Except for the ending this is a superb story that in my opinion pioneered the evolution and cosmology of early RPG games.

While Silver Age hypnotism is always a terrible plot device, this story does demonstrate how to make Dr. Strange work, something later writers forgot. Ditko's Strange is a guy with some powers and (more importantly) some *very* powerful artifacts, but the stories are much more about how Strange uses a set of loosely defined, but limited resources to take on much more powerful beings.

Take away all his magic powers, all his artifacts, and strand him an alien dimension, and he will still outwit the villain in the end. That* is what makes him Sorcerer Supreme. He's like a prototype of the Sylvester McCoy incarnation of the Doctor in some respects.

So many of Ditko's stories revolve around Strange doing clever stuff with his cloak of levitation or his power to cast illusions, and very few of them are about Strange turning back time itself or waving is hands and putting armies of villains to sleep or hurling cosmic energies with planet-shattering force. He's a trickster hero, not a cosmic god as so many later writers like to portray him.

Looking at this story in the Essential volume, I suspect George Roussos did more uncredited inks here.