Spiders were kind of deprecated after KDD by virtue of being kind of not at all interesting or puzzley. There’s a few in the Flash DROD, because it’s still KDD at its core.
Speaking of KDD, have fun on 13F, when you get there. (I kind of wouldn’t fault anyone for looking up a guide to it just on principle.)
I’m now getting worried about floor 13, but for now let’s get back to where we left off on floor 11.
Okay, more tar, but we handled this before and…
…
Well this can’t be good. The entirety of this level is tar mazes which I also don’t quite recall from the other games.
Okay, let me be frank with you: this is the single worst DROD level I’ve come across in any of these games. I took 87 screenshots of this level and I could caption all of them with “this is a bad level”. I will summarize the basis of these puzzles, and then likely spend the rest of my time here pointing out how terrible they are.
We went over how one cuts their way through tar earlier. The difference here is that there are walls covered by tar that you cannot see until you reach them with your sword. The end result is that you cut your way through the tar, gradually find the walls and hence the way forward to continue on. In theory.
In practice what happens is that you make choices that result in you failing the puzzle and having to restart at either the save point or the beginning of the room because you can’t actually see the puzzle you are dealing with. I find this to be a profoundly dumb basis for a puzzle, much less an entire series of them. At only one point during this entire floor did I find myself intellectually challenged, and that is because I went with a complicated solution (that was flawed) because I overlooked the simple yet also flawed alternative. The rest of the time was trying to solve simple puzzles half-blindfolded.
Here is that one puzzle that I initially thought was trickier than it was. I thought the challenge was finding one’s way across paths of falling tiles so that none are left unstepped on when one exists the mass of tar for the last time. This ended up being silly, you can just run across them in straight lines as so.
As you can see, the red door didn’t open up. I thought back and realized that maybe my initial plan was right and that there are hidden paths in between somewhere that I somehow missed on my earlier more complicated treks.
Nope! Turns out there was just one single tile off the beaten path that you have to search every quadrant to find. God what a great puzzle, I felt really intellectually stimulated.
Here’s one of the next puzzles, let’s see how much better this one goes.
My very first move rendered the puzzle unsolvable. Here, have a gif showing the right opening sequence while I go shake my head for a bit.
Anyways, you eventually make your way through that section and leave the room unsolved as you have to make your way through from three different directions in order to get to the one enemy in there. You do so and…
Whoops, rendered the room unsolvable because I couldn’t see the layout of the circled section until I was right on top of it. I’ll just go start that middle section all over again, but at least I learned something valuable.
Here we have a puzzle where the doors are invisible because of the tar. Beyond that it is a fairly standard puzzle and…
Huh?
This door is closed. See one of the switches was a trick and it closed a door rather than open one. That’s not really a puzzle except I guess it would be when you can’t see them. You can click on the switches to see what they do though, that is true. Since this is where they teach you this with regards to the tar they naturally had it be with the very last of the doors. Also they put both the save point and a single row of collapsing tiles right after the switches as opposed to before them so that you have to start the entire room over. Tough but fair IMO.
See, click on one of the switches and you see that single red highlighted square which means that it closes rather than opens. We do all that over again and since nothing else can go wrong…
Yep, cut that one tile getting to the door and it results in a semi-circle of tar I can’t cut my way past. It’s just a battle of wits between me and this floor. I know what you may be thinking but it’s not that harsh, I for one single move earlier could have noticed that if I wasn’t distracted by that door blocking my path. It’s just one mistake compounding another. Such design brilliance on display here.
Ah, this puzzle. This one actually isn’t that bad, if anything it is pretty okay. It even gives you an easily accessible save point right in the middle. You use the mimic potions to help solve a few areas, open the way to that one roach thanks to destructible blocks either above or to the right of it and can exit the room to the left or try the other way out up top. I try that and it leads to the staircase out of the level, so I have to return.
The doors are reset but they were smart enough to leave a destructible path around them near the bottom left exit. For some reason though they neglected to do something similar for the upper right one so when I eventually have to go back to the staircase to leave the level I have to solve the entire room all over again. They got me! I only wish I was that clever.
That quote will likely give me nightmares. Also I circled that area because my first time through I ended up getting a tar bit spawned onto a section of wall with no floor access about there and had to restart the entire room. It’s like a game of chess between the game and me.
Also that screenshot has the name “DROD100” so that must be the 100th non-gif screenshot. I’m sure we’ll all remember exactly where we were when this happened for the rest of our lives. You reading this topic, me cursing out a piece of software, good times.
This was a neat little puzzle where you had to get through the tar sections efficiently so that the snakes didn’t trap and kill you before you could get out of them. It was unusually pleasant actually.
