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File: Helix dungeon.drh (35.8 KB)
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A single level hold.
It should start very easy and be hard in the end.
Thanks to Someone else, Gordius and Suwako for the comments

Chaco
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 3624
Registered: 10-06-2005
IP: Logged

Note to future solvers: The purple "Helix Soul" is the normal final boss, and the Skull Temple houses the secret final boss. You'll need to optimize this hold quite well to reach the secret final boss, but it's well worth doing so because the secret boss is something special.

As for the main hold, I think this hold does a pretty good job of being at the appropriate difficulty: instead of spreading small stat boosts all over the place, they're concentrated in a few locations, and your job is to get those boosts in the correct order, as economically as possible. It's very important to save as much health as you can, and only spend keys wisely for health near specific checkpoints.

Good work! Looking forward to komachi's next RPG hold.

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Blondbeard
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 1486
Registered: 03-31-2005
IP: Logged

Note to future solvers: In this hold I think it is impossible to play by the rule of thumb Green Key = 2 Yellow Keys = 800 HP. If you do you will have to spend many Yellow Keys for 250 HP. So a better rule of Thumb might be Green Key = 2 Yellow Keys = 600 HP. That is importent to know, as I had 14 Yellow Keys and 19 Green Keys to spare by the end of the hold. I could have optimized better if I had known this, and used keys in order to avoid damage from monsters.

Apart from that, and the fact that it's a mess to navigate (a lot of stairs you have to remember where they go), this hold is brilliant! It felt tense and tight all the way to the end. And the Yellow Key for 250 HP options made for a lot of optimization possibility. Very enjoyable to try to figure out the best order in which to do things!

kieranmillar
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 2670
Registered: 07-11-2014
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This hold is neat. The usual approach to a more traditional RPG experience is turned on its head here, where instead of looking to make incremental changes to your stats throughout, the stat boosts are located in caches around the level and your aim is to seek them out and pick them up in the right order. Health and yellow keys are offered in abundance. I'm talking crazy quantities here. I'm pretty sure I had over 50 keys in my inventory and over 22,000 HP at one point, with most of the use for those keys being to trade them for even more health (but not at a favourable rate as far as leaderboard scoring goes). It definitely means you're unlikely to find yourself getting stuck. But then things take a sudden turn as you near the end and the hold throws a massive health-sink gauntlet at you, you spend your keys picking up every last health potion in the hold, and you come to the realisation that there simply isn't enough health to reach the end. Looks like you made some bad choices in the order you went for stats and actually needed to spend some keys to skip past some monsters even though the trade seemed to be non-optimal for leaderboard score. Try again!

The decision to move the stat boosts into a small number of locations simplifies the gameplay a fair amount, although this hold seems complex with all of the doors and potions, parse it all out and you realise that the hold is actually pretty simplified compared to a more standard hold, and it makes for a refreshing and fun change. I really enjoyed playing this hold. The final boss on the alternate end path is really cool too.

One major gripe, and I feel it really needs mentioning. While I'm a sucker for layouts that make a nice regular shape on the mini-map, the layout for this hold makes it a huge pain and time sink to navigate. I have spent, no joke, literally hours moving back and forth across this hold going to collect resources when monsters become free kills. The layout is riddled with staircases that you can't use fast-travel on and make the place more confusing to navigate. Also there are no shortcuts and many of the paths you go down are long linear corridors, so you have to spend a bunch of time just crossing through all of the screens. And let's not talk about THAT room with all the gravestones in it, yeah, you know the one, the one that's shortly after the second score checkpoint? It takes a bunch of time to navigate and I had to walk back and forth through it so many times. So annoying.

But don't let me venting my frustrations put you off or give you the wrong impression, this is a good hold and you should play it.

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[Last edited by kieranmillar at 07-29-2015 11:19 PM]