Wizardry: The Return of Werdna – The Fourth Scenario

The Return of Werdna has been called “the hardest RPG ever made.” After playing it, I can confirm this is not entirely hyperbole. The front and back covers are adorned with “For Expert Players Only!” warnings like some kind of bravura William Castle gimmick, but they’re telling the truth. This is a game that not only tests your mapping and dungeon crawler skills to the limits, but adds in some fiendish riddles as well. I waffled for about a year and a half on whether I was going to actually finish the game or just move on to Wizardry 5. Having finally reached one of multiple possible endings after using all the internet help, I still can’t say I made the right choice.

Roe R. Adams III is Wizardry 4’s sole designer, marking the first time that series creators Andrew Greenberg and Robert Woodhead were not involved in co-development. The result is a radically different game that both reveres and references the original, while loading in pop culture references, cameos from his real-life friends, and whatever else interested Adams at the time. Much like the first Ultima, this noticeably feels like a disconnected grab bag of one guy’s obscure interests.

That’s not to say this scenario isn’t exceptionally clever, because it is. This is unquestionably Wizardry at its freshest. If you are among the “expert players,” you might love the challenge this scenario brings. However, it also marks the biggest departure from the series. No other Wizardry game will try anything like this, to the point that Wiz 4 is arguably more of an elaborate, stand-alone puzzle than an actual part of the series.

By far, Return of Werdna’s greatest achievement is (almost literally) flipping the script from the first three games. You play as Werdna, the “Mad Overlord” from the original. No, he has not had a change of heart – you do indeed play as the villain. Werdna has been left to rot in a crypt after his defeat. He wakes up here, stripped of his power and trapped at the bottom floor of a dungeon. Instead of fighting your way down, you’ll now struggle your way up to the surface over ten levels, battling endless parties of heroes as you go.

Unfortunately, you’re a scrawny, reanimated wizard; not very adept at fighting. In true villain fashion, you’re going to have to rely on your minions. Certain squares on each floor are “summoning circles.” Entering them refills your health and lets you bring forth – for free – three fresh sets of evildoers taken from the rosters of Wiz 1-3. The higher you go out of the dungeon, the stronger your spells and these monsters get. Monsters retain the same stats and abilities from the earlier games, so there’s some real satisfaction in turning the toughest ones around as your allies. Vampires and Fiends sapping character levels with each attack is pretty nice when it’s working in your favor, while creatures that paralyze on hit will end combat much faster than wearing down a hero’s HP.

The only downside is you can’t control monsters directly, but they tend to naturally use their best attacks. Enemies count as one group but monsters are separate – meaning mass attacks like LAKANITO have a chance to not hit you, while your party-wide attacks always hit all heroes. You also don’t have to worry about minions’ spell points or their health. Spell points are free and infinite for them, while their health is never even displayed. I assume they refill after each encounter – not that you, as a mage, have a way to heal them anyway. The only potential frustration is trying to get a spellcaster to fire off a spell you need, but key spells are usually covered by using items, which we’ll get to in a bit.

Playing the villain feels pretty brilliant for its time and is a creative way for veterans to re-engage with the series. I complained a bit about Wizardry 3 rehashing the first game’s starting experience. Desperately trying to level up six characters with only a handful of coin and some ineffective healing spells didn’t feel engaging, having already done it through many restarts of the first game. There wasn’t much mystery or excitement to doing it again. This game brings some of both back by radically altering the rules and expectations. There are no shops to buy gear from. Gold you earn from fights is largely useless. There’s no inn to rest in, no XP to level up.

This means the familiar loop of ducking into the dungeon to map a bit before pulling back and recharging is gone, as is building and growing a mighty party over time. Instead, all your strategies revolve around the summoning circles. They alone recharge your health, spell points, and minions, and they alone act as your bases of operation. Of course, you’ll have to find them on each floor, with long stretches of dungeon that don’t make this easy by any definition.

