So I have neither time nor energy to do a room-by-room analysis, and very few people would want to read it anyway. But I'll say, let's see, that this whole thing was fantastic from the points of view of design, writing, and art; I don't know that I've got any criticisms of those.
So, let's see, puzzles. I really liked the fegundo-controlling rooms. I found I:N, 1N1E to be really tedious, but looking at the high scores, I think perhaps I did it wrong. (I'm always fascinated to take six hundred moves to do something, thinking, "
Wow, that was so horribly roundabout and dreadful"
, and get second place with it. This wasn't one of those.) Other rooms on that level were a little tense and frustrating, but overall very satisfying.
I got a little tired of pressure-plate locks, especially those that involved getting a snake to just the right length to go into one. What else...platforms are cool; bridges are all right. Clone potions, very neat. Oremites and other swordless puzzles, also very neat; the puzzles in which you have to manipulate or kill enemies without being able to stab them are a lot of fun. (Though I did get a little tired of Golem Manipulation in OBG: 1E and 1S1E.)
Aumtlichs: very cool. I liked pretty much all of FR; using various walls and mirrors and roaches to block an aumtlich's view of me were a surprisingly different kind of challenge than anything in DROD 2.0, more different even than swordlessness. (We've all seen rooms in 2.0 where your sword is made ineffective because you can't turn, or what have you.) I think it's a great element.
Ah, and then there's AF. As I think I noted above, AS: 2S is one of my least favorite rooms in the hold. Specifically,
Click here to view the secret text
×the challenge of manipulating both Beethro and a mimic in a small amount of space is mildly interesting, but. Watching my demo, I recall that the mud seemed fairly trivial, the tar not too much harder, and the gel was a Major Pain In The Weehauken. It's harder to maneuver into a position where you can cut it; you can't even start cutting until after it's grown onto your platform, trapping you; unlike the tar, where if you leave a 2x2 block in one square, you just wait a turn for it to grow, leaving a 2x2 block of gel means waiting for the gel in another square to expand to it again... I think I had to start and restart this room more times than any other. And not in a good way.
Other rooms on the level were more tractably challenging; I thought 1W was yet another great use of stuffswitching. 2N1W felt a little tedious--I walked in, saw roughly what needed to be done, and walked out to tackle 2S1E again instead. But it wasn't so bad once I got into it; and I liked the other rooms in the level.
And then builders, which I agree with stigant are insidious. They aren't quite random, but they aren't quite predictable, either. Thus, I walked into LP: 1N1E...
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×...and said, "Well, crud, once they take down the walls, my movements will be so much more constrained. I need to hurry and...wait, this isn't even possible." And then I found out that they put the walls back. That's exactly the kind of unpredictable scripting I've been kvetching about in holds in 2.0.
(Worse, the room had a kind of bug in it: a builder got trapped on one of the spaces where they were trying to build a wall--a wall on either side, and three builders crowded around him. The three of them weren't leaving until they put a wall up, and he couldn't move. The upshot being that, once the walls were mostly put up, they just sat there while I moseyed through the
rest of the room. Possibly intentional, but it felt unintentional.)
Many other builder rooms were no better; LP:1S1W felt like a lot of trial and error, for instance. UL:1S1W was, as stigant said, particularly egregious in this respect; I beat the room, but I have to admit I'm not really 100% sure how I did it, and I think at some point I thought, "
How much longer do...oh, wait, I'm done? Really?"
The most successful of the building rooms, I felt, was UL:2N1E, where it was very clear what the builders would do and when they would do it, and they were there to supplement the solving, not to interfere with it. (In some cases, like UL:1S, they were just another timing mechanism.)
OK, long enough, and I should get back to work.
.
wish I'd thought of that. I actually got stuck on this room because I was too focused on the Adders.
/dy
