I've completed Indoors except for five secret rooms in the Bank. I realize I could go get that Jewel now, but I think I'll wait and leave that as my reward for completing everything. There are still all those staircases in previous levels I didn't go down.
Indoors is a huge and varied level, where the inside of each building really does have its own distinctive feel. The bright colors against the black background of the minimap are also evocative of windowshopping in a city at night. There's a wide range in puzzle difficulty here. As others have commented, it's strange to find the easiest puzzle in a hold on its final level. On the other hand, easy rooms, hold art, and the Bar's challenges are exactly what I wanted when taking a break from the tough Pool and Robolab rooms.
×Diner - Relaxing, easy hold art puzzles. Easy on the brain and easy on the eyes as well. Also, a small amount of comic relief.
Eyeball soup - plenty of platforms for dunking eyes here.
Serpent Salad - I thought I might have to worry about getting caught by the briar, but no, it makes a convenient dead end with the wall well before that. This room pretty much solves itself.
Roasted waterskipper with seaweed sauce - A nice mimic pushing puzzle. The oremites distinguish it from many others of its ilk.
Chile con rattlesnake - I took the challenge and didn't use the orbs. I actually did it with just one decoy. But that was a big pain, and next time I solve this room, I'm using the orbs.
Wraithwing steak with mustard - You could add a small challenge to this room too, if you wanted. Even though the open yellow doors permit sword turning, the puzzle can be solved without doing so.
Cheese and Fruits - The tar blobs (blueberries? plums?) make this room super easy. If they weren't there, I'd have to make a place to hide in the trapdoors.
Maggoty Mud Cake - I liked this little puzzle a lot. Getting the adder to cut a dead end for the serpent was a nice little challenge.
Tar-like Coffee - Perfect for a diner where the waitress keeps refilling your cup with the stuff. The speed potion (caffeine?) made it easy. I have a feeling a "
decaf"
version of this room would be solvable as well.
Slayer's - Is this supposed to be "
Slayer's Place"
? The idea of getting 39th Slayer to help or protect Beethro in every single room is rather humorous indeed. This was the last set of puzzles I completed on this level. Like Rheb, I took a look at the rooms and thought, "
I really don't feel like solving these right now."
But when I actually sat down and did them, they were not so hard or painful after all. By the way, the skull obstacles look awesome. This is the first room style that really makes them look like skulls.
5N3W - Tricking the slayer into opening/closing the doors is a nice way to set the tone for this area.
5N2W - The most challenging and fun part of this room was figuring out what tasks needed to be done. After that, choosing the correct entrance solved the room.
4N2W - In this room, I ditched the slayer by dropping the entire western column of trapdoors first. I never used the southernmost orb. After having the first aumtlich destroy all the cracked orbs on the trapdoors, there were a
lot of trapdoors left to drop afterwards to reach the last two aumtlich. A bit tedious.
5N4W - This one works well. I froze the aumtlich on the slayer's hook so they would hold the brain doors open.
4N4W - This works well too. I made a path for the slayer such that he spent at least 3 turns blocking each of the aumtlich. The fact that the slayer will take shortcuts when there are closed loops in the wisp adds challenge.
3N4W - And this one too. I used mirror, frozen aumtlich, and slayer to prevent the other six aumtlich beams from destroying orbs.
4N3W - I put the mirrors on the plates and arranged for the slayer to knock them off. I like this "
build your own room"
kind of puzzle.
3N2W - Hmmmmm... like Dischorran, I didn't use the single use pressure plates or the speed potions. I killed the last aumtlich from safety standing on top of a closed yellow door.
3N3W - This room looked like it would be much harder than it was. Printing out a screenshot and drawing where I wanted the aumtlich to go and where I wanted the slayer to go made it very doable. Had to plan such that the aumtlich would stay in place when unbrained. A gripe about this room: I had no way of knowing that Beethro would become unsworded when he stepped on the fuse. I can see how this prevents an unintended solution, but why couldn't this be done with a disarm token?
Bandit Lair - Interesting layout for this area, however, it seemed least like "
indoors"
or "
city"
to me. Do the bandits live in pipes under the city... this doesn't look much like the Sewers from Dr. E Will's either. Managing hordes of guards isn't really my thing (try try and try again) and I'm glad I didn't have to do it in every room. The manipulation aspect of these puzzles - getting the guards to turn their swords - is much more fun for me.
5N3E - A nice simple room that introduces the sword turning aspect of the level.
4N3E - Figuring out which guard to start with involved some trial and error for me. It was still fun, though, because there weren't too many guards to deal with.
4N4E - Very similar to 4N3E.
4N2E - Again similar to 4N3E and 4N4E - were you perhaps restricting yourselves too much in the puzzle elements allowed in this area?
5N4E - Similar to 5N3E, but with more guards.
3N4E - Was I supposed to back into the hallway and kill the guards one by one out there? This is possible after stepping on two rotation tokens.
5N2E - Interesting trick in this room. I had to use a guard from the right hand group to hold one of the left-hand guard's swords out of the way. Nice one.
