Let's DROD: The Grand Finale~

[username]

I’ve had the notion for a bit now that when I got around to playing another DROD game that I’d like to do something Let’s Play-esque with it.

I have no clue how to actually do that. Let’s begin anyways.

I am going with the original DROD game now known as King Dugan’s Dungeon, which is not the original version of the first game but one with some later amenities added back in. It is almost certainly the most basic one of these and others would make better LPs, but the ones I haven’t played are legendarily difficult and I’m not quite up for that just yet so oh well! If one were to wish to play along at home there is an official free flash version of the original game available here that has slightly different level layouts and was never quite finished. This might never be finished either, perhaps they will randomly stop at the same point! Tune in to see~

So…

…ummm…

…oh yeah, what the game is. DROD, or Deadly Rooms of Death, is a puzzle game in action/adventure game’s clothing. You have to go around and slay various creatures (mostly roaches) with your giant sword. Doing so requires making use of a Shiren the Wanderer-esque control scheme where every individual move you make is matched by each of the enemies making a move of their own, with everything on screen remaining perfectly still except for when you do something. The control scheme is simple enough. The number pad make you move in one of eight directions (the middle five key has you wait for a turn while everything else makes a move) while W and Q keys make you rotate your sword 45 degrees clock- or counterclockwise respectively. Backspace takes back the most recent move and R restarts either at the beginning of the room or the most recent save point (any Xs you see in screenshots that you have touched).

Your ultimate goal, as in most puzzle games, is genocide. You must find every single living creature in this game world and kill it. The king tasked you with exterminating everything in the castle and by god you can’t let the king down. Ultimately the mission will be a failure as there will certainly be some hidden rooms I miss and hence life will go on but at least the main castle will be left a lifeless tomb.

Anyways enough of that, let’s get to the game itself.

Here is the very first roach in the game, all by its lonesome. I hit the circular yellow switch to let it out and maneuver my sword into it as roaches are particularly susceptible to swords. If anything touches the player he dies due to a rare genetic disease that afflicted many early gaming protagonists. One roach is rather easy pickings but the game…

…ramps up in this regard…

…rather quickly.

While that third room seems a bit unfair it is rather simple due to the fact that roaches are morons. They can only head directly towards you and if say a wall was between you and them they’d continually walk directly into said wall until you moved elsewhere. As you can see if you move up and down a bit…

…you can get them coming directly at you in two neat lines. At that point you can either rotate your sword back and forth or move up and down a tile (if I could make gifs one would go here, you’ll just have to use your imagination) as they march directly into their deaths. Such creatures are too dumb to let live.

That’s pretty much it for the basics as well as floor one (what a coincidence!) so before we move on to the second let’s take a quick look at that last screenshot. The mug in the top left corner is that of Beethro, who you are. Its mouth moves along with what voice acting a buck fifty will apparently get you. The lower left corner has the mini-map that is gradually filled in as you make your way through a given floor. The room you are in will turn green on said map when you kill the final enemy in it (again, anything living is your enemy), and the door which blocks off the staircase to the next floor will only open when all life on a given floor has been extinguished.

Next time, the dreaded second floor~

*side note: feel free to let me know if the screenshots are a bit too big or small.

[janitor]

DROD’s a good game.

I am not a huge fan of King Dugan’s, aside from a few very specific floors (notably 22/23), so fast forwarding over the dull/repetitive puzzles. JtRH is paced much better.

you can play DROD in a browser if you want to! Also there’s the half-assed clone I made that I didn’t finish because things. Game might make a bit more sense once you’ve messed with one of them a bit.

[username]

JtRH would have likely made a better Let’s Play due to both the 39th Slayer and my slow descent into madness during the latter half of the game, but I already played that one (Gunthro as well). That leaves the original and The City Beneath. JtRH is just about the hardest game I’ve ever actually beaten and TCB is supposed to be a full step beyond that so I chose the game I could theoretically actually beat.

…I don’t think I ever figured out basics ii and I beat a couple of these games. I think I need the ramp up to it or something.

[username]

The second floor, or: this post is far too long.

The second floor starts with…

…a choice! Be careful as whichever direction you chose to go here will have reverberations throughout the remainder of the game. That is a lie; more often than not the game is set up so that you have a few directions you can go and hence a few different puzzles on the floor available to you. This is good as if this game is anything like its follow-up the difficulty level will eventually reach the “dear god this is causing me physical pain!” stage and being able to go do something else for a bit will be a blessing.

So, should we go right or up? It doesn’t really matter, I didn’t take a picture of either of those rooms.

As this is still a rather plain level focused just on roaches I’m gonna take this chance to go over a few key if basic ideas touched upon here.

This room is a good example as hey! There are two things of note here!

A is the first appearance of a new enemy type, we’ll talk about him later. B is what I want to talk about first. What I want you to notice here is that I screwed up a bit and got a roach on a tile directly next to my side. Since my sword only rotates 45 degrees a turn I cannot swing it into that roach before it is on me and I die a screaming death. Worse still is that my usual solution to such a situation is also unavailable. Usually I would take a step to the northeast and in doing slow slice my sword across that roach (we appear to move at the same time but my movement has priority), here I cannot do so due to the presence of that… pit above some clouds. This dungeon has some peculiar geography.

