So apparently 7 years ago on this very forum I played through the original DROD game and did a LP of my way through it. I even dug up the link:
Behold all the broken images and despair~
Anyways I decided it is finally time to play the final game of the original four I got in a bundle ages ago, DROD: The City Beneath. I am not LPing that game, although I did consider creating a topic to jot down my random thoughts while playing mainly because I had a good name for it (“DROD: Journal to The City Beneath” as the second DROD game is named “Journey to Rooted Hold” and I like references no one will get). Basically that felt like work and I just wanted to play the thing, so random comments in here will have to suffice.
Here are basically the quick hits of what to know about it:
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DROD is a puzzle game where you have to make your way through a few hundred rooms and kill all the various creatures in them to pass them. It is built on a “you move, then everything else does” system, you get lots of different behaviors and mechanics that lay atop one another to create some very interesting situations, and the people who design these games are generally very good at doing just that. Click on that link if you want a more in-depth mechanical intro.
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The City Beneath is generally considered to be the hardest of the five canon DROD games (much like a ZZT or such there is a massive fan scene with hundreds of fan made holds which range from rather easy to one step short of impossible). The only other contender for hardest would be the most recent entry The Second Sky, but I discovered a shocking fact when I saw Mauve post their completion screens of these two games: they completed TCB in 37+ hours with 35,036 kills, and TSS in 43+ hours with 8,567 kills. Yes, 6 hours longer with only 20-25% the number of kills. Basically expect a lot of battles of attrition against constantly spawning enemies in this one, which at the least is a bit mentally draining.
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This is one of a few puzzle games that legit scares me a bit. The first DROD game I played, Journey to Rooted Hold, was much earlier in my puzzle game rediscovery over a decade back and was legitimately just at the limit of what I could figure out/handle. I had to look up help on 3 or 4 rooms in it which is something I rarely do, very few puzzle games pushed me as hard as it did. By all accounts this game is a full level of difficulty beyond that (the devs list JtRH as a 3 out of 5 difficulty and TCB as 4/5, again with only some of the crazier fan made ones getting a 5) and while I’ve played many more puzzles games over the past decade plus… there is a very real chance I have bitten off more than I can chew.
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I have taken two steps to make things easier for me (well three I guess with the no LP deal). One, I am playing the game in the updated engine (basically each DROD game is released with a new engine and the old games often end up back-ported into them, sometimes losing their original tiles in exchange for lighting effect and the such). Normally I’d stick with the original but that game has no ability to undo moves while the newer engine gives the player unlimited undos and I respect myself enough to give myself that break. The second is that I am playing simultaneously with a longtime online friend (and occasional SB poster) who dropped that game halfway through ages ago and is picking it back up so that we may cheer and support each other hopefully past the finish line. Only took us several months to get our schedules lined up for it!
That’s it basically. I started it up tonight (well technically yesterday but there is a shocking amount of talking/story at the start that took up all my time then) and didn’t get that stuck through the first two areas. A new thing introduced early on is a switch that shifts any one-way arrows back and forth 45 degrees when you step on them and it turns out I have a poor ability to visualize that without triggering and watching it first. Also the tutorial showed that there are now three distinct types of mud (long story short: bane of my existence in these games) and switches you can step on that switch them from one type to another and I legitimately shuddered at the evil potential that portends. Basically my current DROD anxiety level is at a 5 out of 10.