Speaking of snakes, I just got to level 8 of JtRH and it seems to be a snake level (with tiles the limit your diagonal movement, no less!) so I think I’m done for the night.
We’re gonna go over the next two floors at the same time because they are both focused on a new enemy, perhaps the final one to be introduced in this game.
That there is a brain. According to wikipedia they are a race of aliens from Dimension X focused on universal conquest. They do not move or attack you, but they have a passive effect on every other creature in the room. If you recall I mentioned repeatedly early on how most every creature in the game is stupid. The brains make them markedly less so.
We are missing a couple frames but if you watch the roaches are no longer walking into pits or walls and instead are making their way right to me. This is what the brains do; it does not make them smart, but it does make them smarter. The primary effect they have is to increase the pathfinding ability of a given creature. This allows them to take the most direct path between you and them, but if there is a further away path that would allow them to better surround you they still won’t be smart enough to take it. Still this is enough to make many of the common traps we have used up until this point ineffective.
For this puzzle I want you to pay attention to that one roach located in the middle of that falling tile path. With the brain functioning that roach will be smart enough to make its way out on its own, which makes the puzzle easier if you leave the brain alive until it finds its way out. I think the puzzle would still be solvable if you kill the brain immediately, although the presence of those arrows near the end makes me worry about that.
After the roaches the creature most affected by the brains are the serpents. As discussed previously when they aren’t nearby you they have a confusing movement pattern based on the cycle clock. With the brains in play pretty much every serpent that has an open path towards you is coming after you. They also become smart enough to not wander into any dead ends on their own, although on occasion they will still cut one another off in fatal ways.
This transforms what would otherwise have been a simple puzzle into a trickier one. I ended up having to separate myself from them as much as possible, often by cutting a new short path when they are midway through a longer, further away one, so that I could get to a brain and deal with any spawned tar bits before they could catch up to me. I probably could have laid a few traps but getting a diagonal-only step into a bunch of tar requires a decent number of moves from two different sides and I never quite managed it.
I think this was my favorite puzzle on this floor. You have two mimic potions, one of which must be used to kill the brain. You can place it on the tile above it but if there is a way to get all the roaches to come by it I could not figure it out. Worse still, based on where the potions are located you are limited to only up and down movements. Fortunately the increased intelligence of the roaches can be used to your advantage. Those three switches in a row open those doors immediately above them, and when any one or more of them is opened the roaches will head towards them. When they are then closed, they will lose interest and head to the tile closest to you per their usual, non-smart behavior.
With a bit of work you will eventually be able to get these roaches bunched up as so. When this is done and they are located down here you can open up the far door. This will also give you a chance to find out what that other upper switch does.
It closes that section off right there, and because they were bunched up you can catch them all at the same time. Now you just have to put one mimic there and the other by the brain and kill everything with ease.
In complete honesty, I didn’t notice any way in which the goblins became smarter. They were already the smartest creatures in the game.
Smarter serpents in certain situations are easier to deal with as they will follow you from much farther away but will still slither into traps like this as long as you are close enough to act as bait.
Last puzzle from this floor. That lengthy serpent is problematic as it will follow you with every movement and you have to clear out every living thing before you can strike at the brain. You can try to lead it back and forth if you want but its tail is so long that it often blocks the path back for so long that you will be dead before said path reopens. You also have to deal with roaches spawning once a cycle until you can handle the queens. If you wait a bit for the serpent’s head to pass by the door before throwing it open that will buy you a significant head start. Even with that it will quickly catch up, forcing you to take a more aggressive approach.
You will have to lay a trap to take care of that serpent. Fortunately there are a few locations where this can be done, pictured above is the one I went with. As shown in the prior room a serpent will still come down a path as long as you are there as bait, and with these roaches stuck here the serpent has no way out.