Regardless of that, here are the two moves that gets me out of this jam.

The solution is to take a diagonal step behind a corner, the pit/corner preventing the roach from being able to go up the same vertical level I just did. This buys you the equivalent of a 45 degree sword turn, letting you finish the swipe in the next move and rewarding you with a tasteful blood splatter. This may be a bold position, but I believe most puzzle games would be improved by adding blood splatters. Your move Tetris!

Now while in this case I only had to do this because I made a mistake, soon enough there will be situations where this is unavoidable and grasping little movement tricks such as this becomes essential.

Now that B is done we can talk about A. A is a wraithwing, made famous in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. These flying creatures are cowards that will constantly run from the player if you approach them, even over pits that you cannot traverse, but will approach if you turn away from them. When you kill one they are resurrected as a Boo in a Super Mario game.

They are generally tricky to corner and… oh.

Well that was easy. He is now cornered as there is a roach behind him that blocks his retreat as the wraithwing cannot fly over him because of… ummmm, reasons?

…

Anyways! You kill the too-stupid-to-realize-he-can-fly-over-a-roach creature then make your way to the bottom left of the screen which funnels all the roaches who were previously trying to get at you through solid walls along a single row of tiles along the bottom of the room. With enemies this dumb it seems unlikely that I will ever die.

(I will die so much before this is through)

This here is the major new element introduced in floor 2: the queen roach and the clock… elements then.

The clock along the left of the screen ticks off thirty seconds, each move you make equivalent to a single second. After every thirty seconds the queen roach gives birth to numerous offspring, just as roaches do in real life. This room has been constructed so that it takes way more than thirty moves to trigger the switch and get back to the door, in which time…

…this single queen gave birth to these many regular roaches. While this particular situation isn’t that hard to handle it is the introduction of the concept of the conservation of moves. You better believe that I took a diagonal every opportunity I could on the way to that switch to save precious seconds as the game becomes more and more about maximizing your movement efficiency as you progress further on, the clock being one of the more straightforward ways the game reinforces this.

The rest of the floor is mostly spent running the player through a few more basic queen roach scenarios, we’ll just stop to take a look at a single more instructive one.

This room teaches the player to deal with one of the key traits of the queen roach: her cowardice. While the regular roaches come at you in a straight line the queen will always flee you, only capable of being killed once cornered. In this room you are forced to take advantage of this behavior due to the force arrows, floor tiles that only allow you to go in the direction they point. It is impossible for the player to get to the central portion of this room… but the queen roach is too stupid to realize this.

The queen will initially be trapped when running away by these force arrows as well, but if you notice I marked where there is an extra row of tiles both above and below the line of arrows that keep you away from her. If you step on either of these then you will now be either above or below the queen, forcing her to flee in the opposite direction in addition to the left away from you.

This basically results in you moving up and down along that line of arrows, killing the birthed roaches while guiding the queen through the arrow course until she reaches the top left corner and exposes herself. At this point you can launch a direct assault and kill the foolish monarch along with all of her numerous spawn.

Pop quiz!

This room has a similar set-up. The switches work to prevent you from being able to reach that inner section where the three queens are hiding. The sections directly above or below them both lack the space for you to get behind the queens, preventing you from being able to get them to run out of their section from here. What do you do?

The single tile where you enter the room is behind them. Don’t accidentally step into the next room though as it resets your progress.

One last puzzle from this floor.

I include this one as it is the earliest “rush” room in the game. You hit the switch, both yellow doors disappear and fifty roaches charge you all at once. If you don’t move quick you will be overrun, so you have to pick a defensive location that offers you a good deal of protection.

I chose this spot as the corner I am up against protects me in five directions, with the roaches only being able to attack along two (you can generally defend two; three is much more perilous). The random bits of wall also serve to “catch” a lot of roaches so after I finish off the immediate roaches I will move up to where the arrow is pointing and move up and down a few times to clear the section of roaches directly in front of me, then continue on in a way that attracts the attention of only a single group of roaches at a time.

The game lets you know when all are dead and that you are free to move on to the next floor. Thanks game!

The game decided this was a good time to introduce these destructible walls, so I’ll trust its judgment. These cracked walls are destroyed when they come in contact with your sword, which can be used either as part of the room’s puzzle or along the periphery to hide the entrance to a hidden bonus room. In the center of this group of walls I circled a scroll, which generally give you a useful hint when you step onto their tile. Let’s see what knowledge it wants to bestow upon me.

…

Screw you game.

With that unpleasantness out of the way we have completed our second floor together. Well really I completed them, you just read along and in truth by this point are likely just skimming to the end while pondering whether it is really worth clicking the bloodpotion button. This was a long one but I think this wraps up introducing all of the basic elements. Now we should hopefully get to pick up the pace a bit and shift our focus more onto new obstacles and clever puzzles.

