In some ways, the most frustrating holds are those that leave you conflicted: the ones where the story is clever but the puzzles are boring, or there are really good rooms connected by long slogs through empty corridors, or there are really clever ideas hampered by stilted dialogue.
This is not one of those holds. There is pretty much nothing good in here to make me feel conflicted about the bad parts.
Where to even start? Among other things:
What text there is reads as if it were translated out of Russian; and out of fairness, it presumably has been, but having that excuse still means it's incredibly hard to comprehend.
Navigation is something of a chore, since there are rooms that are clearable only when you find a staircase back to them much later, and there are a number of places where you can't backtrack. Not in a hold-breaking way, because you can get back to the room by going forward until you reach the beginning and then looping back through. You merely can't walk back the way you came. There are also many, many rooms with edge spaces that don't correspond to entrances in the next room over: the rooms in the 6E column of "
The travel beginning"
, for instance, are entirely empty (except for staircases blocked by arrows), making it look like there are more rooms beyond them; but, no, just invisible barriers at the edges.
Within-room navigation is often no better. Several rooms in "
The travel midle"
are darkened for no good reason, to the point that I had to turn off alpha blending to save myself from squinting. Others are merely irritating:
a room full of fegundo where you just have to stand around waiting for enough of them to die that you can navigate around them, or
long, needless walks through twisting corridors. (A secret room near the latter room consists of nothing but a 91-move walk to a conquer token, followed by the same walk back out.)
The rooms themselves vary a fair amount, but mostly have a sort of
war-series sense to them--lots of arbitrarily placed monsters, but without
war's sense of whimsy. Many of the rooms seemed more irritating than anything else--when it wasn't the navigation, it was having to deal with brained waterskippers ("
really?"
), or else a single goblin or three lone rock giants ("
really?!"
). In some rooms, I went back to optimize, but in many I decided that whoever came along next was welcome to the #1 score because replaying would just be too tedious to be worth it.
Some days I wish I weren't such a completist that I had to play holds simply because they're there. This was one of those days. Perhaps if you play this you'll find something to like in this hold, but if you don't, don't say you weren't warned.
