Room comments:
The Great Arid Canyon:
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×1S 1W: Fun first room. Not too difficult.
1W: Brained roaches are surprisingly hard to deal with, especially when only one side is water. I know this hold will throw more and harder monsters at me later, so it's a good learning curve. I like that!
2W: This was shaping up to be a really annoying room until I realized I could just shove the gentryii down the little south corridor. I don't see any other way to deal with it hounding you. Little puzzle elements like that are neat. You don't realize these things need solutions until they present themselves as problems.
1S 3W: Pushing decoys around is more tedious than anything else. That will be a running theme throughout this hold, I'm afraid.
The Temple:
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×2S 1E: Also pretty tedious. Pushing mirrors around isn't really fun anyway, and having to time runs across floor spikes only makes it worse. If you're intent on using floor spikes, I'd recommend looking at Forbidden Underpass from TSS. There's a couple of gems in that level. I wouldn't mind rooms like this so much except there's no puzzle to solve and no reason to worry about execution. It's just get in, get it done, leave.
1S 1E: This is a pretty cool room since it forces the player to learn all the little techniques for keeping monsters down for a turn. Full stuns are pretty common, but I think there's some puzzle potential to be had in partial stuns.
1S 2E: I like fighting guards with the staff for some reason. It's so satisfying to outmaneuver them and then push them off a cliff!
2S 1W: I like how the room is made of four little corners that work together. Okay room.
2S 2W: This is kind of a waiting game to let all the seep come to you. Nothing else to it. But I do appreciate the fire traps next to the brain. You could have just as easily made me "escort" the brain to the edge of the room to kill it, but you gave me some convenience. Thank you!
The Other End:
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×1N:Since only half the floor is covered by floor spikes, they're all irrelevant. This could be made more interesting if you and the construct had to "hide" in the right spot when the spikes came up.
2N: This was a pretty fun room! I especially liked dealing with the goblins. Brained goblins + not enough space = puzzle potential. One recommendation: in the bottom-left part of the room, where the player hits the orb at (13,29) and gets flooded by roaches, it's trivial to just stand on the right side and push them into the water. I think you could make the puzzle more interesting if the roaches were allowed to swarm Beethro from above and below. There's no way for him to sneak out of this one unless he remembers the mirrors from before and uses one to guard his rear. Just a thought.
3N: Once again, dealing with the goblins is tough work! Using the roaches -- their own teammates against them! -- is a really fun puzzle mechanic I didn't see used to much in TSS. I'm glad to see it here.
4N: See, now these are the kinds of rooms I like. Sure, they're not mind-bendingly difficult. But at least they're not mind-bendingly boring either. They're fun little horde rooms, good for a lunchbreak distraction. Also, I love the waterfall image. It really adds to the atmosphere!
2N 1W: Don't feel pressured to put a real quote in. I feel inspired already!
In general, I like this hold. But it only hits its stride, where every room is pretty fun, by The Other End. Until then, there are a couple of hit-or-miss rooms I wouldn't mind seeing replaced, mostly the rooms where you just push NPCs/mirrors around with the stick. If you're looking for inspiration, TSS has some great room ideas you could play with.
Puzzles aside. The ambiance is really good. You make great use of darkness, pits, and obstacles to make this feel different from "
just another dungeon romp"
. And it's not too gaudy either, I never felt tempted to turn off the environmental effects to see better.
The last level was pretty fun as-is, though you can change whatever you want before you submit the hold. I personally don't like some of the rooms from the first two levels and think the hold could be better if you worked there, but that's just my opinion. Not every puzzle is for every one.
Good work!
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spacelike
