I've finally completed the first level, Goblin Woods, which appears to be a beautiful 7x7 piece of hold art in the minimap. (Except I'm just theorizing that 6N1E exists. I haven't visited that room yet, and I'm guessing someone in Happy Worker Town might open the door for me if I help them out down the stairs in 6N.) You've definitely got a green theme going, with the goblins, adders, gel, briar, oremites, grass and bushes. A drawback of all the beautiful green is that it's very hard to count squares with a grassy floor, especially in the more mathematical secret rooms. The one-tile bushes are green scenery that's easiest for me to count. Some architects have started using light to superpose checkerboard patterns on the ground to help in such situations.
I like the way secret rooms are hidden behind challenges. So much more interesting that hunting for cracks in dungeon walls. I'm not so happy about having to restore to get back to secret rooms - I really prefer being able to admire the whole minimap and being able to walk in and out of secret rooms as solving inspiration strikes me. However I understand that's the price to pay for hiding them behind challenges. Given the fact that I'm going to have to restore, you need to place some checkpoints for this purpose, out in the open, not buried within the machinery of puzzles, so I can easily return to where I was before restoring. Checkpoints in the middle of entrance rooms, and just before every staircase would be great!
I'm also enjoying the story so far, it looks like Beethro's got quite an adventure in store. As Dischorran has mentioned, there are a lot of typos here. You'll want to clean those up in the finishing stages of this hold.
×1N - I like this puzzle idea. "
Shuffled"
decoys until the central path had only decoy swords.
2N1W - A basic goblin and gel hacking room. Not too interesting on its own, but fits into the level as a whole.
3N - Having just finished beta testing the new SmS, I know this overlapping swords trick cold. It's fun using it in other places now.
3N2W - A little more involved goblin and gel hacking room, that also calls on techniques I've used many times before. Here, cutting gel simultaneously with mimics, and using a mimic to kill a horde of goblins that try to stab Beethro in the back. Hiding the other mimic potion under the goblins was kind of cheap.
4N2W - In this room, it looked like you wanted me to use the stalwart to help Beethro kill the room full of goblins, but I found that a little too fiddly to be fun. So, I left the stalwart in his gel box and killed the goblins with Beethro by himself. The stalwart did kill the four goblins by the stairs. Will I ever get to see what's down those stairs, or are they just for show?
5N2W - The various parts of this room seemed a little disjointed. I used a backdoor method on the goblins, and then cut the gel simultaneously with the mimic.
6N3W - This gel cutting trick is cool to watch. I did the cutting with 6 mimics, and used some decoys to keep 3 of the mimics in position.
4N1W - My favorite part of this room is the beginning. It's cool how making the adder bigger allows me to get him out.
1N1W - More of the same... goblin and gel hacking.
3W - I'm terrible at races and was amazed that I removed all the gel fast enough on my first try. Maybe all those gel hacking rooms have been good practice.
2W - Success here too.
1N2W - Tight timing in this room! I had to cut the adder while it was shortening on itself to get rid of it in time.
2N2W - Fun. A hungry adder's growing tail kills the others. In this particular case, I didn't find opening the secret door with the first adder significantly more challenging that solving the puzzle regularly.
4N3W - The southern scroll was scary (and greek to me), but the scrolls beside the briar "
thermometer"
were very helpful. I figured out what turn I wanted the black door to open on, timed the briar with no trapdoors next to it, and then chose which trapdoors to leave when solving the room for real.
3N1W - In answer to the question this room seems to ask, yes I do know my snake movement rules. I have a very good teacher. Did this room really need 12 gel blobs to be eaten?
2N1E - Not sure I did this right. I put the mimic in the box with the one goblin right away. I fed the adder a big meal, so that his body stayed on the pressure plate long enough for Beethro to reach the yellow door. Beethro killed the adder and all the goblins while standing on top of that yellow door.
1N1E - Oi! The "
easy"
way of solving this room was tough enough. I had to read the hints to do it the hard way, and even after knowing what needed to be done, it was still quite tricky to set up. Very cool though.
3E - I recognize that shape from a previous hold...
2N2E - A stabbed mimic doesn't drop its trapdoor, and I see an eaten mimic doesn't either. This is a neat idea to base a puzzle on, but rather tedious actually placing all 18 mimics.
3N1E - Fighting goblins with various fixed sword positions was a change of pace for this hold.
3N2E - This room brings back fond memories of the Sewers in Dr. E. Will's. I had to cut the gel from the east to prevent the stalwart from cutting it from the west.
5N1E - A very interesting "
impossible"
situation, but rather tedious to actually solve. I chose the grow and cut a huge block of gel approach.
4N1E - I like the dual use of decoy potions as obstacles in themselves as well as sources of decoys.
4N - Not too hard to get the stalwart to stand on the correct pressure plate... but I had to spring a bunch of the booby traps first!
5N - Also not too hard to keep the central adder away from the goblin while the other waited to be big enough to escape. Since the central box is 5 squares high, it's easy to set up a 10-square loop.
5N1W - Demands perfect cutting technique. It took me a number of tries to find a pattern that worked.
4N2E - Interesting use of the adder's tail to keep a passageway through the briar open while it was growing rapidly at the beginning.
2N - Fun figuring out how to get both adders out!
5N2E - I don't know why I couldn't see how to cut the gel. There aren't many possibilities, and I could swear I tried that exact strategy several times without success. Guess I didn't. Very tight timing with the adder cutting as well. Similar to with 1N2W, simultaneous cutting and shortening was needed.
1N3E - An interesting, not too difficult challenge. All the gel hacking in previous rooms was good experience to think back on here.
2N3E - I was rather pleased that I knew the answer to this one without experimenting.
3N3E - Not so easy - this one took me a lot of trial and error. And this is when the slightly smaller irregular shape of Beethro's enclosure became annoying.
3N3W - Not nearly as easy as its cousin to the north. The scrolls didn't help me think about the room. Recognizing that the briar must stab all the blobs at the same time, and that after stabbing the blobs it must not be connected to the other briar in the room limited the solution space a little, but there were still quite a few trapdoor configurations to try. While I had figured out what turn I wanted the black door to open on, it wasn't obvious which trapdoors gave a net increase in briar growth time and which decreased it. I finally just got lucky.
I see my next choices are the stairs in 3N, the stairs in 6N, or the stairs in 6N3E (each of which needs a checkpoint). I'll pick whatever's downstairs in 3N for my next level.
) But as this holds plot is so much about four stalwart brothers, it would be weird if there were not at least a few stalwart puzzles also.
I think realising that you should use the stalwart to cut tar is enough trick. Is there any way you could make the actual process a bit easier? With eg well placed walls.
