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Level: Legendary Smitemaster
Rank Points: 8
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File: Castle.drh (81.5 KB)
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License: Other
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My first hold, hot tiles, no lucky blade, no aumtlich, secret ending.

Lucky Luc
Level: Smitemaster
Rank Points: 1215
Registered: 08-19-2012
IP: Logged

This is a large-ish RPG hold that feels very "vintage". Which has both good sides and not-so-good sides:

The good: This has a nice sense of adventure and progression to it. Beating it isn't terribly hard, but the choices offered here never feel trivial. I never felt like I had so much health that I didn't have to worry about stuff, while I also never hit a huge roadblock and had to restore more than a few decisions back. Hot tiles are probably slightly annoying if you really want to optimize this hold, but in normal play, they feel very reasonable.

The not so good: The open structure means there's a lot of backtracking in the hold if you want to play even close to optimally. And I mean A Lot. What makes the matter worse is that there are so little shortcuts between sections and often, opening them costs valuable resources.

There's a very classic accessory swap chain that is required for the secret ending, and two of the accessories are hidden behind secret walls. I dislike those in RPG even more than in regular DROD, as in regular DROD, secret rooms are hardly ever required for progression at least.

Finally, as usual when using standard monsters and no money sinks like altars, the Greckle curve feels completely off. Apart from a few times very early in the hold, I never felt like I had to care about Greckles at all. Which would be okay, if there weren't still a few Greckle gates late game that just feel very uninteresting.

Okay, that was a lot of complaining, but I still enjoyed the hold overall. I just think a few more improvements could have turned this from a good hold into a great one. But hey, that's what first holds are for: Making mistakes and learning from them.

5.5 brains, 7 fun.

Von Wibble
Level: Delver
Rank Points: 35
Registered: 07-21-2008
IP: Logged

Just completed it, needed to use the editor to find one of the secret walls which was what really slowed me down.

Overall I think Lucky Luc summarises it well - a lot of backtracking, more than many other larger holds have, and greckle gates were basically free stuff once you got past the first blue door.

I thought the health was very stingy throughout, which made for some tough decisions. There were times where I was tempted to make trades like yellow key for 200HP - but in the end I didn't do that and got through.

Also felt that a lot of the hold became more beatable once you got .

Overall I'd go 7 for fun (higher early but the backtracking and hot tiles ding it a bit), 6 for brains.