No simple way to pass a friendly NPC blocking the hallway

[Graham Zaretsky]

I posted this on Steam and was urged to post it here.

Early in a game, I found an NPC in the middle of a long winding hallway and received a quest from him. There were two whole branches of the dungeon that were unexplored on the side of him I was on. When I had finished exploring and found nothing interesting, I decided I had to get to the staircase to go to the next level. The NPC was still in the middle of the hallway (I’m not sure how I even wound up at this dead end to begin with, but those two branches were both dead ends). First I looked for some action to exchange places, like there are in many other rogue-likes, but there was not one. I tried the buttons to go to the staircases or a tunnel or an altar (all of which were known locations on the opposite side of the NPC) and that did not work. I kept getting the message that it didn’t know where to go. I thought that since autoexplore got me to that section that autoexplore would solve the issue, and it did not. Next I tried digging through the wall, but then the NPC moved away, so I had to move closer to dig some more, and that kept happening. But eventually my 2-handed axe thingy broke (I never even realized it had happened at first). I thought that eventually it might to move to somewhere where there was room to get around him (like a room or side passage). But his movement was so damned slow and random. Finally I simply attacked the NPC and died to some really tough guys he apparently had summoned.

You REALLY need to implement either a dialog option or an action to exchange places with a non-hostile person or creature so that this never happens again. I don’t simply consider this a bug, but also a seriously bad basic oversight in the game design.