Oh, I had to open that door first before I did anything else. Since I didn’t I have to do the whole thing over again. That ones on me actually.
Hallelujah. Tar is the worst, this is a bad level.
haha, I’ve beaten the entirety of King Dugan’s and I apparently blocked this level completely from my memory.
Also, I thought in the newer versions of DROD you could click tar and make it transparent, but maybe I imagined that (or maybe they disabled it here to keep the level “faithful”, not sure).
Edit: I don’t think 13 is a particularly good level, but going through it didn’t bother me much at the time.
I did 13 myself, yeah. It involved taking screenshots of the map and blowing them up in an image editor.
Back to some hopefully not bad levels.
This is another snake serpent level, this one focused mainly on rather massive ones. For the most part they are used almost as the equivalent of forced scrolling levels in a platformer.
On average you are given a small window, often of only a single move, with which to step in the path of the serpent. At this point you pretty much have to stay a move ahead of it until you can find a way out of the loop, at which point you move on to something else and eventually get a way to kill it.
I colored over the destructible blocks with dark brown so that they’d stand out more, then circled them because why not overdo things. I wanted to show this screenshot because this puzzle teaches a valuable lesson: take care of your sword’s orientation before you enter the serpent train as you may not have time to do so once you are on board. Here you want to make sure that when you enter the inner path that your sword is oriented up-left diagonally so that you can smash both of those bricks without having to expend an extra move that you do not have.
In this room the gaps you have to step into, while not aligned initially, will eventually end up so as the path of the inner snakes is just a few tiles shorter than the path of the outer ones. It is merely a case of waiting…
…and waiting…
(this went on way too long)
After I don’t know how many hundreds if not thousands of moves you can step into the inner ring and start the thankfully much shorter process all over again.
Oh crap.
Nothing to see here, move along! It was like this when I got here, I swear!
(there’s a row of breakable blocks in the middle there if you were wondering what the solution was)
Technically this shows the aftermath of another room with a neat triggered lattice structure that does an exceptional job of killing serpents, but mainly it is included because I noticed that breakable tile right there which means we must have found another secret room!
Huh? That’s not a secret room. In fact I think that’s…
~double checks online~
That is actually a warp room! I didn’t mess around with it but the switches would open a series of doors that would lead to one of those staircases, the floor which it’d lead to indicated by a basic addition problem appearing in the large desert portion. I would harbor a guess that these should lead from floors 13 through likely 18.
…Or perhaps to floor 14, the one immediately past floor 13. Hmmmmmm.
Here is another instance of that previous structure and how you can be safely located inside of it while the serpents will be lured right to their deaths. I appreciate the efficiency.
This is a bit of an experimental gif. These puzzles are mostly rather similar so with this one here I tried to take a screenshot most of the times I stepped out of the path of the snake so that one could get a basic idea as to the flow of a puzzle like this.
This is another puzzle where the direction you have your sword pointing when you enter is key, but if you notice you will need to have it oriented in a few different directions over the course of your path.
The key here is that thanks to the plentiful number of corners the serpent must take if you are clever you can gain a move each time it does so.
Really we’ve shown enough from this floor already but I had to include the mimic one. While the snakes will from time to time corner each other to death here you have to use your double as a kind of movable block. That cross-shaped structure in the upper right is where most of the action will take place. You have to make it so that the serpent will get next to it and then be ready to get the mimic to take up the tile that is the only way out from there on the very next turn.
It is mildly tricky to pull off.
Still with that we’ve finished up this floor and can make our way to the staircase out of here.
…Except that there is another destructible block hidden down here. I just gotta look.
Hey look, a totally ordinary screenshot!
Okay, honesty time: I forgot to take a screenshot of this room when I entered, and since it is just a variant on that previous mimic puzzle I took a screenshot at the conclusion of the puzzle and blended the two of them together. Still not so bad for someone who has no idea what he is doing.
I bothered with this because the variant in play here is the first time we are seeing a rather powerful structural mechanic. Those little things at the corner of each tile function to prevent you from being able to move diagonally yourself, reducing your available movements to the four cardinal directions. This makes your movement options identical to those of the serpents, and makes the room itself much harder. I’m certain we’ll be seeing more of those later.
Anyways, that is done and back to the staircase.
It’s just that…
If the 13th floor is such a disaster that people are saying that maybe I should just FAQ my way through anyways… it’s rather simple to simply bypass it altogether in a completely fair in-game manner. I’ll have to sleep on this.
Next time: the shocking answer!
I mean… I can’t really skip a level. There’s a chance someone who hasn’t played the game will read this and want to know what horrors it contains.
Great, the game disagrees with me. That can only mean good things.
