I played a bunch more this weekend. Demos are attached to go with my usual long-winded comments.
Void of Indeterminate Time
Now we're getting to some of my favorite elements. Time clone combat rooms run the risk of being tedious "
blind fighting"
rooms, but I was happy to see that most of these rooms avoided that tiresome format. Most of the rooms made it simple enough to just have the time clone(s) and Main Timeline guard captain deal with different parts of the room separately.
1S1W was the only room I remember having to be careful in to avoid distracting monsters with the main timeline guard captain while the time clone fought them. The challenge in
1N1W is really not much harder than doing the room while using the time clone. I would honestly say that the room could probably use more rock giants to be on par with the difficulty of some of the other horde rooms in this part of the hold. It's fine to have an easier room though if you want to keep it as it is.
1N2W is also possible without a time clone and is much more challenging to do this way. I had a lot of fun with it though, it was an enjoyable challenge.
Shrine of Temporal Transcendence
This was neat! I didn't really pay much attention to the temporal resonator puzzles in TSS, but this level really shows some how they can be interesting for setting up horde encounters.
The Entrance and
1N do a good job of showing this off and I like how the goblins and trapdoors are set up in
1N to make it likely that you drop some of the goblins in the pit!
1W was also really fun, I enjoyed being able to carve out a configuration of trapdoors to make my stand in.
1E on the other hand felt a bit underdeveloped and repetitive. I only used the special command once at the very end of the room to get back across the closed red door. I felt like I was just cleaning out the same mini room 9 times. I would suggest maybe spicing this up a bit by somehow letting out some of the roaches early or making it impossible to reach all 9 squares without using special command (or perhaps both). Other players may have differing opinions though.
Cult of the Cosmopolitan
Oh nice! I love temporal Aumtlich and am glad to see them used here! They weren't used much in horde rooms in TSS so this was a lot of fun to play through. I particularly like how you set up a lot of 1x1 walls to ensure that they split frequently. I have no complaints about this level. Some of the rooms were a bit similar, but really it's so fun dispatching temporal aumtlich hordes that I wouldn't mind seeing more rooms like these!
Arena of Angst
This was an interesting way to introduce the dagger as a weapon into the plot. I like the variety of monsters in this level a lot. Difficulty is varied too, for instance I found
1N2W to be fairly straightforward just because goblins are fairly easy to trick while wielding a dagger.
2W was trickier for me, but quite enjoyable. But it's fine to have some harder rooms and some easier rooms on the same level.
Mountain Hideout
This level appears on my map twice for some reason. Both map icons lead to the same level though. Does this happen to anyone else? I liked how this level was laid out, with the east and west wings both taking on a different set of monsters to add in to the fluff vent horde, but having a similar progression. In
1W I did not use the speed potion, so that's a possible challenge. I did not even attempt to skip the speed potion in
1N1W though, that does not seem like it would be worth it. The final room,
1N is fairly simple since the slayers basically just stand there and let the puffs come to them, but it's fine since it is mostly a room to develop the story dialog. Lastly, it is possible to exit this level as either Bongthro or the Pirate Captain and thus to have either a sword or staff in any of the other levels accessible at the same time as this one. I'm not sure if access to the staff is really desirable in those other levels, but you may want to make it so that you can only exit the level as the Pirate Captain.
Temple of Pain
This was lots of fun. I liked the combination of aumtlich and temporal aumtlich. I've never seen that combination in a horde before, but they both have very different styles of attacking which makes things interesting. I also liked that there was a lot of variety in how the rooms were laid out. I'm not sure what is going on in
2N. The aumtlich there are trivial to kill and I did not use the special command until the very end of the room and then only to exit.
1N1E also felt a bit trivial. I just sat on the tile with the fuse and waited for the bombs to kill most of the monsters and cleanup was simple after that. I feel like there should be more to deal with while I wait for the fuse to burn down. The other rooms were all fun though.
Jaded Jail
Yikes. This level was a different experience for me. I typically don't care much for stalwarts/soldiers much in the first place. One of the biggest problems with them is that the path they will take is literally not predictable by human beings and relies on some some opaque code implementation. They will completely redirect their paths in unpredictable ways due to minor changes to room geography on the other side of a room. They also have a tendency to get themselves killed as they are incredibly bad at fighting monsters. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I find rooms like this to be an exercise in frustrating and tedious brute force experimentation. Blindly hitting keys until something magically works. Here are a couple of forum threads detailing the reasons why stalwart behavior is so weird and unpredictable:
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=21265
http://forum.caravelgames.com/viewtopic.php?TopicID=42389
If you really want to include a level like this one where the player must keep at least one soldier alive to complete the room, I strongly encourage you to make things a bit more lenient on the player by including more soldiers and fewer things that might kill them. In
1E for example, I found it extremely fiddly to prevent the stalwarts from just dying on the spike traps. This room would have felt a lot better if I only had to keep one stalwart alive instead of two, or if there were fewer spike traps or more gaps in the spike traps. Ideally both of those things. This is only one example (though probably the most egregious one). I found that most of the other rooms on this level also had me resorting to frustrated button mashing and fiddling around until something finally worked.
I don't mean to end on a sour note. All the other levels were super fun so far. I'm looking forward to exploring further into the hold soon.
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