Next time: more basics will likely bog us down~

[jsnlv]

I love these games. I used to have a CaravelNet subscription just so I could compete for best times and most efficient solutions during the The City Beneath launch period. Looking forward to more from this thread!

[username]

That is pretty impressive! Hopefully it takes a while before I start doing in-game things in a dangerously inefficient manner where you are too polite to criticize me for it but it starts to drive you nuts.

---

Floor 3… is rather boring, so let’s just quickly introduce the new elements that pop up.

Annoying switch puzzles

I… may have accidentally overwritten some of the screenshots I took from this floor.

This room was basically the peak ridiculousness of this conceot. Each of those nine switches affects the eight doors in a “switch 3 toggles door 3, opens door 8, closes door 7” kind of way where you have to get all of them open at the same time. Most are less obnoxious than that, I’m sure you can get the basic idea. Worth noting is that you can click on a switch and it’ll highlight which doors it affects

Evil Eyes

…I couldn’t remember the whole room, so just the important part here. The evil eye is a giant eyeball that sits on a given tile staring in one of eight directions. The thing that makes it unique is that unlike the other enemies it only moves when you cross its line of sight (fortunately you can click on them so that said line of sight is shown). Once it sees you it heads directly for you in pretty much the same manner as your typical roach. Later on we will see puzzles where triggering them can cause serious repercussions, on this floor it doesn’t really matter all that much.

Invisibility potions

Now that I’m warmed up a bit I think I’ve got a pretty good handle on this drawing thing.

That purple bottle is an invisibility potion. Step onto its tile and…

…you become possessed by an 11-by-11 grey box! A side effect of this possession is that no enemy that is outside the bounds of said grey box can see the player. They will stand in place until you get close enough to them so that the grey box envelops them, at which point they will again attack. This makes it easier to lure one or a few enemies away from a group at a time and kill them, which is why it has often been said that Demon’s Souls is the DROD of third person action rpgs; the thief ring is functionally identical.

I put this up as it is an example of a pretty cool thing the game does from time to time. Beethro will on occasion make remarks before, during or after a puzzle that more or less function as signposts for optional but advanced challenges. Pictured here he is letting us know that one could try to tackle the room without using that potion. In the room I first drew above he will comment “I could have opened all these doors by now if I was a little more clever” if you don’t hit the switches in the optimal order. It is a really nice touch and just about the best in-universe way to handle something like this.

Force arrow madness

That room looks impossible, doesn’t it? I mean it isn’t, if it was there’s be no screenshots past this point. The trick is that there is something about these arrows that I did not mention before and that is that you can step on and off them perpendicular to the direction they are pointing. I had a great screenshot that showed this off rather well, but… ah hell, wait a sec.

While Beethro can’t go directly down over these arrow tiles he can get besides them and walk across them from right to left or vice-versa. I drew a line showing the path through the above puzzle to give a better indication as to how it works in practice.

Mimics

Mimics show up a couple times in floor 3 but are the near-exclusive focus of floor 4, so let’s skip ahead.

Those aquamarine bottles all contain the formula to create exact clones of yourself, aquamarine being the universal recognized color for clones. You take six swigs of cloning juice, partake in some puzzling and voila~

You now have a room free of pesky other living creatures and overrun by clones, clones as you know having been declared as officially not-living by Vatican II.

Mimics are a bit trickier than the other things we’ve come across on these last two floors, so let’s take a look at a typical mimic puzzle.

Mimic puzzles are often of the maze variety, this one has three mazes for the three different mimics potions available. Also noted are those tiles that fall after you or a clone steps across them as this is one of the first times they are a factor. I don’t want to tell King Dugan what’s what but large portions of this dungeon are falling apart in addition to being infested. I can take care of the latter but he should really get some contractors down here before the whole thing collapses.

Oh, right, the mimics. You sprint across that deathtrap of a bridge into section A and drink the first potion.

This potion drains all of the color out of the world and grants you the ability to hurl lightning. A side effect of this is that wherever your lightning strike lands an exact double of you is created. These clones have no brains (a running theme in this game is that everything other than you is stupid, to make up for all the times that the game makes you feel stupid) which means that they will mirror your moves exactly. You move up a square, they move up a square. You rotate your sword, they rotate their sword in the same direction. From here it is just a few turns until the one roach in mimic section A is sliced and diced (roaches observe Vatican II and will pay no attention to the mimics, remaining solely focused onto the sole living threat which is you).

The problem is that shoddy workmanship has trapped you in your little section A, the only way out being through a locked door that can only be opened by the switch that fortunately enough is located in mimic A’s section. The problem is that it is all the way across said section which is most of a 14-by-14 square, much larger than the almost 5-by-4 square you inhabit.

Fortunately there is a way around this handicap as this would be a poor place to end this game. You see…

…

…

Stupid piece of crap, “oh this is a new sessions so I’d better start labeling back at “screen01” and delete any other images that may have the same name”, no way that causes any headaches.

Oh, you’re back.