…Really?
~sigh~
Okay, what the hell.
I’ll start with this path.
That’s encouraging. Still, I can see a switch up there so I’ll go back and take the path that leads to it.
The door the switch opens leads to nowhere.
Now I took a lot of screenshots of this stage, but they all sort of look like this and most of them involve me running into a dead end. We instead are gonna jump ahead a bit.
Here is the one roach in the entire stage (may I just say that I’m starting to miss the roaches, the last few stages have been rather short on them). Here is also where the staircase out of this labyrinth is located but, of course, no direct path there.
I made a terrible mistake as I started this late at night and eventually became too mentally fatigued to remember which paths I had already taken, so I called it a night. I prepared to return to it the next day and…
…realized that I have screenshots of almost every room.
I am also both a MS Paint and diner placemat master, so I don’t know if this counts as cheating but…
…after a half-dozen screens of this I finally traced a path back to myself.
After this I went back to the game, followed the path I drew and voila~
Here is my spinning in circles victory dance.
My completion time for this floor was just over 52 minutes, although the game was open for part of my MS Paint tracing. That… was not good.
Looking back as we are roughly halfway through the game and this has been a rather poor stretch of levels overall recently. Hopefully this is more of a temporary setback due to tossing some ill-conceived gimmick levels early on and it’ll pick up steam soon but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that much of my recent playtime has felt like “I go through this so you don’t have to~”. If you haven’t played a DROD game before don’t let this low point scare you off the series entirely, these few levels are not indicative of the quality level of the rest of the series.
But maybe pick up a different entry instead.
KDD has some very high points and a lot of low points. It also originates some of the more famous puzzles of the series, that get repeated in later entries.
The 22nd/23rd floor is worth it. Believe~
edit: i think my favorite parts of the gifs are beethro’s eyes going all over the place
He was just getting a wee bit dizzy there. I have no explanation for the rest of them.
Onwards towards better times.
I mean, if you insist.
Oh hey, goblins! That’s more like it. Goblins are the first and for all I know only enemies in this game that have respectable AI. They will not run directly into your sword, they team up on you intelligently and will effectively try to outflank you whenever that is an option. They do have a few behaviors that can be exploited but they offer a steady challenge and are clearly the most dangerous opposition we have come across by a significant margin.
This should hopefully at least give an idea as to how they move, defend and attack. Much like with the wraithwings they usually need to be cornered in order to kill them, although not always.
Shown for a less than obvious reason. I initially thought that there was a hard time limit for killing that mother tar before it spawned a tar bit on the single tile to the left of it, so I figured that exiting the room and re-entering from below instead of from the initial entrance on the left would save some moves. The thing is there was no such harsh time limit and it makes the room impossible to complete. This would normally be a game-ending screw-up as the room below is a dead-end but thankfully the DROD folks expect idiocy like this.
Back on the main menu there is an option to restore. As inefficient as this is, the game creates a save after virtually every room and the last time you walk across any of those “X” save tiles.
It only saves my most recent entrance into this room, but I did step onto that circled X square. I click on it and…
…you can see the state the room was in when I stepped on it, which thankfully is back when the room was completable. If this was not the case I could have simply switched back to the previous completed room and resumed there. It’s also how I could how I could have cut bait on floor 13 and restored back to the warp room if I had chosen to. It’s also (also?) how one can go back and check out secret rooms missed earlier.
I warn against messing around too much with it as it apparently is a bit finicky and can seemingly lose any progress made after the restored to point, but it can be a very powerful aid if you make a significant mistake.
We’re gonna skip many of the rooms on this floor as it is basically a series of increasingly difficult goblin encounters which are fun in practice but hard to really explain in text. Basically much of the stage is spent getting used to their behaviors and learning how to exploit them; this is mostly learned by getting killed a lot and I did not manage to capture enough pre-death screens to make any gifs of these deaths. It’s a cop-out to say “you really gotta play this part to get it” but it is probably true. I just included this screenshot because I like to note whenever I find a secret room.
In this halfway-finished room I want you to notice the sole goblin who will be released when I hit that switch (that also closes the door behind me). In a situation like this the goblins become significantly more dangerous because they are opportunistic and are aware enough of other enemies to take advantage of their behaviors. I’ve had goblins put themselves in certain-death situations as they knew that if I struck at them it’d give a different creature an opening for a killing blow of their own.
There was a more efficient solution but I ended up drawing him close to me and having the queens spawn enough roaches to block any possible retreat. A save point midway would have been nice as even with the goblin slain it is still a fairly tricky queen roach room.
