I've played through the hold properly, without using the warp room. I tried pretty hard to go to levels I wasn't supposed to go to, and couldn't do it this time.
There is one backtracking problem in the hold that needs to be fixed. In Chapter 5 4E, if Beethro doesn't happen to step on (15,27) when solving the room, he doesn't decide to go talk to Mom. After he's conquered the room, he can't come back and step on that square during a second visit because of the green sister door. It's then necessary to restore in order to progress in the hold.
×Chapter 1 1S - A nice introductory roach puzzle.
Chapter 2 - The two puzzle rooms look very pretty, but not much strategy is needed to solve them. Just kill lots of monsters. Especially in 1W, the fourfold symmetry adds aesthetic appeal, but doesn't improve the puzzle. I just have to do the same thing four times.
Chapter 3 1N - Enjoyed this puzzle. The tradeoff between getting rid of waterskipper nests and getting rid of aumtlich beams made it interesting.
1E - Okay, killed the goblins.
1S2E - Okay, killed the skippers and nests. There's a bit of diagonal stepping strategy going on in here.
2E - Tedious. So I figured out how to get from the middle, to a corner, clear a blob, and come back to the middle. Except you want me to do that same thing four times.
1N2E - I like this quick and fun puzzle. Waiting a few turns (or not) before stepping on the fuse produces different rattlesnake movement patterns to play with.
1S3E - I'm glad you marked this secret, because I can totally see why someone wouldn't want to deal with it. It takes forever to get enough of the golem pieces out to be able to kill everything. I liked how each giant needed a different approach.
Chapter 4 1W - This room is okay. Even though it looks like it has fourfold symmetry, it doesn't make me do the same thing four times. Different strategies are needed when dealing with brained golems on and off the orthosquares.
1N1W - This is such a nice puzzle, it makes the rest of the level look bad. A nice use of snakes to break the two fold symmetry. Needs an additional checkpoint just under the top loop.
1S - This room does have the problem of too much symmetry. I did pretty much the same thing in each of the four quadrants.
1S1W - Okay, I killed a bunch of brained and unbrained adders.
1S2W - Okay, I dropped a whole bunch of trapdoors. The bottom half with all the force arrows was most interesting.
2W - Okay, pretty easy to dispatch a whole bunch of goblins and golems.
Chapter 5 - On this level, I kept trying to back out of the puzzle rooms to the north, to reorient my sword and reenter from a more favorable square. This teleported me back to the wilderness, which got a little annoying.
Entrance - Okay, I dropped a whole bunch of trapdoors while killing roaches.
1E - I like being able to use checkpoints more than once if I need to, but removing the trapdoors made this room quite a bit harder. (In the previous version, I had been using their pits to alter the brain pathmap.) This time, I found it better to hit the first two orbs in quick succession without taking the time to clear out monsters in between.
2E - Okay. It's possible to lead the snake out into the open grass before finally killing it.
3E - This is a good room. A diagonal stepping strategy works well here instead of always doing QW.
4E - This room solves itself with the correct sword orientation. See note above about the backtracking problem.
Chapter 6 1E - This room took forever. I could imagine someone quitting the hold after working on this room for a while. It has a nice idea, that the different legs of a right triangle must be tackled in a certain order. Would it be possible to make a room with the same idea, but on a smaller scale?
1N1E - This room works properly now. I was swordless in the middle and had to kill everything with the fegundo.
2N1E - This is a fine horde room.
Chapter 7 1S2E - Okay, several different strategies can be used.
1N1E - An easy trapdoor puzzle.
Chapter 8 - Since this is the postmastery level, it's okay to put annoying rooms here. Three of the four rooms are definitely annoying.
1N - Annoying because it takes too long to kill way too many monsters. Also, there's no room to the east.
1S - Annoying because of unnecessary scripting. All the events that happen in here could be orchestrated with pressure plates and doors. It's actually not that hard to solve though. There's a place that Beethro can stand and QW most of the guards.
1E - Annoying not only because it's an orb puzzle, but because Beethro has to run long distances through the room to get to the orbs.
1W - Hmmm... what happened here? This room doesn't seem to fit with the others on the level. This is a very nice puzzle. It was fun figuring out how to make a spot where Beethro could QW the guards and still drop all the trapdoors and exit the room. More like this one, please!
Glad it wasn't though.