So that totally-not-hastily-thrown-together diagram shows off the other key mimic behavior. Original you is in room A, clone you is in room B with his back against a block. Original you moves backwards a few tiles but clone you stays in place because there is no where for him to move in said direction. Look back at the section the mimic is in and you’ll notice an awful lot of stuff for him to get stuck against, including a number of tiles just waiting to fall away into nothingness (mimics are at least smart enough to not walk into a pit, for them they function identically to a wall) (kinda odd that as I go down further floors I never find shattered tiles that fell from the previous floor) (you know, maybe the staircases between floors are taking me up and not down, I never really considered that).

After a bit of this and…

You are free! Free to go over and get yourself trapped in the exact same way two more times! It is either that or let two roaches live and that is one thing I cannot abide.

Bonus advanced technique: fancy edition

We’re gonna have to learn this at some point, might as well do it here.

Beethro has got himself into a bit of trouble here. As soon as he takes a step forward roaches from two opposite directions will be right on him. What to do in such a grim situation? Some of you are saying “Isn’t that a mimic bottle right there?” It is, but it is a red herring; the mimic is needed to hit that switch so that you can get that final roach in the upper right.

Now I know I sorta messed up this entry a bit what with all the missing screenshots and MSPaint stand-ins so I wanted to make it up to you. I went out and got you one of them fancy moving pictures to show you exactly what has to be done when facing such a situation. Oh don’t thank me, you all deserve it and god knows this is simpler than having me try to explain it in writing.

If you want to practice it yourself you can load up mauve’s DRODlike and try basics II (also inspired by Vatican II). Those roaches/zombies won’t know what hit them!

Double bonus: play along at home!

Here’s a puzzle I didn’t like and that took me way too long! The set-up is obvious: you hit that central switch and all those roaches are let free and head right for you from every direction. What do you do?

[spoiler]

If you are me you do the wrong thing for fifteen to twenty minutes before noticing the circled details. I diagonally stepped onto the upper of those force arrows, I didn’t notice I could have stepped diagonally down behind the arrows until after all the roaches were all dead.[/spoiler]

I think that’s an iffy lynchpin to hang a puzzle on, feel free to disagree.

Next time: hopefully no more technical issues!

[janitor]

King Dugan’s really, really likes to play tricks on your eyesight and patience, rather than your mind. I caught onto that last one fairly quickly because I just assumed it would be something stupid.

This is also the game with some dumb spider puzzles.

At the very least the upgraded version makes it less painful when you run into the puzzles where tar hides stuff. The original architect’s edition is completely opaque!

I need to work on drodlike; v2.0 is actually almost ready but i’m bashing on the UI code and got distracted by 3000 other things like existential despair work

[janitor]

On another note, the backswiping actually completely confused me at first because it was my first DROD. I am only moderately ashamed to say it took me about half an hour to figure out what the hell I needed to do.

[username]

The backswiping isn’t as bad here as they have it set up so that you will almost certainly use the mimic the first time to clear it with ease. You then go through the breakable wall to the blatant scrolls that tell you that the mimic is needed to reach that switch, and I think mentions back steps or back something being needed. That at least gives you a starting idea, but I agree that it is a tricky thing to initially wrap ones mind around.

[username]

I realized that while I have a vague idea where I’m going with all this, anyone who happens to read this is just sorta going along for the ride as I work my way through these early levels. What that means is that we need some sort of…

Mission Statement

Genocide.

Okay okay, the main reason I wanted to do this was because in the prior DROD games I played there was a number of puzzles or situations that I thought were incredibly clever and I’d like a place to go “Hey! Check out this really cool puzzle!” The thing is that they are generally in the mid- to late game and are built upon all the stuff learned along the way, so if I just put up a screenshot of say a floor 19 puzzle only people who actually played the games would have any idea what they are looking at (and they probably played the game already anyways). Given how much stuff these games throw at you that means laying a whole lot of groundwork as the game likely does a lot of that in its firsts third or so itself.

So! We’re still in the introducing stuff phase, I’ll try to help explain things and make it as interesting as I can. Hopefully in the near future, assuming the tar doesn’t break my soul, we can move past that and spend most of our time looking at swell puzzles.

I did figure out a way to help with the explaining though…

GIFs!!

Have you guys ever seen these things before my last post here? They’re great! A series of images played in sequence to simulate movement, the world is full of such wonders. Even better is that I found an easy way to make them, and since the game takes place one movement at a time getting the necessary screenshots is a breeze. They make explaining stuff much easier. Check these out.

Evil Eyes!

You can see how crossing their line of sight awakens them, and how they’ll then follow you.

Roach Queens!

You can see how not only she gives birth on the stroke of thirty, but how she does so on every available space around her and how many turns it takes for her baby roaches to reach maturity and attack.

Wraithwings!

You can see how the easiest way to kill one of them is to get them lined up with a wall or object along one of the four cardinal directions and charge straight at them. This is sometimes unnecessary though, we will revisit them in a bit.

Okay… don’t want to overdo it. Let’s take a look at floor five.