Speaking of rooms where goblins can make dealing with other creatures much harder… this. The wraithwings are more aggressive as there are a lot of them and the goblins make it hard to focus on them for any period of time. They will regularly sneak towards you blind side when slashing through some of the wraiths. Worse still, while you will try to keep some bit of level geometry between many of the wraithwings and yourself to keep them from attacking at a given moment the goblins will almost certainly attack in a manner that forces you to move beyond this safe zone, bringing the wraiths back into play.
This is a great lesson in crowd control and making use of your environment as it is remarkably easy to be overwhelmed in this room. You will be surrounded by those four goblins up top immediately with no way to attack them, and when you retreat more goblins will join in on the chase.
Here is a terrible diagram of how one needs to deal with them. Quickly one will figure out a way to run over that falling tile, which buys you time to escape the goblins immediately behind you. The trick is (and it is a legitimately tricky one) that you have to time your downward and diagonal steps towards this tile so that none of the goblins are below you when you arrive here. You have to start your run with the sword pointed southward and if you have no goblins below you when you get to this point you may have enough turns once you exit that little hallway to rotate your sword just enough to keep the goblins to the left of that structure away from you long enough to get to that lower section with enough time to turn your sword towards the entrance before the goblins are on top of you.
I’m not sure I used the word “enough” enough times in that sentence.
Anyways once you are in there and positioned properly it becomes easy to pick them off one at a time as their brothers block their own retreat. They are smart, but not that smart.
Last room for this floor, shown because it is both unique and clever. As that gif explains, you have to basically herd this one goblin all the way to the area with the serpent so that he will block its path, resulting in said serpent’s demise.
Just including this one as it shows how one manages to lead the goblin through a section of the maze. Do that a few times, get it to the serpent and you are done with this floor.
Beethro is kind of a dick, but nobody said that genocide would be clean or easy.
Floor 14 is a falling tile level, and a good bit more intensive in this regard than the ones we’ve come across before. The main skill required and honed here is pathfinding, where you must look at what is given to you and chart a course (or courses, some of these rooms require you to take several trips across the tiles) that let’s you accomplish all that you must while having you step off of the final tile left standing with your last move. It’s a pretty neat challenge, but one that will bite you from time to time.
One of the first puzzles let’s you commit a basic error early on before the punishment is too severe. I walked past that intersection in a straight line, which completely cuts off any path forward.
However, if I cross this section with a zig-zag pattern it allows me to walk past this area while still leaving a path open for when I soon double back upon it. This is a key skill in puzzles where you must double back over the same area multiple times as it can be a lifesaver.
Here is one of two rooms that gave me a good deal of trouble on this floor, although this is the lesser of the two of them. To summarize quickly, you will be forced to take six treks across the tiles to hit that one switch in the middle of all those tiles, which is what that gif progressively shows.
There are a couple of factors that one must keep track of in order to complete this challenge. One is that there are only eight tiles around that switch so one must be careful to preserve them, ideally only stepping on one of them on a given trip. Second and more importantly is that there are a total of twelve usable tiles around the entrances and exits to the tile section. Given that you make six trips this means that you can only use an entrance/exit adjacent tile right when you are either entering or leaving. It also means that you must keep lanes available to these tiles until they are finally used up. That is the part that tripped me up for a while.
You are forced to use mimics from time to time on this floor when you are not given direct access to the tiles. There is one thing to realize about this: even though they are mimics they still have to step off of the final tile for it to fall. When you overlook this fact on a puzzle with as many tiles as this one and have to redo it… not the most pleasant thing in the world.
This is a better mimic puzzle in that you must control two of them at the same time. This obviously introduces its own set of challenges. The one benefit in these situations is that the mimics will always be near pits which will give you plenty of opportunities to better orient yourself while said pits will prevent them from moving along with you.
If you are careful you can finish one of the mimic’s sections and get them off of their playing field, which means you then only have to worry about the movement of the other one at this point. It becomes rather simple to wrap things up once this happens.
We got to the ending staircase before we got to the final third or so of puzzles, so we must head back. However right down there is another breakable tile…
…which leads to the simplest serpent room I’ve seen in a while. Perhaps I just got lucky but I had the serpent wandering down one of those paths to its doom in about a minute’s time. Oh well.
This. This puzzle. I dubbed this puzzle “the MFer”. You have to hit those seven switches in the order listed then make your way out to the north while stepping on each tile one time. Now that other puzzle I had trouble with, it just required me to adjust my tactics once or twice. With this puzzle I just straight-up struggled. You have to cross that central area five times and I found it particularly difficult to come up with a layout that would allow that.
After a bit of experimentation this presented itself as a solid opening move. The basic zig-zag was obviously needed but after repeated experimentation I found that I needed to alter it just a bit at the end there. With that set-up it became easier to get to at least the sixth switch before it all fell apart, although in truth it becomes obvious when traveling between the third and fourth switches if you have any prayer of success.
