kdechant
commented
6 years ago I think I see what happened here. "The west door is now open" is actually the artifact description. When you try to move through a door that's an embedded artifact, the game reveals the door, showing the description, then tries to open it. In this case, the messages seem nonsensical because of that.
I'm guessing that you just don't have the key in your inventory in the saved game. Try reloading your saved game, then go to where you originally find the key and it should still be there.
I'm going to change the artifact description to make this less confusing. (FYI, when I do, your saved game will actually preserve the old description and you won't see the new one until you exit the adventure and play it again.)
The "hell" bug is something I've noticed from time to time. I do find it rather amusing as well. I think I tried to fix it once, but it appears that I wasn't entirely successful.
(Fun fact: At one point while I was developing Eamon, there was an even sillier behavior. I wasn't moving the player out of the room when he/she died, and hostile monsters would keep attacking the player's corpse until they had all taken their turns. It reminded me of the original Diablo, which would do the same thing if you died while playing multiplayer with only one player.)
aubloom
Hi Keith. I've been testing the saved game feature while playing Cliffs of Fire. So far so good!
I found what may be a general bug in the engine, or maybe just in Cliffs.
There's a locked door in the game, and probably just the one key. So the door to my west was locked and I was holding the key. I didn't know the door was locked and tried just walking west. I got a message saying the door had been unlocked, and the key was removed from my inventory. But then when I tried going west the door was still locked. I've attached a small screenshot of this moment.
Re: the 'hell' feature I mentioned. I hadn't noticed before that when you die, the status window shows all previously dead creatures as suddenly being in your room. I guess this is because you/your corpse are now in the same 'room' as them (room 0? That's what it was in Applesoft, anyway). And I thought - actually, this is kind of a cool effect, as if you've gone to hell/heaven/purgatory, whether or not it's intentional.