admin
Level: Legendary Smitemaster
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File: Floating Friendship Facility v7.hold (43.6 KB)
Downloaded 399 times.
License: Other
From: Unspecified

A challenging one-level hold exploring the puzzle potential of Halph. It features an open level layout, uncluttered visuals, and mainly lynchpin-style puzzles.

Doom
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 3303
Registered: 07-05-2004
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There's not a Halph level in any of the Advanced Concepts holds, is there? This one here is a pretty good substitute. A lot of the rooms require tricks that the official holds don't expect of you. Luckily there's a series of tutorial rooms to prepare with.

Most of the rooms are lynchpin-based and fun to figure out. Would recommend playing. On the other hand a couple are heavy on trial-and-error (like 2N4W, 4N1W) and not on the same level as the rest of the hold.

Incidentally several of the rooms are setup-heavy, and if you make a small mistake you'll effectively have to start again from scratch. I found it useful to prepare an editable hold to copy-paste rooms into in order to see if a setup would work before wasting minutes arranging things in-game.

Dying Flutchman
Level: Smiter

Rank Points: 406
Registered: 01-27-2017
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This is a very enjoyable hold. It takes a while to get used to Halph's behaviour, so the first few rooms you try may seem impossible. However, once you get the hang of it, the going gets a bit easier. That being said, the hold is still pretty difficult, especially a couple of secret rooms. But hey, those are secret for a reason...
The style is inviting, with nice design and compact and minimalistic puzzles.
After playing this hold you'll probably have a quite improved understanding of the ways of your little annoying nephew Halph.

Really recommendable.

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Autocorrect is not my friend. Apologies for the typos.

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[Last edited by Dying Flutchman at 02-03-2019 11:02 PM]

Insoluble
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 1639
Registered: 09-04-2014
IP: Logged

I’ve never really cared for Halph as a game element. Most of the time when I’ve seen him in other holds he’s been used more as a week story prop than an actual part of a puzzle. So I wasn’t sure what to think when I first checked out this hold. Wow. Talk about a total shift in perspective!

Floating Friendship Facility really makes use of the full extent of the “Halph” element. Doom compared it to an Advanced Concepts level above, and I think that’s a good comparison. I think another good comparison is Mother of All Roaches from TSS. Just like that level took the humble roach queen, mostly used for prosaic horde rooms, and used it in completely innovative ways, this hold does the same for Halph. Bent really explores some of the interesting results of Halph’s rule set here. Things that seem simple, like giving Halph new orders to re-set his “return” spot, make for some super interesting puzzles. I would have never imagined that such creative and fascinating puzzles could have resulted!

And the puzzles in this hold are lovely. A lot of them do require some advanced room setup, but they are mostly very elegant and logical. Most of the puzzles were brilliantly designed and once you realize what the solution is it’s not a problem to set it up. There were a couple of rooms that relied more on manipulation, but for the most part these were reasonable and none of them depended on having to predict Halph’s janky path mapping.

One thing that may be a bit of a deterrent for some people is the current 8 brain difficulty rating. This hold definitely reaches that level of difficulty fairly early on. But I think it’s still worth checking out even if you aren’t into super difficult holds. There’s a nice introductory area in the southernmost row of rooms that does a good job breaking down the finer details of Halph’s mechanics that’s worth seeing. And the level layout is very nicely done, so it’s worth checking this hold out if only to see the attention to aesthetics. All in all, this is a super cool hold and really worth taking a look at.


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Links to neat forum tools that I always have trouble finding:

Bent
Level: Delver
Rank Points: 92
Registered: 12-11-2015
IP: Logged

File: Floating Friendship Facility v7b.hold (45.2 KB)
Downloaded 67 times.
License: Other

Here’s an updated version of the hold with the following changes:
*3 challenges added (4N, 3N1W, 1N4W)
*Dialogue changes/additions to a few rooms (3N, 4N, 3N1W, 1N4W)

Since these changes doesn’t affect demos, I’d like to request that the main download link be updated to this version as well. (To the HAs: I have demos with solutions to the new challenges, but don’t know where to post them. Also, is this even the correct place to request a hold update?)

Bent
Level: Delver
Rank Points: 92
Registered: 12-11-2015
IP: Logged

File: FFF Challenges.demo (6.2 KB)
Downloaded 43 times.
License: Public Domain

So a few years has gone by, and I’d like to repeat my request to the HAs of having the hold updated. Version 7b from the previous post still contain all the changes I’d like to make. Since the only gameplay-related changes are a few new challenges, I’ve attached demos in this post demonstrating that they are solvable. I would be grateful if the hold was updated, especially since the update removes a joke which really did not fit the mood of the hold, and that I now regret making.