This was when I felt like I finally had it. At this point I can get to the fourth switch while still leaving a path behind so that I can get from the sixth switch to the seventh and final one.
This… hurt. I had gotten oh so close but I left one single tile behind. Still progress had been made and I could at least pinpoint exactly where in the process I had to refine things by a move or two.
I cannot put into words how happy I was at this moment. It is clear by this point that everything is lined up perfectly and that this significant challenge has been bested. Just to be clear I am not lamenting the fact that this was a very hard puzzle, likely the hardest one up until this point in the game. Part of the charm of these games is that they will push you and this is a legit test of your knowledge when it comes to pathfinding. It is perhaps a touch harsh but that does not mean that it isn’t a pretty good puzzle.
A puzzle or two later and we get the all clear sign. We are also about half a floor away from the staircase. This presents a serious problem. Look at some of the puzzle screenshots in this post, particularly the mimic ones. There are no enemies in those rooms which means they can’t be marked as completed, hence when you finish them no shortcut or green door opens up. Even if one tried to use the secret room to get back to the staircase the way to it is blocked by a one way arrow.
In case it hasn’t dawned on you already, you need to redo the rooms in front of the staircase to get back to them. This is profoundly dumb, especially since when you are trying to hurry your way through these rooms a second time a single misstep can force you to restart the whole thing. Kinda puts a bad taste in your mouth right at the end of an otherwise fine level.
That trapdoor puzzle near the end is one of the puzzles of KDD that really sticks with you.
And yeah, there’s a lot of places where you have to redo stuff to make progress. I felt that the free exploration aspect of DROD never really added anything to the game.
Man, I actually don’t remember a lot of these floors/puzzles. I beat KDD probably 14+ years ago at this point, so maybe that’s expected. Or maybe seeing it with the old graphics/tileset would jog my memory of it better.
play KDDL! The maps are smaller and slightly less tedious than real KDD, plus the ‘maze’ floor was completely remade in a fairly interesting way in Episode 4. Also the achievements are a neat idea.
It’s not linked on that page, but Episode 5 IS up and playable. (I just edited the url on a hunch and hey.)
So, the next level started like this:
Yep, another tar mother floor, another floor where I was more focused on surviving than taking enough screenshots. It’s alright, we’ll get by. Besides, I actually did pretty good on this floor and isn’t that what’s truly important… to me? And doesn’t that matter more than any missing screenshots?
Looking at this opening puzzle it combines the tar mother puzzles of the eighth floor with the “get the roaches to a certain spot and trap them with a raised door” puzzles of the ninth. We will revisit this combination of puzzle elements a few times on this floor and in many ways the presence of a tar mother can make placing the roaches a bit simpler. Actually, to be more accurate it can make it easier to keep the roaches where you want them once they are positioned correctly.
In the above gif I successfully got the roaches where they needed to be. Once that was accomplished we time lapse forward until the tar mother grows so large that the roaches cannot move from their spots no matter where I go. Once this is done I can make my way back to the switch that traps the roaches and opens a path to the mother and finish them both off at my leisure.
Went north, saw this puzzle and walked back down south. This is the benefit of having a somewhat open design: the ability to go do something else instead. We call that freedom, and we call enemies of freedom something mean I’m pretty sure.
The interesting thing about this puzzle is that while you could kill the tar mother quickly you have to let it grow for a while so that the rest of the room can be solved. In the south those are queen roaches who run away from you, hence you must let the lower bit of tar grow large enough so that it prevents the queens from running past the five tiles circled at the bottom when you hit the switch; if they are not on those tiles when the switch is hit they will be unreachable. It also gives the blob in the upper right enough time to trap the snake and squish it.
…Nope, don’t feel like it yet. Southward ho!
Wow, look how close and defenseless this tar mother is! I’ll just kill it immediately and certainly nothing will go wrong.
This is hard to show without video but while you can walk up and down to get a couple rows of roaches to gradually flatten out into a longer single row you just can’t get that final back roach to do so, at least not with a line this long.
However if you let the tar grow long enough that it squeezes that front row directly it holds that final roach in a position where it can step into the front row, so that after you kill the mother and throw the switch you can reach all of them.
Alright already, we’ll go deal with this one. It’s actually not that hard and is a variant of the opening puzzle. You split the roaches up so that they end up in areas where they won’t overwhelm the number of accessible tiles once you throw the switch, line them up such as like this…
…and simply wait around until the whole inner section fills up with tar. I have a suspicion that there is more efficient way to hand things here that doesn’t require all that waiting, but don’t argue with success I say.
