Alright, finally played some more of this. Sorry for the delay! Demos are posted as before.
Old business.
Greenhouese. I like the shortened level. Rooms on the main axis seem much tighter.
2E: Passing through the middle west to east on my first pass through, there doesn't seem to be a way to get past the yellow gate at (32,16). Should these be toggled the other way initially? Should the orb I strike at the beginning of the room open them?
3E: Probably could use a checkpoint in the two main snake chambers.
The Entrance: How do I get out from the northern and southern passages (the trap door bits)? I can't find a way to backtrack through the middle passage in 2E or 2Wi, am I missing something?
2W: Passing through the middle east to west on my first pass through, there doesn't seem to be a way to get past the yellow gate at at (5,15)
Five layer sandwich Liked the new version of the entrance room where the first few passes are just to show it off. This also fixes the unintentional solve from the third pass from before.
New business.
Five layer sandwich Really liked the secret rooms for the most part. These were neat, and I thought the "
Get out of here!"
was a fun touch.
1S: This was a fun mirror puzzle. Possibly my favorite room on the level.
1S1E: This was another really fun one. I should have two demos visible for this showing two fairly different solutions. As you can see, not all the decoy potions are necessary, but it's not necessarily bad to have extra.
1N1E: This one was a bit of a slog. I'm sure my demo for it is horribly inefficient though and there are better ways to go about it.
1N: A fairly standard golem packing room. Still fun though.
Back and Forth This was a neat level. Unfortunately I didn't think to record a multi room demo so you'll only see demos for room clear for the most part.
2N2W: Fun little room! I was worried the doors would be hard to parse at first, but everything workd out pretty nicely. Neat idea.
2N1W: Only recorded room clear. It's neat that there are three disrtinct rooms here (version 1: kill goblins; version 2: drop trapdoors; version 3: clear mud)
2N: I somehow remembered to record demos for both parts! Even though these are standard room types, i thought both passes were pretty fun.
2N1E: Nice tarstuff horde room. Some good restraint was show in not making this overly tight or frustrating.
1N2W: Thanks for the cautionary scroll!
1N1W: The presence of a mimic makes me think I'm only supposed to be able to solve this room on the return trip. I can solve it from the entrance with the mimic of course (did it in the editor), but it's just as easy to solve on the first pass. Not sure which way is more efficient on the whole. This may possibly bug optimizers who will have to fiddle about with save files to be able to attempt the room from both entrances, but it's pretty clearly telegraphed that you'll be returning here from the other entrance at least, so they should know to leave this one uncleared on the first pass. Still though, you might want to consider putting an inactive seeding beacon in some of these rooms that can be solved in different ways from more than one entrance just so that people can try solving from both entrances without having to restore.
1N: This one can be solved from both orbs, but I only have a demo recording from the southern one. Again, you may want to consider putting inactive seeding beacons here to allow people to try it both ways.
1N1E: That's a lot of snakes! My horribly sub-optimal demo aside, this wasn't really to bad or to fiddly though. Most of the rattle serpents and adders had the decency to get caught on walls or other snakes at least.
1N2E: I felt like this was a bit of a slog, and maybe the same idea could be done with fewer mothers and a smaller room. But looking back on my demo I definitely made things harder than they needed to be by drawing out and spreading out the babies unnecessarily.
1W: Pretty straightforward room. I feel like the checkpoints ought to be a little bit closer to the entrances, since in most cases you won't be wanting to wander too far from them to wrangle the snakes.
The Entrance: This one
definitely reminded me of Journey to Rooted Hold. Seems like the kind of room that showed up there or in KDD a lot.
1E: Sorry, I only have a demo of solving it from the norther entrance. Not sure why there are force arrows scattered about in the walls.
2E: Managed to record demos from both directions for this one!
1S1W: Nope. I hated the Tetris room in The City beneath and have no desire to shuffle platforms around for half an hour. It's probably more a mater of personal preference though, and other folks might be more into that sort of thing.
1S: This is the kind of slayer room I like a lot. The slayer isn't just there to be a pest, but is actually used in interesting ways as part of puzzle widgets. This was a refreshing change of pace from the more horde focused rooms on the level and a lot of fun.
1S1E: Another really nice, more puzzle focused room. On the whole, the southern rooms in this level were a lot of fun. Standard roach queen tricks were used here, but it was a neat room and it took me a minute to get the exact trick.
1S2E: Slayer didn't seem to be good for much other than being a pain here, so I just killed him on the trapdoors. Still a strangely enjoyable room.
2S: I kind of agree with Beethro's assessment here. I feel like there should be more to this room.
2S1E: This was a neat room. I thought I was supposed to carve a path out of the brains at first, but after a minute that approach seemed clearly flawed. Manipulating the roach while brained wasn't too bad and a lot of fun actually. Nice room.
This has been pretty enjoyable so far, and I hope to get to the last few levels soon. I also really hope you keep working on it! It's definitely a change from the more linchpin heavy holds that are more common these days, and it's fun to have variety like this. There's also some fun cleverness to the level design that I've enjoyed a lot.
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[Last edited by Insoluble at 02-28-2017 01:50 PM]
I'm not telling you how to solve it now...