(My previous posts on this game are needed for context.)
I think I’ve squeezed most of the juice out of Easy difficulty level, even though I haven’t finished; I’m going to try upping to Hard and make at least one more post.
I did manage to fix the main thing that was bothering me, the empty gap on the top level map. I’ll show that off first:
There was no puzzle involved: in the room leading to that area, I simply missed an exit. The bizarre constantly-changing exit descriptions really do make it hard to keep track. The main feature to the area is a hedge maze, which is “classical” Adventure-style; that is, it is the kind of maze where I needed to drop items to map it out and a node-based representation (as above). The only extra twist is that upon going through the maze’s exit, sometimes it teleports the player back into the maze; this is just like the maze area on the middle floor.
The maze leads to three rooms representing a library, and a one-way exit back to the regular portion of the map I was at before.
I have not caused anything special to happen here. It may be just decoration.
There was one other a gap, a single-room missing chunk on the bottom floor…
…but I think I have that one accounted for as well. The top and middle floors are now all filled, and the Sanctuary — the room that you go up from the top floor to in order to drop treasures — needs to be placed somewhere amongst the three floors according to the game’s logic. So I’m fairly confident the Sanctuary is filling that gap (meaning I can stop trying to dig down, hit the adjacent walls with a mattock, etc.)
Just like Minotaur, if you’re holding too many items you can’t go up, and the game communicates this by just repeating the room description.
Other than that, the game has been mostly tedious. The problem is that most of the mechanics are ripped out. Getting hints from the unicorn, I found
you need a ROPE to get a SCROLL
you need a FOOD to get a MACHETE
you need a TOME to get the DRAGONSWORD
you need FOOD to get the DEATHRING
and I even got a screenshot of both the hint and its ramification right next to each other, by luck:
However, on Easy none of those items seem to be important. You do not need the DRAGONSWORD to kill the DRAGON. In fact, the MACE (one of the first weapons I found, just out in the open) kills everything including both the dragon and wizard in three hits.
No special item from the Wizard, the map sometimes is out on the open on the top floor.
The only enemy I left standing was the Jester, who appears, laughs a bit, and disappears before I can finish typing BASH JESTER. It sometimes randomly picks up items and moves them elsewhere but doesn’t attack. I can say I reached the same state I “won” Minotaur at last time (killing all the imminent threats) so let’s see what Hard has to offer.
The gaps in Easy really did undercut the game mechanics significantly; the whole idea of chains of objects needed from Minotaur is gone. As far as I can tell there are no magic spells either like in Minotaur (even on Hard!) It may be just the author decided the original game was too fiddly (which is, to be honest, fair) but the fiddly parts are what made the game work.
Even if I don’t have any significant difference playing on Hard (just making something up: now instead of 1 teleport spot there are 3 of them) I’ll spend one more post on Keys as I want to do wrap-up on the adventure-roguelike concept as a whole. This represents more or less the last game in the category from 1982 (barring a certain famous game from Australia, but it gets its own long discussion) and my impression is the genre starts to peter out starting in 1983. (Not completely! But enthusiasm for games like Madness and the Minotaur starts to wane.) There’s been some recent interest trying to use “AI” to generate maps but people attempting to do so run into the same problems that people in 1982 were running into, so I think it’s a useful discussion both for historical study and modern design.
L. Curtis Boyle, Rob, and Strident all helped with finding an earlier ad for the game than in my first post. From 80 Micro, May 1982.
Renga in Blue 
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