A decent hold by a new architect. It's massive: took me 10 hours and 14 minutes to finish it (that's about 1.75 minutes a room - yes, I counted).
The first rooms of this hold aren't particularly hard or interesting, and most people have seem them in one variation or another before. Luckily, we get away from the easy stuff and find some more interesting stuff. I enjoyed lots of rooms in this hold. Unfortunately, it's often surrounded by plenty of trivial or copy-cat rooms of ones earlier in the hold.
The aesthetics were pretty good, the scrolls/level descriptions were good and the hold was fun to play.
Several rooms suffer from a lack of checkpoints, which artifically increases the difficulty while decreasing the fun. Not fun. Remember...it's hard to have too many checkpoints in a room, advice which I have already taken to heart.
Many rooms are of the trapdoor variety which got tiring after a while. Several of them feature trapdoors/walls under tar. This problem would be terrible if this were a TCB or later hold. But since this is an AE hold, I can let this one slide (I did it without translucent tar, and it's nowhere near as frustrating as Level 11 KDD).
There are about a dozen US's here, many of them completely breaking rooms. I'm not sure how they made it into the final hold.
So, in conclusion, a great first effort by the architect, and I look forward to any other holds they have in store.
5 difficulty
7 fun
Individual Level/Room Comments (Secreted for space)
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Floor 30
Nothing special or difficult here, just some basic roach puzzles that we've seen before. I liked the trick in 1S2W.
Level 29
Rooms were okay, but didn't really enjoy anything here
Level 21/24/26/2728
Okay rooms, nothing stood out
Level 25
Not much to say, except that trapdoors/walls under tar are annoying without vision tokens
Level 23
I enjoyed the trapdoor puzzle particularly in 1E
Level 22
A recurring problem is in 4S, which presents "backtracking" issues. Doing this room early, you will have to reclear the trapdoors
I liked 2E.
Floor 20
I liked these rooms a bit more than the earlier ones. 1S was a favorite.
Floor 19
One of my least favourite levels - everything was trivial
Floor 18/17/15/Secret Floor
Nothing good, nothing bad
Floor 16
I really liked 1S1W and 2N
Floor 14
3N2E was my favourite.
Floor 13
From the clues, I was able to gather the exit was a prime number in the entrance in the lower part of the room.
The last clue I didn't understand what it meant, and therefore just guessed. Did "2 4 6 8 9" refer to their locations from left to right?
Floor 12
I really really liked 1W.
There's US's in 3n1E and 4N where you never have to drop the red door.
Floor 11
Again, nothing really stands out.
Floor 10
1N and 1N1E really needed a checkpoint.
I particularly liked the trick in 1N2E and also liked 2N2W. Probably was the best level so far in the hold.
Floor 9
I'm not sure my solution for this room was the intended one. I killed the goblin after killing the NW serpent.
Floor 8
1W and 1N I liked.
2W was extremely repetitive.
Floor 7
Overall, the hardest level of the hold, and probably my second favourite.
The rooms were very good, just suffered from a lack of checkpoints. Particularly, 2E, where grabbing the checkpoint is almost suicide.
Floor 6
Pretty short level. Liked 1N1E, although dropping the red door is not required (and probably easier)
I didn't need the second mimic in 2N1E.
Floor 5
2E for me was easily the hardest room in the hold, and I spent the most time on it overall. 2N has a serious US basically destroying half the room involving the Evil Eyes.
Floor 4
Short floor, but probably my favourite overall. Several rooms I liked quite a bit - 1W, 1N1E, 2N, 1N1W and 1E.
Floor 3
Good.
Floor 2
Nothing I really liked I'm afraid.
Floor 1
Not sure why you want the wraithwing in the tar "timer" in 1E. Considering you can just kill the spawns after the red door opens. 2E was genius.
Floor 0
The first room was a good ending to the hold, pretty tricky. The second can easily be completed by standing on the scroll and killing tar babies until tar floods the room.
[Last edited by bomber50 at 09-19-2012 02:35 AM]
I'll try my best to prevent these things in my future holds.
meanwhile newbie might have fun learning all the basilar puzzles of drod 
I'll be more careful in the future. 
