×KDD:AEE builds on robin's extraordinary work bringing historical versions of King Dugan's Dungeon to the modern DROD engines. While robin dealt with the visual aspects the project, OldCodger worked on the gameplay aspects, in order to allow players to relive the experience of playing DROD in the original Webfoot version.

In addition to the playable hold itself, OldCodger added a level with example scripts to allow other architects to create holds with old-school gameplay. Interesting methods implemented include:

- Unclickable orbs. Orbs are replaced by special characters which open or close doors when stabbed. This improvement finally returns the original experience of orb puzzles.

- Disabling undo. It was unfortunately not possible to completely remove undo. However, clever scripting will cause undo to take a long time, and the player is likely to give up before undo completes. An unfortunate side effect of this method is that it slightly slows down the game. While it is possible to remove undo in the game settings, we cannot trust the player to play with this setting and must use other methods. This solution isn't future-proof, as the developers might "fix" undo. (Obviously all checkpoints were also removed.)

- Entering cleared levels. When you enter a level, you should solve it. Who had this strange idea that it should be otherwise? This is implemented with seeding beacons and scripts which keep track of the various rooms, and fake blue doors.

There are several behaviors which were not implemented.

- Spider visibility rules. OldCodger has stated that despite being an old codger, he is fine with the change which made spiders completely invisible. He is only against changes which make things easier. He wouldn't mind, however, someone modifying the spider graphic so it will also be difficult to see.

- The restore screen could not be removed. OldCodger is very upset about this.

- No timed mode. Timed mode could not be added for obvious reasons. Though to be fair, I doubt anyone actually played in timed mode. I'm not even sure OldCodger is aware this feature existed.

To summarize, this is an interesting concept, but will hopefully not be expanded. I'm sure OldCodger can't wait for the day he can play Bavato's Dungeon with these "improvements". I fear that day will come.

×Just done the first level so far, I like how all the rooms are based on the same pattern. Wonder if each level will be based on different patterns.

Edit: Second level done. More of that same symbol. good stuff, but I think I've seen enough of it for now, I'm going to be dreaming about it tonight haha.

edit 2: was going to give it a break, but something drew me back to this hold. third level - puzzles for the Symbol. getting trickier but after staring at the rooms for a while it all starts to become clear. it's amazing how much you can gain from the Symbol, the more you see the more there is to discover.

edit3: the Symbol is all. all is the Symbol and the Symbol is everything. it is the true sign. play and see the Symbol and know its truth. know the Symbol and let it encompass you. we are all part of the Symbol and the Symbol shows the way.a ll is the Symbol and the Symbol is everything. draw the Symbol that it might spread the sign to all who see it. show others the Symbol, the Symbol is everything. see the Symbol. there is nothing without the Symbol and the Symbol contains all. play the hold and take the Symbol into yourself. the Symbol is true and the Symbol is truth. the Symbol shows the way to truth and the Symbol is all. we are the Symbol. the Symbol is us. the Symbol is all. the Symbol is all the Symbol is all the Symbol is allthe Symbol is all

×I've always been a fan of how soldiers were used early on in Gunthro and the Epic Blunder; constrained spaces with limited movement options made the soldiers into a predictable puzzle element. This hold is like a harder version of that. Nearly every puzzle room involves doing something while a stalwart is doing something else, but aside from a few nasty secret rooms it's not too difficult to keep the stalwart alive or get him to go where he needs to go. The puzzle is more figuring out how the stalwart can be useful in the first place and then setting things up so that the stalwart goes where you want him. As we've come to expect from a Jeff Ray hold at this point, there's a cute little story that goes along with the puzzle solving. I know the stalwart focus will be off-putting for some people, but this hold is a good example of how stalwarts can be used in ways that are fun rather than frustrating. It's definitely worth checking out.

×
The next generation of serpent types arrives with this revolutionary offering by garrysmurk. Zaphodic serpents have a second head instead of a tail. Every turn the closer head to Beethro is set as the active head, and then moves like a regular serpent. No more standing behind a serpent and watching it walk into a dead end.