The twenty-first floor will mostly be skipped over. If I had to sum it up I’d describe it as a battle arena. Virtually every room contains several brains and queens. Queens become much more adept at fleeing you with brains in play as if you try to trap them in a corner they will flee along the side furthest from you. This results in every room breaking down to you versus a number of smarter roaches coming at you from all sides. It is a test of you being able to kill these roaches as efficiently as possible, often forcing you to kill one with each move in order for you to have enough time to position yourself for the next group.
Unfortunately this is hard to capture in screens and in truth it was hectic enough that I often did not take any screens during the heat of a battle.
I think this is the one action shot I took. This may be the least puzzlish floor in the game, it is focused almost solely on combat and slowly grinding your way through waves of enemies until you can finally kill a brain or queen at which point you must make your way to another one.
As seen here there will often by a few switches separated by a good distance and several paths by which roaches can come after you, and that is the challenge you must conquer on this floor. This was also the first room in the game where I got overwhelmed. When I say overwhelmed what I mean is that I hit a point where I could not kill more roaches in a cycle than were spawned so even though they could not surround me it was impossible for me to cut a path forward. This happened along those middle paths with the falling tiles as it is easy to find yourself in a situation where you can only kill a roach every other move, be it either swinging back and forth or stepping forward and back near those single tile wide exits.
In rooms like this you must make sure to kill enough queens or time your runs through so that you do not get stuck in a situation with literally no way forward or out. I do sort of wish the game did a better job indicating when you entered a hopeless state. In its sequel there was a room later on with a hard time limit where if you didn’t cross a certain early point in a timely fashion Beethro would comment how you don’t have enough time remaining. I would like it if something similar was in place for whenever you entered a non-obvious failure state.
Next time: We reach the final four!
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Good news! For the first time in the course of this game I am stuck. Updates will resume once I figure out what the heck I am supposed to do here.
the only thing i gotta say about the 22nd floor is
The True King Dugan’s Dungeon Starts Here
(i think i mentioned 22nd/23rd earlier in the thread, too. They were, by far, the hardest.)
It strikes me that this is an opportunity, as any tale or in this case Let’s Play of a reasonably hard game where you make it seem like smooth sailing and constant forward progress is inherently dishonest in a way. Let’s pause here for a bit and take a look at how one finds themselves stuck, and how they then try to deal with this.
Here is how all the switches work in this level.
The only way up was via this switch, so this seems to be the only natural opening move. It allows me to go up and get to the second mimic potion.
This is what appears to be the common sense place to use the other mimic as it opens the doors for the first one and allows it to reach the switch in the section to its right, which opens the door that allow me to enter the central hallway.
Here is where the obvious initial path runs into problems.
With both of them going past the force arrows to hit those switches the path forward opens up, but there is no next available set of moves. That highest up switch opens the doors that would free the mimics but it is blocked by a door that can only be opened by another switch that is stuck in a “once you enter there is no way out” area.
After staring at thing for a bit it struck me that the second mimic would likely have to be placed up top by that switch as if it hits that then a secondary path would be open for both myself and the initial mimic. I could then use said mimic to open the door blocking the second mimic, freeing it to go hit the switch opening up the final door and allowing me to advance to the next room/floor.
The problem that struck me is that I could not get this set-up to work as I could not figure out a way to advance the initial mimic to where it needed to go. I decided that I would have to go take care of things where I had initially placed the second gimmick, but as shown by this gif I have no way of advancing the initial mimic past that door. I butted my head against this for a while and it just doesn’t seem to work.
I then turned my attention to that little section in the upper left that seemingly serves no purpose. I figured that it is a clue as if it were to play a part then that means there would have to be a hidden path of breakable blocks to it, and if breakable blocks are in play then that could potentially solve things. Exploring with the mimics I could not find a single breakable block though so I have to chalk that section up as a red herring.
At this point I had to walk away from the game for a bit, and I posted the initial “I’m stuck” screenshot shortly after. This was half for honest disclosure, but also half because I’m superstitious and believe that more often than not when I post someplace that I’m stuck on a tricky puzzle or nightmarish boss I usually figure out a way by shortly afterwards.