As four floor was mimic central, floor five is all about getting good use out of the wraithwings and evil eyes. The problem is that the wraithwing ones don’t lend themselves to easily understandable screenshots due to their more erratic behavior.

Here you have to kill all of them while also dealing with the queen roaches. That is easy enough to understand but it’s a hard to digest image. Know that you will have to corner them to kill them.

I’m actually gonna instead look at a couple of the basic falling tile puzzles, this first of which features those creepy eyes.

This is basically a trainer puzzle where they teach you the basics of choosing a sensible path. This one does have a ton of eyes. They actually aren’t that bad to deal with as you generally only trigger one or two at a time, and as these tiles only fall after you step off of them you are free to stand and swing your sword on a given tile for as long as you desire.

As the scroll says, the main thing to worry about is that you leave a path back to the starting area. As this is more about getting your feet wet than actually challenging you it is as simple as sticking to one side on the way up, and the other side on the way out.

This is the other main flavor of tile puzzle. You are given a lot of space to play with, but you must always make sure that you do not cut off your route out of the room as even if you kill every enemy if you cannot exit the room it does not count as completed. The other thing to consider is that since you often have to kill these wraithwings against a wall of some sort you want to take care to leave much of the periphery of the room accessible in case you need to pin them against the side of the room. If it goes well you are left with a room that resembles this.

Let’s take a quick look at one eye puzzle before we head for the next floor, just to go over one handy thing.

The yellow doors that look like walls would block the eyes from seeing you, but you have to hit the switch before you get there so that is a gauntlet you are gonna have to run. I want to focus on the immediate next step though where the player has to handle that smaller but closer batch of eyes.

As you can see, that easily ends in death as there is no way to enter that does not trigger too many of them to handle all at once. One must instead take a quick look to see what else the player has available to take advantage of.

While you are on the arrows the eyes cannot attack you due to said arrows, so if one simply remains on them they are functionally untouchable. The later gauntlet requires better handling of sight lines initially, but those arrows can be used in a similar manned to deal with the mass of eyes located at the bottom of the room.

With that we can move on to the next floor and… hold up a sec.

We have crumbly blocks in each of the four corners of this final room. Let me check the four of them out and…

We found our first secret room!

The first tile in this room has an invisibility potion on it. While that potion is generally useful in this case it is actually a handicap, and that is what makes this one of those clever puzzles I was alluding to earlier.

See, I was wrong about the behavior of the wraithwings before. They are only outright cowardly when they are on their own, when there are others around they become a bit braver and will attack. I haven’t exactly figured out how close other creatures must be for them to be aggressive or even if it matters what type of creatures are present. What is key though is that the enemies that do not see you are not aggressive towards you, which combined with the far walls of the room being unreachable creates an interesting challenge. While the wraithwings even when alone will often try to stay within a certain distance of you, that distance is larger than the size of your grey invisibility box. While in normal situations drawing one of them away from a corner is as simple as walking away… here they will simply remain there as you will becomes invisible to them before they will be comfortable enough to approach.

Killing the first few is relatively simply but by the end you will be guiding one or two of them around the screen but away from the edges to get them close enough to other wraiths so that they’ll be comfortable enough to come within sword range of you. Even after that you have to make sure that the final one is capable of being led to the one central wall block so that it can be killed and you can finish the room.

That is not terrifying in the least.

We’re actually gonna mostly skip over this floor as it doesn’t introduce anything new and is rather gimmicky. You can go in one of three directions to start the floor and…

.

.

You will get a series of puzzles built off of the same basic layout and concept, these three being from if you decide to go left. Actually, for that last one let’s…

Play along at home~

I’ll tell you off the top that every switch must be used, that one enters and exits that mimic potion room via a pair of breakable walls on the left side of it, and that the mimic is required. Taking a quick look at the layout what would you use the mimic for?

[spoiler]

As far as I can tell you can’t make it through that one section of eyes from above and survive, and once you enter that one switch area it is impossible to get back out. I also had the mimic take care of the lower left switch by starting him there but once you leave there you cannot get back so it is important to clear all the enemies from there when you have the chance.[/spoiler]

Next time: Why did it have to be…

[janitor]

That one room with the zillion trapdoors and eyeballs is absurdly tedious. I get what it’s trying to teach you, but it just takes forever and the idea sets in really early.

In the original Architect’s Edition you didn’t have an undo key, so if you made one false step you were probably groaning and redoing the last several minutes. I don’t know how I ever cleared that version.

[username]

If it makes you feel any better I had access to an undo key and still managed to screw that room up about halfway through.

A briefer entry for…

Floor Seven

Another floor and with it a new creature.

Now don’t you worry, those aren’t snakes, those are serpents. Snakes can be hurt by swords while serpents are totally impervious to them, I learned that from Animal Planet. An enemy that we cannot hurt seems like it’d be rather unfair for us but fortunately…

…thanks Beethro, way to steal my thunder. As he said, if you can lead a serpent into a dead end its tail will continue moving forward into its now-stopped head until it explodes. I’m not joking about that.

