The rarest of breeds: an expansion-within-an-expansion. In the mythical days of yore when a 10-15 hour expansion was somehow considered too short, Black Isle Studios added this utterly extraneous mini-module onto Icewind Dale’s Heart of Winter expansion as a mea culpa. As previously implied, this has literally nothing to do with the narrative of the aforementioned expansion or the base game - instead, your party is unceremoniously and involuntarily teleported to a fort in the middle of the desert to be ‘tested’ by the titular villain. Despite the jarringly disconnected nature of the premise, this isn’t without some minor successes. The dungeon design, as in most of Icewind Dale, is largely quite strong. In fact, the addition of some elementary puzzles, mostly absent in the main game, feels like a straight-up improvement. For roughly the first third or so, the enemy mobs feel appropriately (rather than relentlessly) challenging.

Sadly, this gentle difficulty curve doesn’t last. Once you enter the main keep, the game reverts back to attrition mode. The latter parts of this expansion are even more unforgiving than the hardest parts of the main game. It feels like there is an enemy encounter designed to push your party to its breaking point every two minutes. I respect and even enjoy the crunchiness of 2nd Edition D and D, but when it’s this unrelenting, I just get exhausted. Mercifully, the actual Luremaster himself is a fairly straightforward final boss. The grind to reach him is borderline-intolerable, though.