That did not magically work so I went to eat dinner, then I came back to take a fresh look at things. At this point it becomes a good idea to take a look at the assumptions made up to this point as if they were all correct I likely wouldn’t be stuck here. I start with the initial assumption, that the only initial move is to put that first mimic in that lower left section to hit that switch so that I can move forward…
…and I notice that I could instead use it to open the door to my right by putting it where I initially put the second mimic.
I could then open the door that lets me get to the second mimic potion from the other side.
Now I place the second mimic up top to open the doors next to the two switches controlling the way out of this central hallway.
It is easy enough to open said doors, letting me guide the first mimic over.
That means the second mimic is now free to go get that last switch and…
It is next to impossible to get a screenshot of the floor summary screen as any button press advances the screen, but my time for this floor was just over three hours. Prior to now I don’t believe I’ve had any floor come close to two hours (I think I had at least one floor in JtRH take me over five hours). Part of this was due to this floor legit being difficult but a very significant portion of this time was spent in just this room. It happens in games like these and it may happen again in this one.
I generally try to avoid looking up hints and I am still clean in this run (only thing I checked was to see if that one room was a warp zone). There were four or so rooms in JtRH that made me seek help and even in Gunthro and the Epic Blunder, a game designed to be much easier for beginners, there was one late game puzzle where I needed a question answered. While it was annoying in the moment I’m glad this game finally threw a wall in my path, I truly believe that any puzzle game worth a darn needs to pop you in the mouth at least a few times. Getting stuck is simply part of the experience, and at the very least this Let’s Play is a good deal more authentic now.
Next time: the rest of the floor~
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Floor 22 is built around a central theme. Not only does each room make use of mimic potions, but all of them can only be solved by you putting the mimics into no way out situations. Arguably there is no moral issue with this as they are not considered living creatures (thank you Vatican II) but still as you look them in their blank eyes as you leave them trapped for the rest of their short lives it is hard not to feel a bit bad about the whole thing, even though they disappear as soon as you leave the room.
I think that this is DROD’s way of telling us that in order to be free we must be willing to destroy ourselves. The only way forward is to let go of what we were as if you aren’t willing to sacrifice of yourself then there is no way out of this room you find yourself trapped in. Perhaps games are art and DROD is the highest form of that, the digital version of dogs playing poker.
Oh, right. Puzzles!
I’m not gonna go too in-depth on the rest of this floor as we already took a deep dive into one particular puzzle from here last time. This room is basically getting you used to using a few far off landmarks to keep your mimic in place as you reset your location inside the small section of room you can move around. Also if you were to guess that I’d not notice that top indentation along the upper wall for way too long you would be correct.
All secret rooms will be mentioned. You have three mirrored mini-rooms with your pre-placed mimics (although if you don’t drink a potion how would they be your clone? Perhaps they are clones of someone else, or perhaps some evil scientist is growing spare "you"s deep down in this dungeon.) with their swords rotated in three different orientations. Once you make it to that save point the queens will just begin to spawn so this room comes down to quickly rotating and moving in such a way as to kill all of the spawned roaches before they can get past the arrows. The key to this, beyond rotating your swords a certain way, is to make it so that you end up on a horizontal line with the roaches coming from the room next to you and a vertical line with the ones coming from above. That allows your mimics to block a few of them and hence hold them in place for a few turns.
This room is set up so that you must send four mimics through the four sections of this maze at the same time, guiding each of them from the center out towards a switch while making sure not to get any of them stuck on any of those arrows before they can complete their task. It is not as hard as it initially seems but you must be aware of all of the ones that have not yet hit their switch whenever you make a move, taking any opportunity to “hide” them in a relatively safe spot while you advance the others.
This is peak madness in terms of guiding a number of your clones to a specific goal or goals, in this case eight of them.
It is a relatively fair room as there aren’t really any traps where the clone army can get stuck in with no way out, the main hazard being the sheer number of swords in play. I assume that this room was hellish without the ability to take back the most recent move as I accidentally gored one of those other "me"s way too many times to count. With the benefit of takebacks it is a bit repetitive but more of a test of patience that puzzle solving.
