I remember this same issue from when I owned this game years ago. Yes, I see the Troll. Yes, I have a shin bone in my inventory. Yes, I can sneak. I can punch, though that will not help.

But how the heck do I equip anything? The guide seems to be almost silent in this regard. I'd love to play, but after an hour of dickering around with the interface, I give up.

Any help appreciated.
Further to my last post, is this game vying for the title of worst game interface ever? I finally worked out how to equip the bone. Now I come to ...spell casting.

Right. Memorized it. How, Yum. Cool. But the instruction to bring up the magic casting ability comes once and only once, and if you miss it, guess what? You have to start the sequence again. Because that instruction does not appear in your "journal." Okay, I can live with that. I rerun the sequence, use the Ctrl key, up[ comes the Magic icon, cast the spell, and hey presto, Light.

But what new devilry is this? I had to reload the game a short time later and...now the Ctrl key no longer brings up the spell casting icon.

If I use the Ctrl key immediately after I reload, the Magic icon comes up. But once I take a few steps - say, when I get into the room with the torches, the Ctrl key does nothing. No Magic icon appears, so I can't cast the spell.

Can anyone come up with something that would even remotely explain why this is happening? Because I am actually ready to uninstall this game, break the DVD I made in half, and try to figure out how to get it off my gog.com account altogether.

Your problem of not knowing what the controls are is entirely self-inflicted. All controls are fully explained during the brief tutorial. If you weren't paying attention to the huge on-screen text it's your own fault. Even then, all controls are listed in the game settings (where you can also change them should you wish to), and what they do is generally obvious.

As for the Ctrl issue, well, Arx Fatalis isn't exactly bug-free, and the best way to avoid this would be to not begin doing a spell right away after loading (similarly, saving while holding Ctrl is probably a bad idea too).

I appreciate your taking the time to respond. But no, my problem with the controls is not entirely self-inflicted I've done a bit of a cruise through various old Internet fora on this game, and the clunky interface comes up over and over, in myriad posts over a number of years. The interface is decidedly not user-friendly. And the instructions for certain game controls are not in the in-game control menu; that was the first place I checked. Hence my question.

Anyway, the game quickly became unplayable because it started to freeze when I saved, and then I was unable to get it to start, so it's all moot. A shame, really. I got about halfway through it many years ago and really liked it, but technical problems stopped me back then as well.

So, cheers, anyway.

Buy a Game pad and assign the controls yourself...