Permadeath is still technically present (you restart from the beginning), but this is also the first game in the series that lets you save. You can save anywhere, at any time, to eight slots. This is admittedly a procedure on the Apple II, requiring you to swap to the A disk and back with all the slow speeds of mid-80s technology. But the point here is clear – you’re able to save “checkpoints” throughout the game and fall back to them upon death, somewhat lessening the otherwise brutal difficulty. Unfortunately, this also feels used as a license to crank up that difficulty to extremes.

First off, as the box itself says, you should absolutely start at the first Wizardry before coming here. You’re going to need an understanding of the rules this game sets out to break before you can appreciate or understand how it breaks them. At a minimum, Wiz 4 won’t tell you anything about the monsters you can summon. Unless you just take each out for a test-drive, you’ll want an idea of who’s going to be useful from fighting them in previous games. Along the same lines, you famously can’t escape the first room without knowledge of how spells and secret doors work – a puzzle they included the answer for in a sealed envelope within the box.

Next, Wizardry IV definitely has the hardest maps of the series so far, while arguably being among the hardest of the entire genre. Your only real concession here is knowing you’re locked to 20×20 grids for each level. Beyond that, every mean trick in the book gets deployed. Level 8 is a literal minefield, meant to kill you over and over as you fill in just a few map squares each time. Level 6 uses spinners at every corner to create the illusion of infinite blocks of rooms. Level 4 uses rotating blocks and endless one-way walls, corralling you into shifting corridors that don’t make logical sense. Level 7 is a ziggurat, with the suggestion that North is moving vertically up and large gaps on the side where you’ll “fall” if you try to move into them.

The final challenge is the “cosmic cube” – a massive series of stairs and invisible chutes that connect the last three levels into a giant one, littered with sections of darkness, spinners, damaging pits, and no shortage of wrong-way backtracks. The difficulty here is also influenced by what version you play – the Apple II original gives no indication at all that you’ve stepped on a spinner and turned your view. Teleporters work seamlessly and actually show the view of the room you’re teleporting into as you move forward – think of looking through a portal without seeing the end of the room you’re currently in. Don’t play this as your first dungeon crawler unless you want to hate the genre forever.

As with previous games, you absolutely have to keep a separate map going. As we’re on the Wiz 3 engine now, squares with an event show up with a filled-in floor, but you’re still going to need to enter every square of a level to ensure you’re not missing anything. Your sole reward for a session will sometimes only be filling in a few squares before death. Meanwhile, you’re going to constantly need to verify your location with DUMAPIC (a spell detailing your location in relation to 0,0 on the map), because these levels will constantly try to trick you.

The whole time, the ghost of Trebor (the benevolent king from the first Wizardry) hounds you. Wiz 4 runs in semi-real-time, with Trebor’s invisible spectre moving closer towards you every 5-10 seconds. When he gets close, he’ll taunt you. When he reaches you, he kills you instantly. You’re only safe when camping (Wizardry’s term for using the party menu inside a dungeon) and should you ever leave your computer running and step away, you’re almost certain to come back to a freshly-slain Werdna.

I should note that I think there’s some trickery going on here. You will always get the same sequence of six warning messages before Trebor kills you. I think each time you see one, Trebor isn’t “close,” but has actually reached your square. He never killed me before I saw all six messages. This would mean you really have six chances – but the effect is basically the same. You have to keep moving to stay alive, while you’d better duck to another level on the last message (“I almost have you”) to reset your chances.

Then there’s the heroes. In a neat touch, a number of these are (allegedly) character names taken from people who sent their disks in to Sir-Tech for repair. They appear in groups of up to six at a time, reflecting the kinds of balanced parties you would build yourself in the earlier games. They are also allowed to get as strong as the parties you would build. You can roughly expect fighters to gain 30 HP each time you climb a level, meaning you’re soon facing 200-400 HP meat shields. Mages with insta-kill spells start appearing on floor 6 (remember, that’s just 4 levels from your start at floor 10), so turning a corner, hitting an encounter, and getting nuked without a chance is awfully common. Early Wizardries, again, have no defense against magic damage.