I think this was my favorite puzzle on this floor as it forces you to balance controlling two mimics along with avoiding several traps either of them can fall into. If you look at the initial dual gauntlets these mimics must path through they only have one chance to pass by certain parts thanks to those falling tiles, which means that they must avoid stepping onto those arrows once past them at any cost. That is simple in theory but much trickier with two of them simultaneously in play.
The twist with this room that makes it my fave is that whenever a mimic hits a switch to open a way forward for you it also lowers a door holding back a number of roaches. Said roaches will head straight for you and if they get past the mimic they will without fail end up wandering past some arrows which will make them unreachable. If you look at the end of the initial gauntlet for each mimic you basically only have to worry about blocking a single row of roaches, but by the time you reach the second batch you want to be sure you are positioned correctly before hitting the switch and by god be sure that you don’t open both sections at the same time. That… is a bad thing.
This room culminates with you setting free one last big group of roaches, a wave that you must deal with by using both mimics in concert to hold them off. If you are lucky you end up in the situation pictured above, where you manage to dart back and forth to get the initial ones while ending up with the remainder stuck in a straight line right by your sword. It took me more than a few tries to be so fortunate.
Still I thought this room ended up being a nice little blend of several ideas seen before but not quite in this combination. I think DROD’s puzzles are best when they are combining several different puzzle elements in clever ways. This also may be why this initial game doesn’t work as well as the later ones as it has a relatively few number of mechanics to play with, and I don’t even recall seeing a spider since that one floor. JtRH likely doubles the number of available mechanics if not more so, and it benefits the experience greatly.
We’ll finish off with this as it showcases a neat little technique. While we’ve already braced mimics against solid walls and even stationary creatures before, if you are crafty you can brace them against moving creatures for a single turn. Each time a roach passes beneath the mimic I am able to move myself one tile lower without the mimic itself moving, and after a few cycles of that I have enough moves built up to be able to reach the top of that section and open up the doors.
Next time: How many more will I sacrifice for the sake of the job?
I’m up to floor 13 in JtRH. It’s still quite good. The nice thing about it is that it doesn’t seem to assume you’ve played any DROD before, so it introduces KDD elements as well as the new JtRH ones.
Would definitely recommend starting there for anyone new to DROD. The difficulty curve feels pretty good, and the floors don’t really overstay their welcome.
Also, I noticed I had a save on floor 9 for KDD, so I got up to floor 11 on that. @username it seems I have a newer version of KDD than you. It uses new tiles/tilesets (my floor 9 had sand) and it had a few scrolls that didn’t exist in your screenshots (like one that explained the mimic potion you skipped on 10 wasn’t needed). Mine’s labeled “KDD 2.0”, so maybe I got it as part of Caravel Net at some point. I beta tested a couple of DROD releases and was given free Caravel Net for a couple years.
That is odd. Based on the title screen I am running the most recent patched version 2.0.16, but it makes no mention of a 2.0 so perhaps I am on some weird version between that and the Architects’ Edition. It’s funny, at one point I looked up a video let’s play for the game to refresh my memory on a certain puzzle from a previous level and noticed that it looked completely different. I had just assumed that they imported the game into one of the newer engines and that was a side effect of that, but perhaps not.
I must confess that I am of the opinion that the DROD games are all significantly too long. The store page for each game boasts how they are over 350 rooms (except for the newest entry, which is over 500) and while the design quality generally holds up it’s still a lot to deal with. I believe Journey to Rooted Hold took me north of forty hours to complete, that’s starting to wander into jrpg territory there. Cut the games in half, sell them for half the cost and release them twice as frequently I say.
This floor is focused on goblins, primarily on manipulating their behaviors so that they aid you in your quest. Each room will generally put a goblin into play early on with you having to deliver them to one or more ultimate locations. For example, in this room there are two serpents that can only be killed by placing the goblin in their paths.
