My
actual comments, which I'm too lazy to post in a hideuntil-tag, or maybe I just want people to be influenced by them. Either way.
I'm not including the numbers I gave, mostly, because my exact criteria are my own. Starred rooms are ones I didn't solve.
Chaotic Order:
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×1N1W: very nice implementation of the three challenges. It was clear what needed to happen, it was interesting but tractable to make it happen.
*2W: I don't really know what was so awful about this room. Maybe it was remembering that gel would grow over hot tiles. Somehow I spent all my time trying to lure a gel baby into the snake area, rather than having one grow in the space to the northwest.
1S1W: Perfectly fine room, but I felt like I'd already played it once... No better nor worse than the other version, and while I wouldn't mind seeing both in the same hold, this feels a little redundant as a second contest entry.
*1S: [For some reason I have no comments on this room.]
*1E: So, I watched a demo. The initial bit with the soldier was, for whatever reason, too irritating to work out. Reading through the scrolls at the end, though, I feel like using the queen's spawn against her and the area with the construct were kind of phoning it in.
2N1E: So there are four constraints on this room, and the two "avoid" ones are only trivially fulfilled because the elements aren't in the room at all. A third, about an adder's head, didn't come up because I killed the adder at the start. Kind of a disappointment.
1N2E: It's interesting that the prompts were very clearly covered, and yet the room felt like it wasn't "about" two of them. It was a room about briars and pickaxes, and only very incidentally about multiple entrances and (briefly, in a sort of prelude that didn't have anything to do with the room's main solution) explosions over arrows. On the other hand, I liked the fact that the pickaxe was used in two very different ways (once to push kegs, once to hack briar), and that you needed the briar to destroy the mud/tar tokens. Well, at least you needed the briar to get to that point; by the time you were done with the briar growing, it no longer really mattered whether those tokens were there or not.
1S2E: Well, after 1000 moves, I was at the end of the path, only to discover that there was no way to kill the adder. I suppose I should have realized that sooner, but since I'd already gone through several false starts with the adder, and the golems, and so forth...I could have used a little more guidance from the room on what I should be doing in it. We'll see whether I feel like coming back to it.
...all right, I came back to it, and it wasn't necessarily that bad, though again I feel like it could have been made somewhat clearer.
Haphazard Choice:
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×*2N: Judging from the demos, that's just one long exercise in being annoying.
1N1W: The 20-move timer at the start was actually fairly interesting, and it took me several tries to get it right, so definitely kudos on that. I did like the southern part of the room as well, with the roach. I'm not sure the builder quite worked for me, but overall, not a bad room at all.
1N1E: I still have no idea how this room was supposed to work, but I pretty much just killed everything and walked out. Maybe the fegundo wasn't supposed to escape from its starting area? Maybe the mimic was...no, I don't even know.
*1W: All I learned from the demos is that skell and blorx are slightly better at breaking the room than I am, since I was trying to do roughly the same thing. Color me unimpressed.
1E: It's a shame that I found a trick for getting out of the room without avoiding that one power token, but I actually liked the room just fine even with that trick (it was pretty tricky!), and either way it's a nice implementation of forcing the player to decide what tool to use for what job, and a good use of a non-Beethro role.
1S1W: This room started out quite interesting. It was a fascinating challenge to get the guard onto the far side of the door, to get him to open the door again with the mirror, to maneuver the wraithwing into the fire trap, to get the guard to push me over the oremites, to get back down and…wait, I needed to keep the wraithwing alive? All right, so redoing the room without killing the wraithwing was a little irritating. Killing the wraithwing afterwards, without the fire trap, is just proving to be a serious annoyance. That's a shame, because I liked a lot of this room, but it's losing a lot of points at the end.
*1S1E: DO NOT WANT. Nope nope nope nope nope.
Roach egg isn't really "used"; sister door isn't really "used"; and blorx's demos don't work. Is there anything good about this room?
This is the only room I gave a 1 to. (I didn't give any twos.)
Level 3:
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×1N1W: Huh. I had a feeling I was supposed to somehow keep the red door closed. However, thanks to the bend in the "road" tiles, it was possible to kill the eyes even after waking them up. So I definitely solved it wrong, but I have no idea how wrong. But it was fun regardless.
1N: that was...frustrating, but certainly clever, and new, and a good interpretation of the constraints.
*1W: Well, it certainly implements its constraints. But it's an intensely difficult room, more so than I needed.
1S: the NE corner was quite tricky. Solid room.
1E: It took several tries to get into it, but this really was a well-executed room. It was fairly apparent what needed to happen (i.e., "hit all three cracked orbs and destroy the clone potion"), but left enough room for a solution that took some experimentation.
1S1E: The conditions are a little odd, because I didn't use the speed potion or the trapdoors at all. (Admittedly, I didn't try to do the challenge.) It seems to me that if you can totally avoid two of the three constraints (and the third one, after all, was entirely cosmetic), something has gone wrong with the room.
2S: I just watched blorx's demo, and I still have no idea what's going on in this room.
And some comments on some of the non-voting rooms...
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×Chaotic Order 3E: seriously, no checkpoints? Also, the relay station evil eye thing was pretty meaningless ("oh, no! now I have to go around the north side instead!"), there wasn't any consequence to the soldier trying to attack the nearest monster, if indeed it could, since it was trapped by bombs and not going anywhere; "green door opens" is a seriously boring prompt; the maze was indeed an implementation of the prompt but not a very interesting one...there were a couple of hints of a good room in here, but not enough to make it a good room.
Level 3 2S2E: I kind of like this room, other than the fact that I can't figure out how to finish it.