Dead heroes stay dead while you’re on the same level. If you only kill a few members of a party, you’ll only face the survivors if you encounter them again. It’s possible to whittle down the toughest groups this way, which is nice. However, all heroes and all parties respawn when you leave a level and return, or when you reload a game. This is less nice. It’s entirely possible to create a save you can’t backtrack from – where you’re too far into a level and too weak to survive the now-reincarnated wizards casting the TILTOWAIT nuke spell. Use all 8 save slots liberally.

Just staying alive is enough of a challenge, but figuring out how to actually win adds a whole new level of difficulty. Puzzle items aren’t new to Wizardry – see the statues from Wiz 1 or the ship in a bottle from Wiz 3 – but they’ve never been as prevalent as they are here. You can even find a Black Box that can be equipped like a backpack, boosting your inventory limit from 8 to 27 and protecting items within it from being stolen in combat. Shuffling items in and out of the box is maybe an unnecessarily extra step, but it works within Wizardry’s systems – and it’s how you’re able to have adventure game style inventory puzzles here at all.

Most items are outright useless. Dead heroes drop weapons and armor that you, as a mage, cannot use. Your minions never need equipment and there’s nowhere to sell loot to. However, items with unique names are likely very important. You have no way to examine an item and no one to ask what it does, so there’s a heavy trial-and-error component to these puzzles. There’s only a few cursed items, and I think only two with a negative effect, so you’re mostly free to try items out anywhere you see fit. It’s just finding that one valid square out of thousands that becomes the trick.

Depending on the item, it can either be used from your inventory, or worn and “invoked.” Invoking a equipped item will use its particular ability, with a chance of it breaking. Effects range from healing you, to casting spells for free, to having specific uses at specific locations. Again, you are never told directly what an item does – you’ll have to hope it makes an obvious change to your stats. If it breaks, you’ve got to go back to get a new copy, or fight more heroes until a new copy drops.

The only guide you have in the entire game is a Wandering Oracle who travels the levels at random. You can see him move around on screen as a question mark. If you catch up to him, you can buy a randomized “hint” for 25000 gold. But these aren’t really “hints,” in that they’re not optional. You won’t find the answer elsewhere in the game. These are the critical clues you need to solve the puzzles – and most are cryptic as hell. Some examples:

“Chomp, chomp . . . eh, what’s east, Doc?”

“The egress will set you free.”

“”Read The Iliad lately?”

“The answer is carved in stone! It’s right before your nose!”

These four (out of an apparent 42) are some I know are needed to beat the game. For me, most of the Oracle’s clues didn’t make any sense until after I had solved them with internet walkthroughs. Working backwards, okay, I can get what he’s going for. But in the moment, they were simply too broad to be of any use whatsoever. Mix these in with a few that, I think, are just red herrings, and you’ve got a tangy recipe for frustration.

Perhaps the meanest puzzle takes place within the cosmic cube. You are directly warned that you cannot leave the cube once you enter – and this is true. Even MALOR, your late-game teleport spell, stops working. After struggling through the 3-level maze, you’re going to hit a point where you need a specific item to escape. It’s not clear what this item is, because it will allow you to do something you’ve never been able to do in a Wizardry game before. This item isn’t inside the cosmic cube – but the critical hint that lets you access it is ONLY given within the cube. This means you’re virtually guaranteed to get all the way through the cube and realize you have to go back in the dungeon – but again, it’s too late. If you didn’t plant a save before entering the cube, your only way forward is to restart the entire. damn. game.

The virtually incomprehensible clues paired with wildly arbitrary items are the biggest contributor to making Wiz 4 such a hard game. If you’re playing honest, you will hit points where you’re walking around and trying items on every square, just to find the one that does something. And if the item breaks, you’ve gotta go back and get a new one. You can’t teleport freely until the very end, so you’re struggling through the same traps – both ways – each time. On top of this, you’re dealing with levels that actively fight your attempts to map them, plus hordes of respawning enemies that can wipe your party out in one round.

It takes… a special dedication.

When you finally emerge from the dungeon, you’re in front of the castle from the first game. Instead of a menu, you wander around here as a level itself, passing such icons as Boltac’s Trading Post and Gilgamesh’s Tavern. A fully-leveled Werdna with a Greater Demon in tow, encountering <10 HP newbies at the Training Ground, got a legitimate evil smile from me.