This is just a refresher to show how one would maneuver a goblin through a situation like this. By this point in the game one starts to get a grasp on how they respond to your movements and in particular your sword rotations, especially when they are alone, which makes it easier to lead them to doors and around corners. The tricky part is what takes place immediately after this gif when those eyes come into play. On their own they are simple enough but you must figure out how to handle them while keeping the sword between yourself and the goblin as it will attack at the first opportunity.
To get a goblin to enter a path not directly in front of it they will generally flee to the other side if you approach them with the sword raised forty-five degrees above or below them. With these basic ideas mastered it becomes simple enough to lead this goblin to that last serpent and kill both of them.
I think it is worth flashing back to the floor where we were introduced to the goblins, which ended with a puzzle much like this one.
Back then Beethro felt remorse over how he manipulated that goblin to do his bidding and then had to slaughter it once it had outlived its usefulness. It was noticeable as at no point up until then had he shown any hesitation in performing his mission. On this floor though he has to do the exact same thing in most rooms and there is no hesitation at all, no remorse. I look back at that last floor where Beethro had to use and discard copies of himself over and over again in order to survive and I wonder if it began to change him. As noted the theme of that floor was how one must be willing to sacrifice oneself in order to be free, what was left unsaid is that sacrifice denotes a cost. It seems that in dealing with all of those clones the one thing Beethro lost, ironically enough, was his humanity. Never forget that this game is a constant descent, each staircase leading down deeper and deeper (no, still no idea where all those falling tiles end up). We are still left with the question of what Beethro is descending into.
DROD
Games
Art
…Anyways!
This is one of the rare combat-centric rooms on this floor. In a standard battle you’d have no hope of handling that number of goblins at the same time but that serpent fortunately gives you some time to set things up so that the playing field is to your advantage. You have all of those falling tiles to make use of and there is no one right answer, so it depends on what kind of battle strategy you want to go with.
This is the technique I went with. It is a tad less ambitious than some of the alternatives but by managing to bunch all the goblins in front of me it dramatically lowers their collective mobility and prevents any attempts to flank me. In fact…
…one could say that I prepared the battlefield for massacre~
We got to the exit a bit too early, but as you can see I cut my way through a lot of breakable walls and discovered another secret room!
Hahaha… no. To hell with that.
I unfortunately neglected to get a screenshot when I entered this room, but the basic setup is that you start with eight goblins free and pursuing you and eight little sub-chambers with serpents that can only be killed via goblins blocking their paths. What makes this an interesting puzzle is that once a goblin enters one of these chambers there is no real way out for them. The end result of this is that you must lead the goblins on a chase around this room where you want to try and get a single goblin to enter a sub-room that has no goblins in it, but in doing so making sure that only one enters and that none stumble into an already accounted for room. This gives this room a particular dynamic that hasn’t been duplicated in any other rooms we have come across so far.
This was another interesting room. You have five mimic potions and five normal roaches behind one way arrows. You also have a single goblin behind a destructible wall and a serpent at the end of a row of falling tiles, locked off behind a door that can only be opened by a switch behind another row of falling tiles. That door is actually the complicating factor as you need to open it to get to the serpent, but once you hit the switch to do so you are put in such a small place that you lose most of your ability to maneuver the mimics. This nominates the goblin for serpent duty once more, but it is a bit complicated.
A mimic is needed to bust the goblin out, but you also need to hit the switch to open the door to said serpent. You can’t easily maneuver the mimic so you likely have to bust the goblin out before you hit the switch. You also need to guide the goblin a bit, and if you take too long to get to the switch the goblin will inevitably step onto that row of arrows and get stuck.
The solution is to create a wall of mimics along the arrows to prevent the goblin from stepping onto them. Once you hit this point the only potential hitch is making sure that the goblin enters the section that leads to the row of falling tiles as if he goes past it there is no way to get him back up there.
Final puzzle we’ll look at from this floor, and in my opinion the trickiest of the bunch. You’ve got the two goblins at either side of you and two different serpents located up top so I’m pretty sure we all know what the ultimate goal is.