This is a deceptively tricky puzzle because of the single tile gap circled near the top of the screen. If you throw the switches quickly a roach almost always seems to end up in there and hence beyond your grasp, or more specifically your sword. I decided that the best course was to get the upper right roaches over to the left side to avoid said gap. The other goal was to maneuver most of the roaches down to the circled lower areas. The main complication here is those two secondary tar sections will grow to block the path down at the end of a single cycle, too soon for me to get enough of the roaches down there. However, lining the roaches up along the wall in front of the tar right when the grow cycle concludes prevents the tar from blocking the path for another cycle, which gives you enough time to maneuver everything into place. After that you throw the switches and take them all out as so.
Since we went over that floor rather quickly we might just be able to fit the next floor in here as well.
Two of these floors in a row is just mean 
Okay, so another tar level. The problem here is that while this wasn’t a bad level it also wasn’t a particularly interesting one. Much of it felt like earlier puzzle concepts revisited, so I’m just gonna look at a couple puzzles that at least present some decent tar bit situations and call it a floor.
…Right after I bitch about this puzzle for a sec. The basic idea is that you cut yourself through this maze of tar to step on the falling tiles (that I have helpfully circled) with the main challenge being not to screw up the cutting so that you have no way forward.
The thing is that I step on the last of these tiles right after this shot is taken and the red doors don’t open. The red doors don’t open because there is also one collapsing tile under the tar as well. While looking back you can just sorta make it out if you squint closely, for a puzzle built around carefully cutting your way to specific areas, adding one extra “you can’t see it, hopefully you don’t make it inaccessible before you realize it exists” tile feels a bit cheap.
Here’s where it was hiding, for those playing along at home.
A tar bit will spawn from each of those indentations after each cycle. Things can get a bit hairy due to this, but this does force you to be more efficient with your movements for at least the first few cycles.
This is the end of the first cycle and I have chosen a path that has positioned me where I do not have to worry about any of the bits that spawn above me, allowing me to focus on cutting my way through the ones in front of me efficiently enough so that by the time the next cycle wraps up…
…I end up roughly around here. This leaves me with only a few tar bits to deal with and lets me start to cut my way through this big tar section to my left.
Should have taken a shot a few moves later but oh well. Once you finish that last chunk of tar and start to cut into the one just below you a newly formed opening allows those amassed tar bits to stream in after you. You have to balance cleaning them out with the tar regrowing every so often (make sure you are positioned so that no bits are spawned behind you), but after a few cycles you can once again resume moving forward. When cutting through that bottom row keep as low as possible as leaving some tar above you blocks any of those bits in the hallway from coming in after you.
Almost done but let me stress that you should position and keep yourself like this to prevent those tar bits below you from coming up to attack. It wouldn’t be a fatal error but it can make this particular section much more complicated to handle. Once you clear out the bits that come from the right you can cut up to the eyes, gouge them out and concentrate on cleaning up the remaining bits.
The other puzzle I wanted to look at was this one. For the sake of visual clarity I once again circled the collapsing tiles, all of which you must step on in order to drop the red doors protecting the mother. After a couple of cycles those various tar circles will start throwing bits, at which point you should be near the bottom of the screen if you have taken a smart path. Each move is important but even more so is the timing of you stepping off that final tile and lowering the red doors in relation to the cycle clock.
I messed up the timing here just a bit and was a few steps away from the mother when the cycle ended. The problem is that I now have to wait another cycle before I can start to cut my way in at which point many more bits are spawning and the rest of the room is rapidly filling up.
By the time I finally cut my way in to the mother this go around it is too late to actually clear the room. No matter how I try to cut my way through a number of the bits will be in areas I cannot reach, requiring me to start over.
Here is the immediate aftermath of me killing the tar mother on a much more efficient run (the mimics aren’t very important, my path just took me across the potions). Look at how much more free space there is, how many fewer bits there are to deal with. The difference between these two runs mostly came down to something as simple as two or three wasted moves early on.
In one of the first of these entries I wrote about how the game would begin to ask more and more of you in terms of efficiency of movement as you got deeper and deeper in; this is what that looks like. A few moves can be magnified by something like a tar mother, where the difference between an extra cycle taking place or not can be rather dramatic. From this point on I would expect this kind of efficiency to become much more of a requirement.
There isn’t much of a unifying theme with the eighteenth floor, although we do get a healthy dose of goblins once more.
(Aside: I upload and edit everything via imgur and the whole process has changed since yesterday so if anything is screwy or the wrong size let me know.)
