Fighting Fantasy: The Citadel of Chaos - review (not yet Android)

Fighting Fantasy: The Citadel of Chaos - review (not yet Android)

It seems the further we go into the future the more the past strikes me as an interesting place to belong. I don’t know why, but it seems many feel the same way with the rush for “the classics” such as Metal Slug to be released on mobile and Atari recently releasing their vaults online. Gamers yearn more and more for a cultural wormhole. A quantum leap to those sweet ol’ time where things were much simpler. But of course they weren’t were they? 

Setting up a game of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons today or even conceiving how that insane man down the street had the patience to set up a Spectrum seem, well, insane. I think what keeps dragging us backwards into the history of gaming - short of a cultural regression or the longing for the comfort of the bosom - is that games were far more challenging back then. Robert Heinlein knew best when he wrote "values are created through suffering". On that note, I decided to track down a few adventure gamebooks of yesteryear and was pleased to discover Tinman games had already been in the habit of adapting many of my favourite torture devices for Android. 

Today, I'm going to look at a game Tinman have yet to adapt, The Citadel of Chaos, which desperately needs a re-release. Join me as I head back to '83, or at the very least a bookshelf, to review the original in its heinously bad front cover glory.

 What the hell is that thing? 

hmmmm, it resembles a cross between a bear and a leopard. 

A bearpard?

No...

Bizarrly, the creature in the foreground, the one that resembles a prop from some 1950's Sci Fi movie, isn't even in the game. Various shapes in the distance march two by two from an evil Disney tower and, well, all that orange fives the feel of wanton abandonment as if the colourist simply gave up and went home early. It's a mess Jackson Polock would be proud of. All this and, yet, I love this cover. It captures the pulpy style of many 70s horror novels, such as Chamber of Horrors, where garish colours and dramatic close-ups all took a similar approach. Nostalgia or madness? Perhaps both.

Cover aside, the story was the real draw. The first in the Fighting Fantasy series to be exclusively written by Steve Jackson (who eventually would go on to co-develop Lionhead studios), The Citadel of Chaos places you in the role of a wizard apprentice tasked with the mission of assassinating a war monger and demi sorcerer named Balthus Dire. His death will mean preventing a war against your homeland. This war theme lends the game a sense of urgency lacking in the first book. Here there are real consequences of your failure which will contribute to the replay value even with the challenges presented.

Citadel was also one of the first gamebooks to have a system for utilising spellcraft. Players could select from a myriad of spells including E.S.P., Creature Copy, Fools’ Gold and Illusion. The book was also the first of the series that could be described as extremely challenging. Where Firetop Mountain was a battle game relying on dice rolls and skill (minus that extremely cruel maze part), surviving this book meant relying on your accuracy navigating its chambers, with the right equipment whilst making confident judgements with each creature encountered therein. 

  

The creatures within the citadel are a very colourful collection of sadists, psychopaths and savages. Many of them are selected from mythology while others still more interesting were designed by the author himself such as the Wheelies, Gaks and the dreaded Ganjees. knowing their niches and weaknesses are of crucial importance as wrong moves will invariably lead to a nasty end.

Bastards

  

Nasty indeed as the book will punish you for forgetting your spell rules or failing to plan ahead. An example might be using magic, this then backfiring on you and, naturally, resulting in your immediate death. On a replay run, it took a half dozen attempts to finish and crafting a map of the entire citadel was almost fundamentally necessary in order to reach a successful ending.

The difficutly of this book is what makes it enduring. I remember lending a friend Talisman of Death over a decade ago and being given it back completed the next day with s look of marginal disappointment. Simplicity is death to an adventure gamebooks endurance. The Citadel of Chaos builds upon the weak areas of the first book in the series (such as the combat rounds) whilst avoiding the complex puzzle traps later books in the series would fall into. Instead, the main challenge comes in the form of accurate judgment of possessions, knowledge of environemtn and reliance on spells to defeat many of the tougher encounters and quickly gain access to the Sorcerer’s tower for a penultimate battle. 

This truly is a good, fun challange for those who enjoy RPGs and fantasy literature. One that is both vivid in character and its tension, it badly deserves an Android release. Here's hoping that Tinman one day give it that push. Until then, dust off the weird front cover and have another shot at the black tower, you owe it to yourself.