How else would you explain that? I guess the serpent’s locomotion is driven by its hind segment, not sure where the brain is though as they are rather prone to slithering into rather obvious traps.

They have a few other quirks to be aware of, one of which I cannot explain. For one they can not move in a diagonal direction, so if you can lead one down a path where the only way out is via a diagonal step they will die in there.

While my sword is unfortunately blocking the view a bit this shows that they also cannot move over a force arrow, even one that is pointing in a forward direction. You may have also noted in these gifs that there is a clock on these screens. While a serpent will generally follow you when within a suitable distance when they are further away their movement, primarily when and how they change directions, will be determined by the clock. Over two games and change I have never figured out the specifics of this though, it likely would make thing easier but it apparently is not necessary to learn.

There really isn’t a lot to show with these standard serpent puzzles as the main goal remains the same when they are the sole creature in play. I only included the above screenshot because of the Tron reference. I do want to take a second to show another way they are often used.

You will see certain puzzles that start off with an extra long serpent’s head already trapped. In these cases the serpent is functioning like a timer, each movement removing one segment from its length. In this particular puzzle the queen roaches are isolated and birthing standard roaches around the clock, your goal being to follow the shrinking tail around to eliminate these roaches quickly once they become exposed. If you fall behind you can quickly be overwhelmed.

This was located behind a standard door, I’m not sure why it would qualify as a secret.

The fine print always gets you (the serpent isn’t missing in that picture it, umm… can just turn invisible once every thousand years or so. Yeah, let’s go with that). Because of this loophole you are not required to clear this room, hence it being listed as a secret one. I would rather die than not have it do so itself, so we are doing it.

Going back to the initial screenshot we have another case where the serpent is acting as a timer. Those are two normal roaches trapped by it’s head. To release them you must hit the two switches in the lower left where I drew lines to the doors they open. The problem is that if the serpent is not there to temporarily trap the leftmost roach when you open the first set of doors it will be waiting right outside the second set when you go to open them, a situation which is fatal as the second switch also closes the door directly behind you.

What this means is that you must manage to trap and kill the queen roach and then make it to those switches before the serpent expires. The queen can easily lead you in circles around those paths if you don’t go to the switches in the correct manner, take my word for it as it is hard to describe. If you manage that…

…you should have plenty of time left over.

[WarpZone]

@username

How else would you explain that? I guess the serpent’s locomotion is driven by its hind segment, not sure where the brain is though as they are rather prone to slithering into rather obvious traps.

I took it as the serpent starving to death over time as it is unable to move and gather whatever nutrients (roach feces?) it must be collecting on the dungeon floor.

Serpents seem to favor vertical or horizontal movement every 5 steps (but will break that rule if they can eat you on an adjacent square), but like Wraithwing flock behavior, I never sussed it out completely.

Although I believe some of the less predictable/manipulable elements of DROD are generally frowned on by hardcore players and can make room optimization frustrating (and are one of the regrets of the original creator), I think there’s value in slightly mysterious rules where a full understanding of the system feels just outside your grasp, provided the puzzles don’t suddenly force a precise execution of a fickle and unclear behavior (which they are occasionally guilty of). Being able to organically play with clusters of enemies and come to realizations about their behavior is one of my favorite things about DROD, and is a direction I would have rather seen the series pursue more, with fewer rooms of switch puzzles or arrows on every tile. Brains and the Slayer are great examples of this, or how Gunthro’s shallow water (underdeveloped in its campaign) has broad consequences across multiple elements.

Anyway – I never made it all the way through KDD, having been burned by the unfriendly Architect’s Edition and playing the JtRH demo in the meantime and never looking back, so I’m here to see if there’s anything interesting I might have missed in the later levels. Well, and to see username’s reaction to level 13 (shhhh, nobody say anything!).

[janitor]

If you play the Flash DROD, it actually has a little additional symbol on the clock that states if the snakes are preferring vertical or horizontal. The main games don’t have this, sadly.

I actually really don’t like snakes as a mechanic; every time you’re supposed to manipulate their movement it just becomes a mess of trial and error until they agree with you. I get that there’s some value in things being sort of weird and hard to understand, but at some point it stops being a puzzle and starts being “ugh, I’ll just throw myself at it until it does what I want it to because I’m really just manipulating a secret timer and cycling until it agrees with me”

Definitely want to do more with clever enemy formations and manipulation thereof when I get back to working on drodlike. Feel free to poke me in messages or on its thread if you want to bounce ideas around.

[username]

@WarpZone

@username

How else would you explain that? I guess the serpent’s locomotion is driven by its hind segment, not sure where the brain is though as they are rather prone to slithering into rather obvious traps.

I took it as the serpent starving to death over time as it is unable to move and gather whatever nutrients (roach feces?) it must be collecting on the dungeon floor.

This will require more Animal Planet viewing to decide.

I like the serpents because it is nice to have an enemy that has to be defeated in a truly different manner, but I can’t deny being frustrated when I’m down to one left and it becomes a grind to get them to act in the way I want them too.

Anyways, to the next floor where…

…oh god no.