There are a few rooms on this floor that have you battling goblins on these falling tiles, this one probably being the gentlest of the bunch. These can be a bit tricky due to having to worry about the tiles potentially cutting off an escape path you may need behind you, but that can also be used to your advantage.
By plotting my route I was able to separate the goblin that was chasing me from the one I was pursuing. Goblins become much simpler to deal with when facing them one on one on a relatively flat field so at this point it became rather easy to pick them off one at a time.
This room is just a sampler full of various ways to kill some serpents. We could probably just skip this room… or I could just shamelessly throw together a montage~
Feel free to play your favorite inspirational song, I’m going with “The Touch”.
Yeah~
Of particular notes are sections A, D and H where one has to maneuver a living creature in such a way that it traps the serpent. The first two are relatively simple as they involve roaches but the latter requires getting the goblin to behave in a useful way which is a bit more advanced of a proposition. Odd room in that there are basically no stakes, works as a nice breather really.
See, Beethro agrees with me!
I unfortunately didn’t take a screenshot when I first entered the room so we are short a few serpents. The sole goblin started this room trapped behind a breakable wall in that upper section. I like this puzzle because it forces you to guide that goblin to the bottom left corner to block the serpent there, but you always have a threat of one of the other serpents coming after you and suddenly putting the fleeing goblin on the offensive (that is why I cleared out as many serpents as I could as soon as I entered). You can fortunately deal with the bottom right serpent without the goblin’s assistance.
When you clear out those bottom two corners and hit their switches you will raise those walls in the middle of the screen which are perfect for the risk-free killing of serpents.
Another secret room, and one I enjoyed because of its compact nature. DROD puzzles can be a bit sprawling at times, this in contrast is a nice immediate challenge. Those are queen roaches, and because they flee you they work to keep the goblins pinned against the walls. They also still spawn regular roaches so the first two third of this puzzle is another test of efficiency.
Unfortunately they decided to talk over half of my moves here but this still should give you an idea as to what my opening tactic was. Doing this repeatedly will leave you a move or two away from the last lower row queen when the cycle ends and they all spawn. If you are smart you can manage to take out that queen and the goblin right before the spawned roaches mature and start to attack, although they will be right on top of you.
I believe I have alluded previously how diagonal slices can be much more efficient if you know how to make the best use of them, but this may be the first time I had enough screenshots available to show an example of it. This doesn’t save a ton of time as they are still all in a row, but that backsliding cut can mighty handy in certain situations.
Once that is done all one has to do is position themselves so that they can immediately wipe out the next round of spawns and cut their way through this row similarly to how they did the previous one.
The rest of the floor is basically goblin battles, so we’ll skip those and pick things up at the start of the next floor. It is a good one.
I’ve never even played any of these games but I’ve now developed an irrational fear & hatred of tar
weekend project: implement tar into the drodlike and make everyone suffer
I’m playing through Journey to Rooted Hold right now because of this thread. Save for the voice acting I think it probably holds up much better than King Dugan’s. All the levels so far have been very enjoyable, and there don’t seem to be nearly as many samey/superfluous/annoying screens as what you’re showing off. It’s a nice game!
I’m up to the 6th level right now. All the new monsters/elements they added for JtRH feel very clever. They make you approach the game in different ways. I’m particularly fond of the rock monsters that make walls when you kill them. I’m not a huge fan of the scripting elements (Halph/Slayer), but I think they’re dynamic enough for what they are and they haven’t overstayed their welcome so far.
JtRH is a nice game, and it has bombs which may be my favorite DROD obstacle that I recently found out won’t be appearing in the game I’m playing. Oops.
I really have no idea why they insist on voices.
You have an extra ir- in there.
The nineteenth floor is my favorite in the entire game up to this point. I could probably ramble on about various puzzles from this one for a good two to three entries here, but for the sake of brevity I’ll limit myself to just a few of my favorites.
This floor is built around you having to manipulate a small number of creatures in a given room so that you can eventually reach them while making sure that they do not stumble into any of the traps that litter most of these rooms. As you can see in this room you have to successfully maneuver three roaches through three mini-mazes, the trick being that each of these mazes is full of one way arrows that can get a roach stuck in that spot with no way out. While leading any one roach through isn’t too tricky you movements draw any living roaches towards you, requiring you to choose your steps carefully as to not draw any of the other roaches into a truly dead end.
First we get the upper left roach to come down into that little nook which should keep it in place for the next bit. We then circle around the lower section as so to get the roach inside there to come around as so, then drag it up to the entrance where it can be eliminated.
Afterwards we take a loop along the upper edge of the room from the left to the right, taking special care to get the upper left roach stuck on that particular arrow so that it cannot follow us back to the right. We then continue to loop around until we can pull that roach down to the left, and stay on the bottom of the screen to pull it just a bit back to the right and out the exit. Once that is done it is simply a matter of getting the last roach out and the room is complete.