First things first is to get both of those goblins on the same side of you which is simple enough, just step out then retreat back and if one of them follows you maneuver them to the proper side using the techniques we gif’d earlier. The tricky part is the middle one with all those falling tiles. If you notice the only way out is blocked by a red door, which again is only opened when all of the falling tiles in a room have fallen. With one goblin in play this would be problematic, with two it is an outright problem. You can control their positioning for a while but in the course of stepping on all of those tiles they will eventually manage to separate from each other and begin to circle you, forcing you to either kill one (which makes the puzzle unsolvable), be killed yourself (which does the same) or miss one of the tiles (ditto). What we need is some sort of set-up that would temporarily take them out of the equation.
Unfortunately I neglected to take a screenshot of said set-up, which is more understandable when you realize the sheer number of ideas I had that did not work before I found one that did. Still it is simple enough to recreate with the power of MS Paint (also this legit may be the best MS Paint thing I’ve done yet). While I do not know if that is the exact configuration I ended up with it still manages to show off my solution. I managed to draw them up above the falling tile section on the right and escaped in a way that left them with no direct way to follow me while still leaving open a path for me when I had to return over there later. That let me clear up the section on the left free of harassment. When I returned to the goblin section by sticking to the left side I was able to clear away two thirds of the tiles there before the goblins once again became involved.
Once that was finished it was easy enough to lead the goblins once more to the serpents and finish up not only the room but the floor itself. I think what sticks out about this floor to me is how in most of the other goblin puzzles it is a bit of a scramble with you stuck in furious combat with these creatures. On this floor though you are positioned more as their clear superior. Generally you could slaughter them at any point but instead manipulate and maneuver them through a series of challenges until they do exactly what you want for them. Even with the rare combat puzzle you are given time to prepare and shape things to your advantage. For a game with no leveling up or anything of the sort it is still a nice way to show your progress and display your mastery over something.
Next time: I did not expect to see that down here.
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At the start of this penultimate floor we are confronted with…
…
…goddammit.
Restore time!
I promised genocide and what is a man worth without his word?
This room is obviously problematic. That is a ton of goblins, twenty-two by my count, who will come come straight at you the second you hit that switch. That is bad. On top of that the only way out of the room is blocked by a red door, meaning that while trying to kill all of these goblins you must also make sure to step on every tile once. This is also bad.
As an aside I have a theory about puzzle games, that being that you can break them down into two types. The first is more common, where the game gives you a certain set of items or obstacles and it is up to you to figure out how to best use them to solve a challenge. I like to think I am decent at that. The other type is where the game gives you a goal and a mostly blank canvas on which to try and craft a way to achieve said goal. I am markedly less good at those. This puzzle, while still technically that first type, is much more like the second than most other puzzles in this game. Basically it is playing to my weaknesses.
I do have one thing in my favor though. This is reminiscent of one of the very final puzzles in Journey to Rooted Hold, a battle against an army of similar if more aggressive enemies atop a floor of falling tiles. It isn’t exactly the same, but it gives me some ideas to play around with.
This is my initial idea, mainly because it was the easiest to implement. It gives the goblins much less room to maneuver and has one other very beneficial aspect.
When I go to hit the switch to open all of the doors it also cuts off the path below me. It reduces this level to more or less a straight path that happens to be full of goblins. I felt rather proud at this moment as I had taken what had appeared to be an overwhelming challenge and reduced it to something not only manageable, but rather simple. The only problem was that it did not work.
During the thirty minutes I spent on this puzzle I took many screenshots but still missed some key moments, fortunately it is rather simple to MS Paint in some extra details when needed.
Even though this isn’t the exact same scenario it shows the one problem that came up repeatedly when trying to get this basic idea to work. Inevitably with this basic framework I’d reach that upper right corner and ironically enough hit a wall. Those two goblins will not move from those two spots next to one another, and no matter which one I attack the other will kill me immediately.