Well, that’s it for this episode! I’m gonna go lie down for a bit.

[Gate88]

Please do the 3 tar mothers secret room. Also please do it without using the checkpoints or undos.

[janitor]

@Gate88

Please do the 3 tar mothers secret room. Also please do it without using the checkpoints or undos.

aaaaaaaaaa

[username]

@Gate88

Please do the 3 tar mothers secret room. Also please do it without using the checkpoints or undos.

Fun fact: the below was written before I read these responses.

---

Okay, I’m gonna level with all of you: I did a poor job taking screenshots on this floor. I’d basically wake up every so often, realize that I haven’t taken a screenshot in a while and hit the button to do so, then get wrapped up all over again. That left me with a bunch of screens but not a lot of the type that would be useful.

There is a simple reason for this: I hate tar. It is the worst element in these games and I think it may be virtually impossible to make a puzzle involving it that isn’t a numbing grind. I despaired when I started this floor not just because it was gonna be a ton of these puzzles but also because it meant they’ll be present moving forward. I had some hope that we wouldn’t get to them for several more floors. Alas.

I will try to explain what makes them so annoying with the pictures I do have available.

Here is a quick gif as to how they initially work. Tar can only be cut along a flat surface, if you look at the first frame the sword is over the curved corner and doing nothing. When it is cut that section is removed, and I believe that any section that is left as a single tile breaks off as these do. Anyways, these one tile tar segments come alive and will attack you in the same manner as a roach. Here is another gif that shows this in action.

These early tar puzzles are generally like mazes. You have to make sure not to screw up in that you accidentally only leave a curved surface reachable by your sword, as that functions to permanently block off that path. Avoid that and it’s generally not long until you cut your way through like so.

I must make one warning though: while the puzzle is considered complete once I kill those last two roaches if on the way back I slash the tar and have any more bits come to life the puzzle is once again classified as active. Killing the stray bit will complete it once more, but if you leave the screen without doing so when you return it will once again be in its initial unfinished state. In JtRH it is possible to trap yourself with no way out if you do that in the wrong place.

I did that in the wrong place in JtRH.

Still, this is not too bad. Nothing I have shown so far would explain why these puzzles can be such nightmares. This is because there is one elements I have not gotten to yet.

Tar mothers are the bane of my existence. See, those eyes mean that the tar is now alive and the clock is back in play. I don’t have a good picture to show this off here so I’ll show a later puzzle in its initial state, then after a few cycles have been completed.

After each thirty move cycle every tar body on the screen expands out by one square along the entirety of its periphery. Worse still is that at any point where it would expand to only a single tile protrusion these tar mothers will birth tar bab…

…

…Wow. Ummm, guess they didn’t think through that extra naming step. Sentient tars is too long, let’s just call them tar bits. Anyways, from any of these points they will not only spew these tar bits, they will continue to do so every thirty moves. As noted they count as living creatures so each of they all must be “cleaned” before you leave the screen. If you note at the upper right in the second screen I have screwed up and left some of these bits where I cannot ever reach them, meaning that I have to start it over.

You stop this endless tar growth by hacking your way into the middle of it and slashing both eyes. Once it is blind it no longer can see where its edges are and stops growing, just like most animals.

We’re gonna stop and take a look at one particular puzzle that requires understanding two different concepts in order to complete.

This is a very tricky puzzle in that it is possible for you to end up in a fail state before you have any clue that is the case. When any of those doors open if the tar happens to grow into the tiles they occupy it will become impossible for it to be removed because… shoot, I have to have a useful screen somewhere.

Here, do you see those 2x2 spheres in the circled area? As there is no flat area left they are impossible to eliminate unless the tar mother grows them out again. Jumping back to the previous puzzle, if the tar grows over any of those door areas it will be impossible to reduce them beyond a semi-circle that will block the path either in front of or, more importantly, behind you. In this case it requires only opening one door at a time and totally eliminating all of the tar in that section before moving on. It also requires you in the final area to eliminate enough of the tar by the door before you make a run at the eyes.

There is one thing that will help you though, and that is the clock. In this puzzle where tar in the doors can be fatal and in others when it is just annoying you have the benefit of knowing exactly when the tar will expand, right at the start of a new cycle. The eyes of the mother will even close on the last tick of the ending cycle to give you another visual heads up as so.

This is also helpful as in the closing moments of a cycle you need to prepare yourself for any tar bits that may emerge as unlike the roaches birthed from a queen there is no incubation period, they will attack the next immediate turn. The clock may be the single most important tool you have in these puzzles, keep a regular eye on it.

Anyways, after a long slog I am finally done with this godforsaken floor… except that the “all clear” door in front of the stairs is not open.

After a bit of head scratching I notice this destructible block right below my sword, figure I’ll go tackle an optional puzzle while I try to figure out what I missed when…

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

AHHHHHH! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

What in the holiest of fucks! You have to be kidding me. Not only do you hide the final room, you make it an unholy nightmare such as this?!? Who in the hell thought that putting three tar mothers in one…

…Wait a sec, three tar mothers? Oh my god, I remember hearing about a room with three tar mothers! This room has a reputation, apparently a big one as I think this is the only room I can recall hearing of before starting these games. Well this’ll be fun.

