I have mixed feelings. There were a lot of things I absolutely loved about TSS, and I'll be making a post on that in the other thread as soon as I get my thoughts together, but I also spent about 60% of the game in a furious rage. It kept on switching between blaming this, that and the other for it, but it finally clicked what is, to me, the biggest problem with TSS after I screamed at More Fluff for the nth time.
Fluff, as an element, drove me absolutely
crazy. I could not figure it out, I had no real idea how it functioned, and every fluff room just seemed designed to be a special kind of hell. And then I came to the forums, read a post that summarised the movement and growth rules of fluff, and suddenly the level was
incredibly fun. And that really is the core problem with TSS; the new elements, as fantastically fun as most of them can be, are largely introduced badly, which is especially surprising as JtRH and TCB were so good about introducing new elements slowly and clearly, reinforcing the rules multiple times. I can understand how this happened -- building the game gives you so much familiarity you just start to forget how to learn the basics -- but it turns a lot of what could be fantastically fun puzzles into teeth-grinding hell until you finally develop enough of an understanding to "
get"
the element. I had similar problems with Temporal Aumtlichs, and with temporal split tokens I had a probably-just-me problem where other games with similar mechanics I've played always have the duplicate stop functioning after being disrupted by something, so I spent a lot of those rooms assuming that knocking the duplicate with a stick or getting in its way would completely stop it in its tracks.
Not all elements had this problem; gentryii were very easy to understand even if mastering them took some experimenting, cabers were a bit too obscure at first but got sensible quick, the staff was immediately intuitive, and the dagger levels were all just serious fun, as we'd had a few games to teach us about unarmed movement and now we just built on that. The spike and fire traps were excellently introduced and quite clear. But fluff, constructs, most of the time travel subtleties, and to a certain degree some of the weapons would have seriously benefitted from more explicit and slower introductions to their implications before tossing the really hard puzzles at us.
The only other thing that really bothers me is the lack of full explanation about
Click here to view the secret text
×Ironk and the Pit Thing
. However, from a writing standpoint, I completely understand this choice, and am trying to follow that one scroll's advice of just assuming They Are. Still, I would jump all over a potential future game that finally explained who and what that was all about, and more about the nature of the Eighth.