I tried several variants on this approach but I always ran into a similar problem whenever I reached the corner. There would be two goblins waiting nearby each other that would not move from their respective tiles and when I went to strike one the other would then strike me.
This is a basic draft of what finally worked for me. The problem with the corner ended up being that there were simply too many goblins in that area and hence there would always be some in the positions that gave me such problems. My solution was to draw most of them into a central area that would itself quickly be cut off from me after a few steps. That left only a few goblins in the upper right area and after a couple of them attacked there was only one left by the corner, allowing me to stab it and finally turn said corner to face the mass amount of goblins gathered immediately in front of me.
System restore is a great source of second chance screenshots BTW.
This ended up being the simplest area of this room as while there was about ten goblins amassed right there by moving my sword back and forth one would step onto the tile in front of me and get sliced the next turn. With a little luck this reduced the volume of goblins nearby down to four, and generally down to three when I made my first step forward.
The key here was to get two goblins in front of me with only one a couple of tiles below me as this was probably the hairiest situation to deal with once I got past the corner. The first step forward will stab the goblin directly in front of me but will bring the one below me onto my tail. I will have to find a way to push the other goblin in front of me into the section of tiles in the upper left while cutting off enough of the path behind me so that the other goblin can’t immediately follow.
The other tricky part here is that I must pursue while making sure not to leave any spare tiles behind. On top of this right around now the goblins along the bottom of the screen that haven’t been doing much start to make their way towards me. From here I sort of have to maneuver the goblins coming from below with my sword so that one will occasionally charge as I don’t really have the benefit of being able to move much thanks to the tiles.
Here is where I realized that I finally had things in hand. Most of the pursuing goblins are gone with just one nearby and one straggler hanging out at the bottom, all along a nice easy pattern of falling tiles to deal with. At last I can rest easy knowing that all are dead.
Next time: …about that.
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Okay, we have unfortunately hit a bit of technical difficulties at this particular moment in time.
Earlier today while playing through floor 24 we were hit with a power outage due to a rather sudden thunderstorm. Half a day later power is still down, with me only being able to post what was already written thanks to being able to briefly plug in elsewhere.
This leaves us with three different problems.
One: I initially seemed to lose all of my progress on floor 24. The restore screen however has some points saved during said level, so hopefully I’ll be able to use those to regain most of my progress.
Two:
Hopefully that contains no personal or embarrassing info. The only thing I could get to take screenshots easily of this game was this program, which is only free to use for 30 days. As of yesterday we had five left with two floors, now we have 4 days with two floors and still no power. What that means is we are a day away from this:
I would not be too worried about that except for…
Three:
I am absolutely flummoxed by this room. I was stuck last time, I am much worse here. At times I have made it fairly deep in but as far as I can gather there is no actual way to get to the eyes from anywhere I can reach. I have a theory I will have to investigate next time as the room on the left of this one is another tar mother one, making me ponder if it is in fact a stealth two room super-puzzle. I don’t believe in the almost three of these games I’ve played that they ever did that with tar mothers before, but I can’t rule it out.
The problem is that it is almost a poisonous idea on my end. If it is just me thinking too far outside the box I will spend a great deal of time on a notion that will never work and will not give me any beneficial information in terms of coming up with an actual workable solution. However if I keep spending time looking at it as a single room puzzle when it is in fact a double the same thing will happen. It’s a potentially rough situation either way.
I really hate to have to look up hints for a puzzle game, to me it defeats the purpose of them. JtRH forced me to do it about four or so times, but that was the hardest game I ever beat. Gunthro made me do it once for a late puzzle and two years later I’m still a bit sore about it. Walking away to clear my head is often helpful, but if this takes more than a few days I gotta learn a whole new way to run this LP and it’s barely holding together as-is.
So… hopefully I wake up tomorrow, the lights are on and I can at least figure out an opening move here. If not, tough decisions will have to be made. I may have to go to the Caravel forums with my tail between my legs.
