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Gem Runner
A Princess Of Zamarra
A Saint Beckons
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Shrine Of The Salamander
A Flame In The North
A Shadow In The North
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Any Port In A Storm
Below Zero Point
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The Ravages Of Fate
Nye's Song
A Knight's Trial
Return To G15-275
Devil's Flight
Above The Waves
The Curse Of Drumer
The Word Fell Silent
A Strange Week For King Melchion The Despicable
Sharkbait's Revenge
Tomb Of The Ancients
A Midwinter Carol
The Dead World
Waiting For The Light
Contractual Obligation
Garden Of Bones
The Hypertrout
The Golden Crate
In The Footsteps Of A Hero
Soul Tracker
Planet Of The Spiders
Beggars Of Blacksand
The Diamond Key
Wrong Way Go Back
Hunger Of The Wolf
Isle Of The Cyclops
The Cold Heart Of Chaos
The Black Lobster
Impudent Peasant!
Curse Of The Yeti
Bad Moon Rising
Riders Of The Storm
Bodies In The Docks
House Of Horror
Rebels Of The Dark Chasms
Midnight Deep
Lair Of The Troglodytes
Outsider!
The Trial Of Allibor's Tomb
Hellfire

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The Diamond Key




Finlay Tayler
Thu Sep 27 10:30:14 2018
Skull - non-optimum ending reached
goddam police...

paul
Wed Mar 13 15:56:39 2019
Skull - non-optimum ending reached
never trust a frog-creature :(

Ron
Tue Jun 29 02:43:24 2021
Fantastic

Stinger
Thu Aug 19 17:10:09 2021
Skull - non-optimum ending reached
Ugh killed by Darm's lightning bolt. Man that's a long way to go to not finish.
What could I have done different. Was there something that gave me a better attack strength than minus 2? sheesh! lol

oliwier
Thu Nov 4 14:23:07 2021
Skull - non-optimum ending reached
not bad

bad
Mon Nov 15 11:30:30 2021
Skull - non-optimum ending reached
bad, i died

Olive
Fri Nov 19 12:27:33 2021
Skull - non-optimum ending reached
very nice

veneta
Fri Nov 19 12:29:05 2021
Skull - non-optimum ending reached
the story was nice and interesting

ChewbakaPT
Mon Feb 21 10:18:50 2022
Skull - non-optimum ending reached
Being brave, in a world of bandit, is foolish and unwise. The premises of The Diamond Key are those of bravery, yet I failed the task. Wasn't able to defeat the foe. I will surely come back for another attempt.

First Time Reader
Tue Mar 8 12:19:45 2022
Skull - non-optimum ending reached
Long sword is a trap :(

Karol SZwec
Tue Nov 8 10:45:52 2022
Skull - non-optimum ending reached
It is good

Naomi Dimbleby
Fri Nov 25 11:38:23 2022
Skull - non-optimum ending reached
Good game fun and a lot of dicisons but make the text inbetween the decision make the text shorter

odette
Wed Nov 30 09:18:58 2022
Skull - non-optimum ending reached
very fun

Rio Aryo W R
Mon Mar 13 18:51:06 2023
Skull - non-optimum ending reached
ah, after trying and getting killed dozens of times, I finally managed to finish this story.
great, I'm very satisfied!

bluejuice915
Fri May 26 15:53:21 2023
Skull - non-optimum ending reached
Been working my way through this site again & apparently this was on my incomplete list. Seemingly like other people, I only got to 800 instead of 1000. Still feel pretty good about the path I took to get there (no spoilers). Love the combat system & dedication to world building. Also greatly appreciate the size (will be making multiple maps for the various stages of the book. Hope to be able to get a proper completion & maybe attempt the bonus challenges. Nothing's perfect though. 99/100

Liam
Wed Aug 2 10:35:08 2023
Skull - non-optimum ending reached
This should be a movie, Please make another one!!

YARD
Thu Dec 28 20:46:21 2023
Star - optimum ending reached
Well....

Longtime observers here probably noticed how I set out to go through everything on here in the middle of the year, and nearly managed it too. It was at another one of Ulysses' works, Contractual Obligation, where I found I also had limits, and had to take a break three months earlier. I knew full well that The Diamond Key was the absolute largest work here, and I initially intended to save it for last, but the perspective of restarting CO was so unappealing, I had to change my plans.

