The Stack

Level 6 of Knight of Diamonds is basically a big power fantasy, sending hordes of absurdly overpowered monsters at you so you can squash them with your even more absurdly overpowered heroes. That can be fun, but I did finally decide to get on with it and win the game. You don’t even really need to visit level 6 at all to do this. The ending takes place back on level 1, where you complete your quest by handing in the outfit you collected in the boss fights of levels 1 through 5.

There’s one way that level 6 connects to the ending, though: the riddle. When you fork over your loot to the goddess Gnilda, before she bestows upon you the final macguffin, she asks you “What is the answer to the sphynx’s riddle?”. The “sphynx” in question is on level 6, guarding nothing more than a shortcut back to level 1. So you don’t even really have to deliver the answer to the being who poses the riddle in the first place, but it’s a useful way to try out guesses without consequence. If you give Gnilda the wrong answer, you still lose your stuff and get nothing in exchange.

And now this post is going to descend into griping. According to one second-hand source I’ve found online, Sir-Tech customer service fielded more complaints about that riddle than about anything else, which would explain why they left it out of the Nintendo version.

First of all, I’m not at all sure that I actually ever found the bulk of level 6 the first time I won this game. That’s because it breaks a promise. We’re told that the use of a light spell like MILWA or (preferably) LOMILWA will reveal any secret doors — and that means that secret doors basically aren’t a factor for the bulk of the game; the only times you ever don’t have a LOMILWA going are (A) when you’re too low-level to cast it (which also means you’re too low-level to be even considering transferring over to Knight of Diamonds) and (B) when you’re in a darkness field of the sort I described in my last post. I honestly have no idea which of the doors on my maps are secret ones. All doors look the same to me. Well, except for a few in the lower levels of Knight of Diamonds, which are apparently extra-secret doors, invisible even under magical light. It would have been very easy for me to not know they were there.

And that would cause some problems for the riddle. See, the sphynx tells you to find three clues scattered around the level. Recall that you can’t teleport on level 6. If you trust that walls are walls, and you’ve thoroughly looked around the small space that’s visible available, it’s hard to see where they could be scattered. What do you do then? What the game expects you to do is walk into walls just in case the rules have changed.

Still, it hardly matters, because the three clues are actually useless. Here they are, see for yourself:

That king, the king who worships gold, will no more see his treasure room

That king, the king who worships power, will have none within his tomb

That king, the king who worships these, that king, he finds doom

Now, the brief bit of lore in the single page of documentation does talk about an evil usurper and an attempt to overthrow him, using the legendary Knight of Diamonds armor, that brought down the castle and turned it into the dungeon you’ve been exploring. So you might think to try the usurper’s name, Davalpus. When that doesn’t work, you might try the only other two named characters in the story, Margda and Alavik. But in fact the answer is “THE KNIGHT OF DIAMONDS”, and I don’t see how that fits at all. It is, on the other hand, a fairly easy thing to guess if you ignore the clues. The clues actually make the riddle harder.

If I squint, I can kind of see it justified as a twist revelation, that the “king who worships gold” etc. is actually Alavik, the actually-evil ostensible hero of the backstory, or possibly the original Knight of Diamonds that the armor was made for was actually evil, or maybe it’s even describing the player characters, accumulating treasure and levels for their own sake. Revelations in the form of riddles can be highly effective — Andrew Plotkin’s System’s Twilight has some smashing puzzles of this sort, where it tells you a story and then, some time later, asks you a question about things just outside of what was narrated. There, the very posing of the question provokes reevaluation, makes you come to new realizations just by making you think about things from a new angle. If that’s what they were going for in Knight of Diamonds, all I can say is that System’s Twilight did a much better job of it. There, when I realized what the answer had to be, I knew what it meant.