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Checkpoints are good. You should have checkpoints liberally placed around your hold.

The fact that you have chosen to make many of your level transitions scripting-based substantially increases the potential for error. Stairs are pretty easy to work with and to see. However, you have multiple secret rooms that are only accessible from scripting tricks that seem to have no rhyme or reason to them. This makes finding the secret rooms both difficult and unrewarding at the same time.

If I were playing this hold on the Holds board, I would probably give it about a 3, with a 3 for difficulty. There seems to be very little theme to the hold and a lot of very similar-feeling puzzles.

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Very little to say about these two levels, since they have no puzzles on them. I don't really see the need for two filler levels, particularly since they have no story associated with them. It's not clear to me why you don't just start the hold at the next level.

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What is the point of these levels? Again, no puzzles, no story. At least you don't have to go through them if you don't want to.

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At last, some puzzles.

1N1E: The difficult part of this room is killing the tar mother before the first growth. After that, clearing all of the tarstuff is trivial, since you can always just convert it to mud.
But then, of course, you have to deal with all of the accumulated waterskippers. This isn't hard either, but it's pretty tedious.

2N: What's with the lighting? This room is basic hack and slash.

3N: The room starts out kind of interesting, as you need to maneuver your clones so that the adders don't eat them. However, the entire center of the room is trivial because you've placed your orb on a wall -- exploding bombs don't affect it.

2N2E: The second part of this room, where you're trying to get the mimic to the top of the room before the bomb explodes, is actually pretty interesting. The first part of the room is completely pointless -- there's no puzzle to dropping the trapdoors, so really it's just a long tedious setup to a fairly interesting puzzle.

1S1E: Getting the mimic to the orb is OK, but the queen is superfluous since the roaches she drops can't ever reach you. Also, since there's no red door, you have plenty of latitude in how you move the mimic. (And yes, if you put in a red door, you'd have to change the trapdoors...this isn't necessarily a bad thing, though.

2S1E: Lots of snake-killing here. There is no puzzle here after that, though, since the pressure plates just open the doors.

4E: Another hack & slash. I can just light the fuses and kill whatever's left.

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2S1W: This room is pretty good, except for the fact that if you don't make the exactly correct move on the very first few turns, you have to start all over again from scratch.

1S1W: This room is almost completely pointless. No risk, no puzzle.

3S2W: Wait for briar, kill brain. Puzzle?

4S1W: This room. What is the point of this room?

4S: So you put two nonrequired rooms on either side of this room, but you can't exit south until those rooms are cleared. Why?

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And this is where I start to get irritated. Why is there an entire 49-room level with exactly three interesting rooms? If I hadn't been playing through this hold as an HA, I would probably have stopped right here.

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Ship puzzles are all OK guard puzzles. The way in which you get to the ... level, however, is completely ridiculous.

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Most of the puzzles on this level are OK, but also severely lacking in checkpoints.

2W: This room is trivial. Drop the four mimics, kill the queens, kill the brain.

1N1W: Also trivial. Since I can just force everything to mud, the extra blobs are not much threat for baby production.

2S: This is a not particularly difficult room that is made much more difficult by the lack of checkpoints.

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Nothing much to say about this level. Rooms are not bad.

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This level is kind of annoying because of the force arrows on all of the entrances. It means I need to restore any time it looks like I need to enter with a different sword facing.

I do appreciate that you put checkpoints on all the exit squares.

The rooms themselves are OK.

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I don't like rooms with unpredictable scripting, like 2S1W. If you must do something like this, you might want to be more explicit: "Door will close as soon as you kill a monster."

Rooms are mostly OK, though.

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A lot of long, same-feeling rooms. There's nothing really individually wrong with any of them, but as a whole the level is boring.

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2N: This room is trivially solvable -- drop a mimic in the middle, kill the mother, then clean up at the margins.

3N: This is actually a fairly difficult room. Not bad.

4N: ...this is a secret room that is only solvable by a completely random and unexplained scripting trick.

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Most of the rooms on this level are decent. However:

The secret room is once again hidden by unpredictable scripting.

And the end of the level scripting is extremely confusing -- it's been fixed from the original version so it's no longer completely broken, but I would still question the value of this sort of scripting at all.

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Well, again, nothing much wrong with the rooms.

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My Published Holds
Smitemasters' Selection - Finding the First Truth
Smitemasters' Selection - Treacle Stew
My YouTube Channel - Leylite

Holds I contributed levels to

Advanced Concepts
Advanced Concepts 2
Blind Race #1: On Your Marks
The Custom Element Contest Compilation
Doorless Hold Contest Compilation
DROD Flash Project Audition
DROD History Month
Elemental Showcase
Elemental Showcase 5.0
Good, Bad and Ugly Contest Compilation
King Dugan's Alternate Reality
Labyrinth of Mellenfral (unpublished contest compilation)
Lunchbreak Special
Lunchbreak Special 2 (unpublished contest compilation)
Take Five
The Mining Business
Twelve Days of Christmas
Way Forward

Holds in the Making

...MYSTERY PROJECT

Styles

Workshop - DROD 5.0
Voids - DROD 3.0
Cavern Redux - DROD 2.0
Laboratory - DROD AE
Snakepit - DROD AE
Twenty-Sixth Level - DROD AE