I had high hopes, mainly due to the excellent The Ravages of Fate. In hindsight, I suppose I should have guessed that as the latter was one of Ulysses' later works, and this one of the earliest, there would be a substantial gulf - or indeed, that the The Ravages of Fate worked so well because it was so tightly wound and condensed. Then again, I also had the counterexample in front of me, as Gavin Mitchell's Outsider! is both larger than his (much) later works, and very clearly superior to them.

In all, I had hopes. Unfortunately, I can't say they were fulfilled. At one point, I would outright say I hated the whole thing, but now that I finally see this victory screen, I just feel the strange mix of contentment, exhaustion and disappointment.

Funnily enough, by typical gamebook standards I "won" on third try, getting to ref 800 then, and getting very close on the first try, where the character fell in the final battle. Only then did it take dozens more attempts to get here - which should say a lot about the difficulty curve, or the lack thereof.

If I have to start discussing the shortcomings of this, it might as well be here. I have seen comments from Ulysses Ai where he acknowledged that too much of the material is hidden away, but that's a bit of understatement. Some of the absolute best writing here can only be seen with a truly incredible confluence of events.

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Or ref 495 (plus the refs immediately before and after) which is absolutely beautiful and makes this stand out so much from a typical gamebook - and which also requires you to

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This wouldn't be that much of a problem, if it weren't for the incredible weakness of the many earlier events you have to go through. Most notably, EVERYTHING to do with the Griffon forces is narrative ballast. They are never interesting, inexplicably anonymous (it makes no sense why the protagonist who had just come from the south had never heard of that southern lord before), and their function could have been fulfilled by more Arantator forces with little loss to the narrative. Worst of all, the author wrote in two ways to deal with them, yet somehow both are INCREDIBLY stupid. I wish ref 495 replaced one of them - as is, the reaction of soldiers there makes no sense, and the other one is just laughable both in the security arrangements and the lack of desire to do anything after coming all that way already.

YARD
Thu Dec 28 22:04:38 2023
Sadly, too many other mandatory or near-mandatory events early on also suffer from giant lapses of logic - often combined with that surprising bane of too many gamebooks here, auto-choices. In contradiction to pretty much all interactive storytelling advice, The Diamond Key has a surprising dearth of actual interaction (whether through choices or checks) on its paths (as opposed to choosing paths) for much of the gamebook, and is almost completely void of consequences, then presents a massive glut of both at what amounts to the very end.

The one constant throughout the gamebook, though, is the truly broken gameplay, in the sense of combat and risk-vs-reward ratio. As promising as the system is (and I certainly like that thanks to it, human enemies have roughly the same stamina as you, rather than the frankly artificial disparities of ~10 points between the player character and a typical human(oid) combatant nearly everywhere else), the actual fighting is virtually never interesting or tense in the way so many other gamebooks here have managed it. A large reason why is being able to get some of the most helpful items in the game literally for free at the start thanks to highly generous check-free auto-choice refs, then encounter optional encounters upon optional encounters that all have some difficulty of discovery or of completion, yet whose awards are duplicative fully (I read here with surprise that the author considers being able to get three of the most powerful weapons at the same time a point of pride, rather than the VERY opposite) or partially (bonuses upon bonuses for an already broken character, or which merely present you with yet another way to "win" yet STILL get the exact same awful ending you would have already seen many times by then thanks to much easier ways of getting to it.

The effective default ending, 800, is really one of the absolute worst-written endings I have seen on here. It's less-dumb than the bad ending of A Saint Beckons, and has some stiff competition from Riders of the Storm or Wrong Way Go Back, but it's not a good place to be in. The way it's written, with that mirror of the Background paragraphs (a narrative device far less clever than many think it is) would have made sense for an ending where you abandon the whole thing once it gets hot and better yet, take the Key for yourself once literally nobody can stop you. However, that is something you are NOT allowed to do at that point (in spite of all those refs, and of being able to do/attempt a whole lot of fairly evil/selfish things both before and after) and after what you ACTUALLY achieve, with the powers you would have by then, that ending is completely nonsensical. At times, it outright breaks continuity, but sadly, it's far from the only thing to do so.

An incomplete list of continuity-breaking and rail-roading.

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YARD
Thu Dec 28 22:18:32 2023
Continued...

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Gameplay stuff/bugs.

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YARD
Thu Dec 28 22:25:53 2023
Extra spaces before question marks:

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Typos:

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