The Citadel of Chaos was released in 1984 for the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum. Penguin Books was the developer and publisher, and the game is based off of the Fighting Fantasy series.
Fighting Fantasy was a series of single player role-playing gamebooks created by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. The first volume in the series was published in paperback by Puffin in 1982.
The series distinguished itself by mixing Choose Your Own Adventure-style storytelling with a dice-based role-playing element included within the books themselves. The caption on many of the covers claimed each title was an adventure “in which YOU are the hero!” The majority of the titles followed a fantasy theme, although science fiction, post-apocalyptic, superhero, and modern horror gamebooks were also published. The popularity of the series led to the creation of merchandise such as action figures, board games, role-playing game systems, magazines, novels, and video games.
Puffin ended the series in 1995, but the rights to the series were eventually purchased by Wizard Books in 2002. Wizard published new editions of the original books and also commissioned six new books over two series, ending in 2012. The rights were then acquired by Scholastic in 2017, which has since published four new titles and reissued thirteen of the original books with new artwork.
You begin the game by creating your character. You roll for three attributes: Skill, Stamina, and Luck. You then roll for your Magic points which determines how many spells you can start with and cast throughout the adventure.
Once you roll for your attributes you are then asked to name your character and then taken to a list of spells and asked to choose from them until all of your Magic points are depleted. You have quite a selection of spells to choose from and for some reason these evoked pleasant memories of Infocom’s Enchanter, which I played when I was much younger.
Some examples of your spell choices include: Creature Copy, ESP, Levitate, Fire, Weakness, Strength, Illusion, Stamina, and others.
The actual writing and the overall story are both very good. The descriptions of the locations are excellent, and the encounters are well thought out. The right action that you need to take is not readily apparent and the results are often not what you would expect.
Combat can occur quite often in the game and conflict is handled in a separate combat screen. You and your opponent each roll 2d6 and add your skill points; whoever has the highest roll deals two points of stamina damage.
I found the magic system in the game to be highly enjoyable. There are different ways to tackle each of the obstacles that you encounter in the story. You might choose to use an object in your inventory to solve a problem, or you may want to cast a spell which might be particularly useful, or you may just want to resort to physical combat. Your spells that you initially select at the beginning of the game are much like inventory items, once you cast the spell from your spell slot, it is gone.
There were a couple of instances in the game where I felt I might find myself unable to continue because of the branch of choices that I made. I soon discovered however that your player is “funneled” to a particular location and that there are multiple ways to deal with the problem. In MOST cases, if you think you’re in trouble because you don’t have a particular inventory item, there is work around to the problem.
Your ultimate goal is seizing control of the citadel from Balthus Dire; a dark sorcerer of ill repute. The game seems to suggest that Balthus Dire is also a vampire or at least something very close to it. There seem to be a number of ways that you can choose to deal with the big bad but the most satisfying is to cast Levitate soon after Dire causes the tower to tremble and rip a set of curtains from the window. Sunlight floods the chamber and causes the ultimate demise of our villain.
There are some areas that can be extremely tricky to successfully complete. Your research foray into the library can be a tricky affair that can lead to you being captured which opens up an entirely different story branch. The battle with the dreaded 7-headed hydra is also particularly deadly.
This introduction to the fighting fantasy series left me with a surprising reaction to this product. It made me want to purchase or read some of the books from the series as I really enjoyed the writing and locations. I suspect that this game is quite literally a computerized translation of the book itself. The surprising reaction I am referring to is that I found myself thinking that I’d rather read the book than play the computerized version. I wish the programmers would have just had the text describing the locations appear to you all at once, much like a normal text adventure. Instead, each new location slowly parses the text out to you, line by line, until complete. Haltingly reading each location line by line got to be quite a slog. This was a very poor programming choice and almost ruined the experience for me. I even set my emulator to warp speed and still found myself infuriated with the text streaming across like a teleprompter.
This felt more like a text adventure than a CRPG even though you had inventory to manage AND your combat was determined via die rolls. You also found that your three attributes could increase and decrease throughout the game. This observation is not necessarily a bad thing as I love text adventures, the one negative though, and it is a big one, is the way in which the text in the game was dispersed. I should add that even after lodging this chief complaint, I am curious and look forward to playing the other computerized fighting fantasy installments.
I played the game on a Commodore 64 emulator, and it took me roughly three hours to complete.
Next up on the docket is Courageous Perseus.
Until next time…