Wizardry IV: The Return of Werdna

Wizardry IV: The Return of Werdna turned the entire series' concept on its head - instead of a heroic party, the player controls Werdna, the defeated villain from the very first installment, who as a ghost tries to claw his way back up from the deepest level of the maze, regain his power, and take revenge on the adventurers who once defeated him. The game is notorious for its extreme difficulty and a design full of traps, ambushes, and the need to control summoned monsters and enemy agents instead of a classic balanced party. Progressing often requires descending deeper than one would expect, since the only path to power paradoxically leads further from the surface. The player must also handle battles against entire groups of enemies at once while distinguishing which of them are genuine opponents and which are merely traps set by former allies.

Visually, the game continues the bare-bones style of the previous installments - wireframe corridor views and a text menu, with no major graphical ambitions even by the standards of the late 1980s. Precisely because of this, all of the game's difficulty rested on thoughtful yet unforgiving puzzle and trap design, not on audiovisual presentation or a musical score, which the game practically lacked. Contemporary reviews praised the originality of the concept, but the game also earned a reputation as one of the most difficult CRPGs of all time - a reputation it still carries today and which discouraged a considerable portion of even experienced series veterans.

The fourth Wizardry installment is remembered today mainly as a curiosity and an extreme challenge for old-school genre enthusiasts - its steep learning curve and uncompromising design make it more of a historical oddity than a game for the average player. Even so, it earned respect as a bold experiment that was not afraid to view an otherwise seriously maintained fantasy dungeon crawl series from an unexpected angle, showing that even an established series can sacrifice one installment to a risky idea.

Why play: For old-school genre enthusiasts, this is a bold experiment and a historical oddity whose steep learning curve and uncompromising design are certainly not for the average player.