Zaphodic serpents target soldiers and stalwarts, and are distracted by decoys like most monsters. Each head chooses its target separately, so a Zaphodic serpent can target a closer decoy, even if its other head can smell a slightly farther away Beethro.

Zaphodic Adventures also introduces Zaphodic adders and rattlesnakes which work as expected. Zaphodic rattlesnakes as especially tricky, as they have no vulnerable body parts.

We can only look forward to the upcoming sequel which is in late development and will include rooms with brains. We can only speculate about some of the interactions. We have been repeatedly warned not to use rooms with both brains and Zaphodic snaketypes, as some of the current behaviors will definitely change.

DyingFlutchman has already announced his intention to publish a hold about Zaphodic Hydra, which promises to be like taking the bull by the horns while grasping the nettle with one hand. He has also promised a hold about Zaphodic gentryii, which will no doubt be challenging fun and dreadful.

×It's a nicely put together little adventure using default enemies. Nothing new here, but it's still a fun playthrough. While the optimal endgame seems fairly obvious, it looks like optimising for the first few scorepoints will be a bit trickier.

×I think it is reasonable to call this the most ambitious project ever created in DROD. Laqueus has not only crafted a devious dungeon of baffling puzzles, they have somehow managed to construct a hold that literally traps the player inside it. I had to get to the thirteenth level just to find a computer I could use to access the forum and post this review. The puzzle to get it to connect to the real-world internet was so elaborate and yet had such an elegant solution that I cannot help but be mesmerized by the skill required to construct it. And they somehow made it work using only roaches, wubbas, and a single orb controlling a firetrap!

Nonetheless, in the end, I cannot recommend this hold. While escaping the problems of the real world was initially appealing - and honestly only seems moreso after checking the news - the architect has made a significant oversight which severely affects the entire experience. As far as I can tell, there is not a single toilet in the entire hold thus far. I suppose it could be argued this increases immersion, as we have to deal with such physical needs the same way that Beethro would; I, however, simply found it to be an unnecessary inconvenience.

×A small concept hold by smell which fixes a serious problem which comes up in Gigantic Jewel Lost. One of the final levels in GJL has a bank, and the player has to break into all the cells by finding passwords hidden around the hold. Unfortunately, this is not secure, as anyone looking at the hold code can see the script and the plaintext password which appears in it.

This hold provides code to only store a cryptographically secure hash of the correct password, and then during play to hash the code entered by the player to allow access.

To prevent a player from peeking in the safe, a second hash of the password is used to decrypt the safe's content. Anyone entering the room with the wrong hash set will find himself surrounded by monsters and unable to escape.

×No matter what fandom you look into, even one as obscure as DROD, one of the kind of people you'll find is those who obsesses over the character's love lives. Mostly this relates to typing up poorly-written fan-fiction of the most illogical pairings imaginable. (and the less we say about "lemons", the better.)

Rarely is someone so dedicated to the craft of shipping that they'll do something like this. Yes, that's right. MakaDat used DROD's level editor to make a dating simulator set in the Eighth.

So, yeah. This is a thing.

The story takes place in the Post Turning era. Beethro somehow manages to run into his old Clearing School Crush, with the rather unoriginal name of "Beethrette" (I deeply regret making that tile set for her now.) Beethro tries to confess his feelings. But it turns out she's engaged with Tendry after he rescued her from the holds.

From there, the story branches into a tree of options. Does Beethro try to prove himself a more worthy suitor than Tendry? Does he try to make Beethrette jealous by getting into a fake relationship with 84th Negotiator, only to genuinely fall in love with her? Or does he completely forget about Beethrette and... somehow get hooked up with Gristy the Goblin? Yeah, I don't get that last one either.

These options, and more than I had the stomach to try for, await. There's no puzzles, no monster fighting, just cutscene after cutscene of this contrived melodrama, with the occasional dialogue tree or free roaming section. Really, not much you couldn't also get out of a non-DROD dating simulator.

Look, if this is the kind of thing you're into, then go ahead and play this. But it's just not the DROD that most of us fell in love with. (I mean... uh... fracking gob! That was impossible to avoid!) Point is, it's not for the type of DROD fan that most players hopefully are.