3N2E - After crossing the first line of arrows, dispatching the horde of remaining guards required a lot of trial and error.
3N3E - I had a tough time figuring out where to start on this one.
In retrospect, looking back through my demos, I think I totally missed the movement order aspects of these puzzles. D'oh! I apologise for the above comments... I'll have to come back to these when I have more time.
Robolab - Were these puzzles inspired by
this? (Syntax wanted me to mention that he was the one who remembered mrimer's contest non-entry when we talked about these puzzles on the in-game chat.) I'm very often allergic to scripted puzzles, but not these. This area is the high point of the level's puzzle rooms. Figuring out just 33 instructions that will cause the robot to complete its entire task turns out to be a fascinating challenge, with multiple solutions in many cases. These puzzles require the player to think about DROD, but in a totally different way. I don't think Rheb's suggestion of including instructions for what f1 and f2 do would spoil the puzzles. The real challenge is whittling the "
programs"
down to 33 instructions. Oh and the geeky room layout, with the "
calculator"
keypads on the left and the "
experiment"
on the right works well.
3E - A good easy introductory task that shows how f1 and f2 can be used.
1N3E - Also easy. Here, f2 was used to make f1 longer. This room can be divided into 4 repeating chunks.
1N2E - 4 chunks here as well. This time my robot looked like he was walking through a woods full of mosquitoes, waving his sword back and forth and back and forth as he went.
2N3E - Even though the room looks different, I used a similar approach as in 1N3E.
2N2E - As this room doesn't fall into four chunks, I was stuck on it for a couple days. Dischorran finally helped me out with hints. It's an example of a room where some of the instructions in a repeating set aren't needed to solve the room, but need to be repeated just to whittle the instructions down to 33.
4E - This room neatly divides itself into 9 chunks that can be solved by a combination of "
spin around and go straight"
and "
spin around and go left"
subroutines.
2E - A spiral room in disguise. I had trouble whittling it down to a small enough set of instructions until I realized that you can start the spiral from the middle of a side just as easily as from a corner.
2N4E - There must be a more elegant way than mine. I solved this one as a series of rectangles with diagonal moves between them.
1N4E - This is my ugliest program. After dropping the trapdoors, the water would block the robot's movement, allowing me to (ab)use subroutines for alternate purposes.
Pool - So is this an indoor swimming pool, or are those billiards tables? This area could use some additional easier puzzles to introduce the brained roach dancing used in the "
feature"
puzzles.
5N6E - I knew that using the brain as a brain-invisible obstacle in the middle of a wall of brain visible mirrors would cause the roach to dance. However, I wasn't quite sure what the correct mirror arrangement should be, and it's such a pain to experiment with different arrangements in this room... I gave up too early and looked at the hint you wrote for Dischorran.
4N5E - Using what I learned in 5N6E, I was able to get the roach completely trapped by 7 mirrors and the brain.
5N5E - Neat idea for a room. I didn't find the elegant "
automatic"
solution. I had to manually unbrain the roach by moving a mirror every revolution.
3N5E - I unbrained the roach by hiding behind four mirrors in the corner.
4N7E - I saw the stairs here, and I did eventually figure out how to reach them from the Bar. I'll put them on my list of places to explore later.
Bar - Figuring out how to get places where I'm not supposed to go is lots of fun, and a nice complement to more traditional puzzle-solving and to hold art gazing. Also, I had no idea turnip juice had such an effect on stalwarts! And I was surprised Beethro didn't ask for leaf juice as one of the choices.
1N6E - It was fun trying out all the different drinks. "
Seeing double"
as in double whiskey seems to be the way to go. Getting to the northwest area of the bar was most challenging. It was a good idea to let all the scripts repeat in this room, including the stalwart's script, as his information is quite important with regards to the overall story. Oh, and... uh... is that slayer doing what I think he's doing? He's rather vulnerable in there.
1N5E - Read the scroll.
2N5E - I'll put these stairs on my list of places to explore later.
1N7E - And these stairs too.
2N7E - Found the way to the stairs in the Pool area.
Bank - The vault and security code concept is an excellent way to tie the hold together.
Having all those unexplored blocks right in the middle of the minimap is good motivation to go back and explore all the alternate paths I didn't take. So far, I've been in:
The vault with the default security code,
The vault with the large prime security code,
The vault with the security code from the Bar,
The vault with the security code from the southern part of Underground Lake,
The vault with the security code from the northern puzzle in Underground Lake,
The vault with the security code from the 4 mimics vs 1 giant secret room in Lava Land, and
The vault with the security code from Molten Core.
I think I'll wait and comment on the Bank puzzles once I've accessed and solved them all.
Oh, and I should mention, on my way to Indoors, I found and solved the last secret room in Lava Land.
I'll look at the changed rooms in the most recent version now, and then go back exploring some of the paths I didn't take.
.
Conquered, mastered, and postmastered. I've found all the secrets the right way, returned the jewel, and just finished reading through the commentary in the postmastery level. Wow, what a journey! I'm still just sitting here in awe. Thank you so much for this wonderful hold.