do something here. I probably would have figured this out on my own, but the explicit statement does make it all easier. Two teleports lead the way onward.

My first choice is the nearer of the two, which leads to the blue walls. Shades of the level with the first boss in Shadowcaster, but either way, very cool. You start off in a circle with three paths blocked off by pillars along with a door which has a gold lock. To advance, you have to step on a tile with an invisible pressure plate, which opens one. There's another pressure plate, visible this time, which hurts my party, then spawns a bunch of flying skulls. They cast spells, but in a fight they aren't worth much individually. Of course, in a bunch, that's a bit more troublesome.

This is a whole set of strange pressure plate traps that lead around a switch. The first one spawned a horde, while the second one spawns one, but forces your items one space away. This opens a door which leads to a key, and more importantly, the Manual of the Planes, the second druid spellbook. We get Light, self-explanatory, Swarm, attack spell, Dismiss, "sends enemy to another plane", probably works against planar enemies, to use DnD terminology, and Disrupt. I can't use the latter two yet, since they're 8th and 9th level respectively. In-between all this is a pit and a stairway down leading to a small area.

The door opens, revealing another door with a gold lock. Okay, I get the point here. And I start back on the area I was, only to realize I can't go anywhere else. Okay, I'm missing something, I know it. But what? Examining a block which disappeared when I returned reveals a button which opens another pathway.

In here is another plaque, this one reads "HCTIWS", which is not misspelled and when I looked at the screen upside down it showed me nothing. On the left side is a coffer, a storage item I don't need, on the right is a regular bow, which I don't need. I leave, do a few other things, and then it occurs to me, hey, does that mean SWITCH? The nearest switch is back in the last area. Nothing, and then the answer comes to me, switch where the items are.

Another fight with a horde of floating skulls, I once again run out of spells and fight them in melee, not very fun. This area has a pillar blocking a passage and three stairways down. There's another death gem and a scroll. This one tells me that there's another passcode wall, this one asking about how long the Black War lasted. The scroll says 10 hours, but checking the manual, it says 40. Gotta love that, making the copy protection require you to pay attention to the manual, and I'm saying that even though I didn't really read the backstory part.

Oddly, two of the stairs down lead to dead ends and the other one just has a skull guarding a magic robe, which I give to my wizardess. Knowing this game at this point, okay, where's the button I missed? Pixel hunting in blue screens is an experience, let me tell you, and does take away the cool factor. But I find the button, which removes the pillar and leads to a fourth stairway down...which actually just leads back up. Huh.

This area has four more stairways down and this slime monster. As per usual, I spam magic attacks, and try not to get hit. It doesn't seem to be anything special, but I prefer not to play with fire. It's the only one in this section, so what it does will have to wait for later. One of the other stairways leads to another corridor which should lead back to the area I was just in, but is blocked by a pillar. The actual meat here is that there's another "HCTIWS" puzzle, which reveals a chest with the second key.

The third pillar is removed by another newly revealed button, this has two paths. One is locked off by a plaque asking the question about the Black War, but the other is guarded by a glyph. This leads to a strange puzzle with two different plaques, here and today. I figure there's something else I need to find, so I start to double back, only to find there's no way out except a teleporter which wasn't there before.

This leads to another room, which throws a trap at me, with two more plaques. Tomorrow and gone. I'd like to solve the puzzle, Pat. "Here today, gone tomorrow." Well, what that means is beyond me for now, because there's nothing that can interact with this, and the way forward just leads to another snaking pillar, this one giving the solution to the Black War question. It's still requiring you to look stuff up in the manual, but the manual gives the answer, so I don't understand the purpose.

The path behind the puzzle plaque leads to a locked door and one I can open. The one I can open has another one of the nasty-looking fellows on-top, but no way to enter. Until I check the map and notice one of the walls is strangely colored. It's a one-way wall, kind of, and on the other side I have to fight this thing without magic. That's not a mistake or anything, there's a note from Estoroth telling me that I'm too reliant on magic. He's not wrong or anything, but this was the first time I've had to actually use the combat waltz since the ogre.

He's guarding another a key and another druid spellbook, Force of the Elements. This has Shadow Shield, party protection spell, Ice Strike, heavy but non-scaling attack spell, Blast of Cold, scaling attack spell, Quake, heavier but non-scaling attack spell. Kind of limited selection, no fire or air spells? I guess the magic user spellbooks cover that, but it is strange. The rest of this area is just a few more token enemies and better items, along with the final key.

This leads to yet another of the red ceiling crawlers. This one seems tougher than the others, a more or less full shot of spells doesn't kill him and I'm not in a position to actually fight him. Considering that a lot of the higher level spells have something like a 10-80 damage difference, it could just be bad luck. He dies quickly when I came back.

This is it for this section, the moon key is here, along with some nice, shiny plate armor for my fighter. Returning to the relief/door, and a wall is removed, revealing a Frost Razor. This, alas, I think shall be my stopping off point for this particular entry, Easter weekend and all that.

This Session: 2 hours 30 minutes

Total Time: 8 hours 50 minutes