Play along at home
This is a case where you must choose the right sequence of paths that will successfully lead that roach to the northern exit. As I think this is one that can be solved by just looking at it for a bit I will give all of you a chance to see if you can figure it out.
[spoiler]
I guess that is fairly self-explanatory.[/spoiler]
Another nice compact secret room. When you hit that switch the walls will drop and those five roaches will come right for you, and they will eventually get there because all the force arrows point in your direction. They are also the only things that can kill those five serpents. Thank god there wasn’t one less roach or we’d be in big trouble.
There are a few things in play here. Your position at given times is key but the first trick is to knowing exactly when to hit the switch. You need the serpents, particularly the central one, to block the entrance of the roaches for as long as possible in order for there to be enough time for everything else to fall into place (spoiler: the right time is shown in the screenshot).
Once you hit the switch it is important that you get to this spot and rotate the sword towards the lower left. If you hit the switch at the right time there will be a delay in letting the roaches into the inner three serpent’s sanctums, allowing the other two roaches to make their way to the outer ones.
The instant the outer roaches make it to their destinations you must immediately go diagonally down to the inside lower left corner and stick your sword over the arrow before the central roach can get there. It is the only way to keep that roach in place long enough for it to kill the central serpent. Once that serpent is dead the others will have fallen and you can take care of the roaches at your leisure.
I really enjoyed this puzzle. The trapped roach in the upper left corner is a queen who will throw a single regular roach every thirty moves. The trick is that while these roaches are not a threat themselves there are several spots in this room where they can get trapped beyond the safe reach of your sword. Because of this you must make sure to lead them to certain safe spots I’ve labeled A and B while you make your way to that switch. Said switch raises the door right below the falling tile section and hence blocks off that no-way-out section which makes that aisle another safe place for roaches to end up while you double back down towards that lower switch.
Didn’t have the right screenshots so that is sorta frankensteined together, but it gives you the basic idea. If you took care of the first part of this room quickly you will end up with one roach stuck in what was labeled section A, and no matter what you cannot stop him from following you down past that line of one way arrows right below the falling tile section. You do have that switch though which raises the donut shaped structure in the middle of those tiles. If you are clever you can catch that roach right in the middle of it which prevents you from killing it but at least removes him from the playing field for a bit.
This gives you time to clean up the rest of the roaches, but as soon as you lower the donut that roach will just head straight down towards you once more. The solution, as I wager you gathered from looking at that picture, is to cause a section of tiles to fall away so that it prevents the roach from getting someplace you can’t reach. Once that is done you can free it and get to smiting.
Last puzzle for this floor and it involves drawing that wraithwing up to you via that small gap at the top of the room. The thing with a sole wraithwing is that while it will follow you it will keep its distance so that if you just open the doors directly between you and it…
…this is as close as it will come. If you step to either side to try and get it to come closer it will wander into those arrows and get permanently stuck, forcing you to start over. Instead you will have to figure out a plan that will draw the wraithwing through much of the room in order to get a better angle with which to get it to enter that gap.
This gives an idea of how you should have things set up before you free the wraith. Once you set it loose and draw it up you will have to open the slightly bigger door on the right in order to draw it down as so.
Once you get it down here you must use those switches to close the doors around it so that you can get to the opposite side of the room without the wraith getting itself into any trouble.
When you make it to the left side one of the switches will free the wraith, at which point you must move so that it is drawn to that island. The other switch will trap the wraith there allowing you to go to the other side as shown where a switch there can free it, allowing you to draw it up through that gap and impale it with your sword.
Looking back I think the thing that I liked about this room is that by reducing the number of enemies in play it took a step towards a more traditional kind of puzzle game flow. With, for example, a block pushing puzzle game you basically figure out that one block goes here, a second goes there and now a third block can sneak in here which opens up a path to victory. DROD due to the number of elements in a given room often lacks those kind of clear steps. This floor is for the most part an exception and this more traditional approach appeals to me.
Yeah, jtRH is really well-balanced and thought out. There’s a few filler floors/rooms and some ideas that weren’t fully fleshed out, but on the whole it’s much better paced.
Meanwhile KDD spends like 10 floors teaching you what a roach is. And yeah, it didn’t have bombs.
I’m REALLY not a fan of Wraithwing puzzles, for similar reasons that I have to disliking snake puzzles, but the last one shown is one of the few good ones.
spoilers on images aren’t working very well for me sometimes; sometimes the image shows, sometimes i just get a blank area. is this just me? I noted it on the oreshika thread and stopped using them there, too. @botagel