~Some time later~

Damn right Beethro. I don’t have any other screenshots, I was too busy sweating and cursing. Thank god for those save points which I don’t think were in the original version of this game, without them I think I would have just quit here. What isn’t shown here is that it is very easy when cutting your way back to get at the remaining tar bits to screw up and leave yourself with no way forward. Having to reset back to that red x was annoying, but having to restart the entire room would have been infuriating.

Thank god. I’m gonna go take a few days off after that. Next time… something that almost certainly can’t be any worse.

[jsnlv]

Horrible levels like that last one notwithstanding, I actually like chewing my way through a roomful of tar. Do it enough and you develop an intuitive sense for the necessary motions, and fighting against the tide like that gets kind of meditative in its monotony. Tar is probably my second-favorite substance Beethro can be killed by.

[username]

Okay, took a bit of a break and regathered myself, on to the ninth floor.

Tar free and glad of it! I think this is the first intro room with enemies in it, and it shows off the theme of the entire floor. In each room you will have a number of roaches you can’t get at without manipulating switches and doors (and often breakable walls). You will be tasked with manipulating the roaches from afar so that they will not be made inaccessible once the switches are thrown.

Most of the doors once raised cannot be lowered, so it is important that all the roaches are in the exact right spot before you throw the switches and seal them in. If they are on top of a lower door tile when it is raised they will end up on top of said door. In such a case they can step onto any normal floor tile but not along the door itself. One must be careful in these cases. Looking at the set of door roaches I circled, if I were to start clearing out this room by taking out the roaches in the lower right section these circled roaches would take a step down onto the wrong side of the door. Hence I must clear out the section on the lower left before I make my way there.

This is just to show what it looks like when all the switches are thrown. I’m not gonna spend much more time with this floor as most of the puzzles are of this exact variety, but there is one late one I do want to make note of.

This one initially seems much like the other ones. The one thing that makes it different is that the circled switch and doors on the right can repeatedly be opened and closed, which allows you to funnel roaches down three or four at a time to the bottom right section. This takes a bit of time, is almost impossible to get the roaches lined up right and it feels like there are just too many roaches. Eventually I “screwed up” and made an important discovery:

It seems obvious in retrospect (and perhaps to players better than I initially) but I liked how they had a whole floor that primed you to line up the roaches in the marked areas only to sneak one in at the end where you can draw them off in a more traditional manner. Just a nice bit of misdirection.

On to floor ten!

And here we have a room with… apparently nothing in it. This floor is gonna be a breeze.

Huh. I… don’t recall these from the other games. Doesn’t mean they weren’t there, they just didn’t make an impression if they were. These are spiders, which like all spiders are only visible if within a certain range or I guess within a line of sight. I’m not 100% sure.

Now I know what you’re saying: “I’ve seen spiders all my life, they definitely are visible at all times.” (I have cameras everywhere). In actuality you are surrounded by scores of spiders that you don’t see at all times. Sweet dreams.

Now this does make for a LP challenge as if they are often invisible then pictures of these rooms are next to pointless (and in truth they are barely visible in the game itself, the game could have done a much better job making them stand out when observable). Luckily for you I’ve come up with a solution: we are going to ignore them! They only make up half the floor, the rest of the rooms are spent teaching you some more advanced roach killing techniques that lend themselves to the fancy GIFs you kids can’t get enough of.

Regularly during this floor you will have to step into a section of the room with roaches coming at you from two different directions. The thing to learn is that you must have your sword positioned in the right direction before you enter these sections or else you will have no hope. This will likely be expanded upon later where you will have to exit a room and re-enter with the sword in the proper orientation to save a few precious moves.

I honestly have no clue what that potion was for.

Play along at home time!

Here we have a situation where a ton of roaches are ready to jump upon me the second I enter and with a queen positioned opposite them and hence behind me. What do you think would be the best way to handle such a situation?

[spoiler]

The upper row of roaches cannot directly attack me due to the direction of the arrow, but the ones right below them can attack diagonally up as that would be perpendicular to the arrow’s direction (which is allowed). If I enter with my sword directed diagonally down at that tile though I will be safe. Normally I could stay there swinging my sword back and forth to clear them out but that queen will spit out a baby before I have any hope of completing said task. However if I take a step back right next to the queen there will be no space available for her to hatch any new roaches, and queens will seemingly never attack (plus I believe she is on a force arrow pointing away from me).[/spoiler]

I’m including this just because it is the first appearance of the red doors. Also because of the cool spider web room layout. There are no switches that open a red door, instead:

When all the falling tiles in a room fall the red doors will open. Simple here, likely much more complicated later.

There is a door that you can’t get past in this level. It is only accessible to those who purchased the game’s season pass.

That floor was pretty easy and things have gone rather smoothly, let’s see if we can’t get through a third floor before we’re done here.

…Crap.