Wizardry 4: Return of Werdna

Wizardry IV: The Return of Werdna

Wizardry IV is hard as nails. You play the evil protagonist Werdna and start at the bottom of a ten level dungeon. Climbing back and regaining your powers along the way are the goal of the game.

It's not so much about character development and grinding like the other Wizardries.

The game challenges you with riddles, teleports, dark areas, pits, chutes, rotating floors and random instant kills. You have to fight parties of the first 3 Wizardry games that players have sent to Sir-Tech.

You have to explore and map carefully to have any chance at all. You need a lot of patience to beat this game. You get no experience points for surviving battles. You only regain power by finding pentagrams. You can summon monsters for your party and regain health and mana at the pentagrams, too.

Don't play this, if you never played a Wizardry game before.
 
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Wizard IV is noted for be extremely hard, and is advertised as such with a warning.

If Wizardry IV did not pioneer the "Reverse Dungeon" it was certainly one of the earliest examples.
 
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yes, I couldn't finish it (granted, I played it in my 30s, maybe in my 20s I would have had the patience and fortitude to play this rogue-like game)
 
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I finished it back in the day, it's definitely not a roguelike, but it is certainly hard. Most of the difficulty came from unfair puzzles that require you to do something random or illogical to progress without any clues. There were also fights where you have to basically keep reloading until the right selection of random variables occur that allow you to win it.

Despite all of that though I still have some very fond memories about the game, and how creative it was with the whole reverse dungeon thing. At the same time I also have no desire to play it ever again.

Back when the game released you actually got a code when you won, and you could send it in to get some kind of prize. I never got anything when I sent mine in though (and I would never have managed to win anyway without calling the Sirtech hint line a bunch of times).
 
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This was, imo, the pinnacle of the Wizardry games. If you look up hardcore games in a dictionary, a picture of this game should be there! I think this is the game that I was playing when my Apple finally died. -xxxx
 
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