If I had to sum up this hold in one GIF--and I don't have to, I just want to--I'd naturally go to Futurama:
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Fortunately, I also have words. And the truth is, this isn't a bad hold, by and large, and I might even have liked it (with certain caveats)...except for the dialogue.
That's not because the dialogue is bad. (Though, don't fool yourself, it's not great.) It's because the dialogue makes clear that this is somehow supposed to be an introduction to DROD elements. And viewed in
that light, it is kind of a bad hold.
Having a room with an element and saying a few words about what it does is not the same as actually introducing the element. There are no showcases of what an element can do, just "
Here's the element"
followed by "
Here's a bunch of rooms that have it!"
, with no consideration given to their difficulty, or how well they showcase the element. At its most extreme, this is just silly: the first room with a decoy potion is solvable without the potion. The 1E room in the level that introduces mirrors tells you that mirrors can form stepping stones for monsters, but can be solved without any monster stepping on a stepping stone. But far more often it's merely aggravating, especially when there are hordes.
And about those hordes: that's the other thing that makes this such a bad hold as an introduction to DROD. If I were a newbie and I encountered some--many--of these rooms as part of my first hold, my thought would be, "
OK, so DROD is all about mashing keys until everything's dead, hundreds of moves later"
. There were rooms that
I found either difficult or irritating, and I'm not a newbie to the game. There was also difficult navigation; it's not always clear how far back you have to go at certain points, and there's one level that I literally accessed by accident, when I bumped into a pit. (Why? Literally, just, why?)
So as a hold for new players, I think this falls seriously short. As a hold for veterans...well, like I said, it's not bad, in a lot of places. The main criticism I have from this perspective is that it's not anything
new. Almost every room I walked into, I thought, "
Oh, one of these"
: long snake that starts in a dead end and is wrapped around monsters. Bomb mazes. Tarstuff surrounded by 1x1 walls so that babies form all around them every thirty turns. And so, so many hordes.
Also, one very small point that I found so mind-boggling that I felt like it summed up a great deal about the hold:
Blank Dungeon: Bottom Level: 1S. (Hopefully that link works; images currently aren't working.) This room has four 3x3 blocks of gel, on 3x3 bridges surrounded by 1-square trapdoors, so that the gel never grows. That's fine. The mind-boggling part is that in the center of each block there's
a checkpoint. In the middle of uncuttable gel. In a place the player can never, ever reach. And that, to me, spoke volumes about how much thought went into the hold.
Overall, well, you could certainly play worse. Just don't play it expecting a good newbie hold.