×This is a very non-traditional hold by an author who has made several custom level sets for other puzzle games, but has only recently made their first work for DROD. Note that this hold has a large amount of dialogue, choice trees, and alternate paths, and very little monster manipulation - in fact, since most of the content is "exploration" mode akin to The City Beneath's city areas rather than "room-like" puzzle solving, no experience with other holds is required.

The plot is the focal point of the hold, and it covers a long span of time in the same small set of locales, which is rather unusual compared to most other DROD holds progressing the plot by physically moving the player character to new locations. Without giving too much away about the plot's progression, it does a good job developing the characters' relationships with one another, and their attempts to cope with society's demands. I should warn the prospective player that it will be a very long time before any rooms are conquered.

Overall, this is a "visual novel" that puts together an experience full of mystery, and that challenges the player to think of their own interpretations. However, it still has plenty of replayability value due to the high level of detail and reactions from NPCs. I would rate this as 2 brains and 8 quality - this hold offers a lot to people interested in environmental storytelling, but not as much to movecount optimizers or lynchpin enthusiasts. Still, I hope this author sticks around and I'd be interested to see their next hold!

×This hold employs the concept that a demo can be viewed as a certificate of a certain decision problem. A demo of this hold gives a counterexample to the abc conjecture. Since this hold has been published, it must be conquerable, which implies that the abc conjecture is false. I personally do not think anyone other than the author could ever conquer this hold.

×
Zch and Kallor have done it again. This hold is their magnum opus. If they ever make another new hold after this, they'd better be prepared for it to get disappointed reviews because The Clockworks is just an impossible act to follow. This review will be spoiler-heavy, so you might want to stop reading now.

It starts with a little story about Beethro being sent to investigate temporal disturbances that have been cropping up. He arrives at a mysterious facility that has been pinpointed as their source. Then the proper hold begins.

As is to be expected, the level is beautiful. The minimap looks like a complex system of gears. I took the liberty of doing some math, and they really did their research, because these gears could actually turn.

And, of course, the puzzles. As is fitting the theme, the main element is time clones. And they really make interesting use of them. I especially liked the puzzles that incorporate the mechanic of cancelling a temporal recording by drinking a potion.

But the hold is a lot more complicated than that. The first clue is the fact that the first puzzle level is named "present". When you find the time vortex leading to the level called "Future", you know things are about to get crazy.

"Future", is of course, an overgrown and dilapidated version of Present's layout. The gears on the minimap are missing some teeth, and other such things. Now, the brilliant thing about these levels is that they're interconnected in a complex way, like Chaco's Hold. Even more clever is that the level's main entrance is in the same place for all versions of the level, so the room coordinates always line up.

You use vortexes to get to new places, but there's also Time Seals scattered through the levels that serve as a means of fast travel to any seal you've previously visited. The system is pretty brilliant. They actually stitched together screenshots of every room in each level, and put them in the overworld map system. It's a perfect way to show off the artistry of how they make a level's layout beautiful.

But back to the hold itself. After going back and fourth between Present and Future a few times, you finally find a vortex to a level called "Past". I could tell that Zch and Kallor actually designed this level first, and then adapted it into variations for the others. But more to the point, this level is all about Temporal Aumtlichs, who in Experiment of Ages fashion, are working on some major science.

I should probably mention the "time door" mechanic that was integrated into the hold. These are a sort of custom element that uses a variable to retain their state when you exit a room. But they also work with the time travel element. If you change the state of a time door in one time period, it will overwrite the state of the corresponding time doors in all later time periods, adding to the metapuzzle of navigating the levels as a whole.

A little more time period-hopping, and you've dropped the blue door in Present and Future, which provides access to a particular room in Past that changes the whole game. Beethro accidentally stops some inspectors from shutting down the whole operation, meaning that the facility was never abandoned. New vortexes appear elsewhere in Past, which lead to a new level called "Altered Present" Additionally, you now find that you're locked out of returning to the regular timeline version of Present and Future.

Now there's a whole different time maze to navigate, but related to the previous ones. The Time Doors in Past still affect the ones in Altered Present, and later, in Altered Future. (Which, by the way, gives Beethro a raygun.)