But the castle just feeds into the final puzzle of trying to get one of the game’s five endings. You’ll need items from earlier in the dungeon, have participated in a few events within it, and as said, finding the “good” ending is the largest puzzle of them all. Unrestricted teleporting means you’re now free of the dungeon traps and most battles, but it still feels like some final sand in your eye to find that you’re likely getting a very bad ending. It’s as trivial as which sword you picked seven levels ago, knowing nothing about them other than their color, and you’ll have to start over if you want to do better.

Admittedly, this does fall in with Wiz 4’s overall tone. It’s a very cheeky game, delighting at taunting you.  Every exasperated sigh must have filled Roe Adams with boundless pride. However, it also assumes you’re in on the joke. Modern audiences are far less used to Wizardry’s hardcore elements, and so, far less likely to give a finger wag and a “aww, you got me, you rascal!” when confronted with a definitive Game Over they didn’t see coming. More likely, they’re going to bounce to another game in their bottomless Steam backlog and never look back.

I mentioned pop culture references and there are indeed tons of them. This is very American-centric, however, as well as being stale and moldy some 40 years later. You’ll see jabs at the Soviet Intourist agency and the defunct Club Med. You’ll see call-outs to Oil of Olay and the Michelin star rating. And what nerdy game wouldn’t have a direct reference to Monty Python and the Holy Grail? There’s even references to Will McLean’s art from the original Wizardry manual with the Mordorcharge credit card and “Post No Bills” written on the castle wall. Perhaps most important; I’m sure this is the only game in existence where you can be killed by veteran character actor Karl Malden. These aren’t laugh-a-minute gags by any stretch, and you might be too annoyed by the gameplay to have much fun with them, but there’s some chuckles if you’re also stale and moldy enough to get the references.

There are no engine advancements here over Wiz 3, unless you count saving. The interface for both games is the same, as is their ability to display colorful scene-setting images and character art for your foes. The one point I noticed was that you no longer have to type the full name of a spell to cast it. Typing the first letters trigger it to autocomplete, though it takes a few seconds as it presumably measures against the spell list. There’s also no real difference between the Apple II and the DOS versions at this point – so you may want to go with DosBox and the Wizardry Archives version if you don’t want to mess around with the slow speeds of an Apple II, emulated or otherwise.

As with the first Wizardry, a Japanese version is probably the best one to play. New Age of Llylgamyn is a PlayStation release using the same engine as the remake for Wiz 1-3. You can set monster names, spell names, and messages to Original (so, English) and be able to play through the entire game without a translation patch. You gain the invaluable benefit of an automap with this version. I played this pretty much in parallel with the Apple II version and the automap helped me understand a number of levels I would have been totally lost trying to decipher on my own.

Return of Werdna’s relentless difficulty makes it the most tempting to simply follow someone else’s maps and speedrun through the tough parts. You could feasibly cut out sixty or more hours by taking out the backtracking and mapping of empty squares. But like any other Wizardry, this removes the sense of discovery and a whole lot of the point. It would be a railcar tour through a game that, as frustrating as it is, you’re meant to solve on your own. Save yourself many long hours and just read someone else’s experience through it.

I think it’s a far better choice to skip this game entirely. You’ll know if it’s for you, and if you’re at all on the fence about it, then it isn’t. It’s not really even about ability – you have to eat, sleep, and breathe dungeon crawlers to want to finish this game. You’ve got to be one of its “expert players” to put up with all the outdated, teasing bother that it throws at you. Sales reflected this, while Roe Adams would not design another Wizardry again. At most, come back after you’ve conquered other Wizardries.

 

The Good

The most creative Wizardry scenario yet. Back to the more whimsical tone of the first. If you love Wizardry and want a serious challenge, I suppose there’s payoff?

 

The Bad

Miserable difficulty level, murky riddles/puzzles, tricky dungeon mapping, and dire combat odds. Doesn’t feel built with everyone – or even most people – in mind.

 

You are about to battle SOMETHING CUTE!“