Thanks for playing! I'm not sure what bug you hit there, but the first floor should be identical for every playthrough (the monsters you slay determine the seed for the next floor), so I suspect (and some light testing confirms) that you should be able to consistently kill that first sword-holder every time. I wonder if some deeper bug is rearing its head here :(
Viewing post in Crypt of the Unspeakable jam comments
Hi - I think what I ran into was a interface issue. I was clicking on the sword to "activate" it, then hitting up on the arrow keys to walk into the monster, thus cancelling the sword usage (I think). The first time I used only mouse, which is what made the difference. I played (twice) again now using real controls and collected a few trinkets...though apparently there might be more that I'm missing. I tried a run where I kill everything, and another where I mostly avoided monsters...I suppose there might be some other dimension I'm not taking into account. Thanks for responding to my earlier comment!