It all culminates in the Temporal Aumtlichs finally finishing the experiment they started so long ago. But, of course, everything blows up in their faces, and in the chaos, Beethro is transported to the final level, called "Paradox".

Now departing from the variations on the same layout, this level really exemplifies what Zch and Kalor are capable of. The minimap is like an explosion of Mandelbrot-esque geometry, with skattered islands containing shattered fragments of previous levels. They even made clever use of image walls, floors, and pits to make it a mishmash of different room styles that chaotically bleed across the individual rooms. Seriously, you can't appreciate the beauty of this level's big picture just from the minimap alone. Just check it out on the Forum's map tool. You won't regret it.

As for the puzzles in Paradox, well, that involves a custom element called "Malevolent Echoes." They appear every five turns for the room's first spawn cycle, on the tile that the player started at, and proceed to repeat the exact moves the player made. They look like green versions of Beethro, but with each of the six instances having progressively less vibrant colors, the final one that spawns on turn 30 being completely monochrome. They can kill with their bodies, as well as their swords, but if they can't make the move they want, they explode, which is bad because they're also critical heroes and must be kept alive.

In the end, Beethro gets spat out back at the entrance of the facility, at the very first puzzle of the hold, which he finds in an unsolved state. Fittingly, this copy of the room exists in it's own personal level called "Time Loop". Bethro finally understands that he had retroactively caused the temporal disturbances by interfering with the inspectors. So he decides not to go in, and then fades away Back to the Future style, the timeline changing to one in which the temporal disturbances never happened and he had no reason to go there. The hold ends with a cutscene taking place in Past of the inspectors successfully putting a stop to the experiment.

They even managed to fit the Post Mastery level into the story. Accessed from the Altered Present version of the same room where the major story cutscenes from Past and Alternate Future take place, supposedly a "small scale prototype" of the larger experiment. It's titled "Timeless Space". The deleted rooms and harder variations are behind Master Walls, as is traditional, but mercifully, there's also a section blocked only by a Hold Complete Wall that leads to the otherwise inaccessible entrance rooms of the levels for 100% exploration.

Even though I've probably spoiled it for you, you should still play this hold. The puzzles alone are more than worth it. And I also highly recommend first downloading the two custom styles made specially for the hold, "Bronze Rust" and "Neo-Cyber". You'll want the actual levels to match their overworld map versions.

×
"Beethro's Journey of Over Time and Space" by Xidnaris is a very..unique hold. A very, very, very unique hold. And when I say "unique", I mean...

First of all, I have to say I was really excited when I saw this was coming in on the hold pipeline. I mean, "Another Xidnaris Hold" was a masterpiece take on the concept of an unfinished hold getting published as a finished one, and I say that without a hint of sarcasm whatsoever. And then there was that one contest entry, with the flamethrowers? Genius. But then there comes this bootleg re-hash of dozens of weird concepts all jammed into one, and it's...just...all over the place! None of it makes any sense!

I mean, I was excited to return to Spheriture Laboratories again; I thought there might be some interesting new Tele-Sphere puzzles. But no, it's just spheres getting fungi grown all up on them. Fungi, really!? And then there's the re-re-revisit of "The Diagonal Road", like that joke hasn't been played out over and over again by this architect already. I won't even get into the "Temporal Warp Token" nonsense, or the buggy "magic caber" weapon...

Fun fact: Beethro's sword got stuck on a Tapeworm! It didn't just happen to me once, but over and over again throughout the hold. Given Drowning Fletcherman's impeccable scripting prowess, I can only blame the architect Xidnaris for somehow managing to screw up someone else's brilliant custom element! And the architect doesn't seem to know how to make good puzzles with the nuclear control rods, either, despite littering them all over three of the levels.

And then there's the level with the lava spiders and the mobile dragon teeth. How unoriginal!

So anyway, 5/10, average experience. Needed more testing for tighter puzzle design and less buggy custom elements.

×
After hearing about this hold on the radio, I knew I had to try it. I love just how easy and seamless it is to use. I think that even the A.I that wrote this review would have no problem completing the hold. I'm so glad I found this one! Five RBSs.