Next time: well actually…
We’ll be back to our normally scheduled DRODing tomorrow hopefully. I’ll leave this up for posterity.
i remember that puzzle, it’s not anywhere near as bad as it looks but i remember having to be careful about the return trip.
I woke up and had power again, so…
We come across a town. That… sort of raises all kinds of questions. I’m pretty sure when I started this off I entered a dungeon, I mean it is right there in the name and everything. We’ve now descended to what I guess would be the 23rd basement level, which is a town. Assuming that Beethro is roughly human sized then this dungeon must be many hundreds of feet below ground by now, what sort of technology was used to create such a thing? On the other hand, perhaps those roaches are actually supposed to be roach-sized and Beethro is roughly the size of a smurf. The depth would be much more reasonable but the relative scale would still be impressive. I really haven’t seen much in the way of prisoners unless this whole thing was built to incarcerate goblins, although maybe it is so overrun by creatures that it has fallen out of use.
Back to the first thing, a town is not what I would expect to find this deep into a dungeon or this deep underground. Did this spring up within the dungeon, or was the dungeon built atop of it? Either way, wouldn’t that mean that it was here for a long time now? Does King Dugan know about it? Has anyone found any of the tiles that have fallen?
I have no answers. So yeah, we’ve wandered into a town called Neatherville according to its Board of Tourism. Let’s just get to the puzzles.
I know, right?!?!
There’s a good number of swell puzzles on this floor, so we’re going to focus on some particularly neat ideas that come up rather than attempt a full walkthrough. These posts are long enough as-is so we should cut the superfluous.
This is right after we clear out the initial rush of eyes and roaches. It was… aww to hell with it, some superfluousness.
I may not have another chance for a combat gif. Anyways, after Beethro hacks his way through the eyes and kills the queens it is worth stopping here to get the lay of the land. The thing with most of those eyes is that they are right past a single falling tile, meaning that if you try to go kill them you’ll end up trapped. It also means that you must leave the brains alive until the end of the puzzle as once you get the eyes to see you they need to be smart enough to come after you, crossing over those tiles in the process.
This eventually leads you to this section over here, surrounded by eyes whose vision is blocked by all of those doors. It is a case where you pretty much have to hit the switch and run, but it has a mean trick in its back pocket. See, in the midst of the mass of eyes that begin moving the second you hit the switch there is one that doesn’t see you. In fact if you happen to leave this section without it seeing you it never will, the switch itself will block its view.
What this means is that we have to take a few precious extra steps in order to trigger every single eye surrounding us here and then make a made dash for that falling tile path while we still have a chance. After that one merely has to clean up the stragglers.
I don’t want to talk about it.
This puzzle is pretty nice conceptually. Basically each switch closes the door behind it while opening the door in front of it in addition to one elsewhere on the screen. You basically have to lead these brained-up serpents around and use diagonal steps to get enough distance so that you can sneak into one of these sections, hit the switch and slice the brain before the serpents can regroup at the exit and trap you. It could have used a save point but it was a pleasant little chase of a puzzle.
Another room where each switch opens access to another switch while freeing a few creatures. I just want to note one particular twist it has.
When this particular switch is hit the circled goblins and queens are released. By this point in the game one should be able to handle them without great difficulty. The next switch is a different story.
That switch opens up the door to the serpent right above you and no matter how you time it there simply is no way to get out of that narrow hall before the serpent enters. It seems impossible, and in that screenshot it actually is impossible. What can be done?
I mean, the fact that I mentioned the prior switch should have been a tip off. If you leave the queen alive you can time it so that the spawned roaches will enter that hall before the serpent can do so, resulting in its death. I do like how, aside from the blatant goblin “lead them to the end point” rooms there are a couple more subtle variants where letting things live for a bit longer can make all of the difference.
I think this is the most blatant “careful where you enter this room” puzzle in the game. I initially entered this room from the left hand side.
This was a problem as this roach will walk towards you and right past that arrow. That’s not gonna work.
I decided to re-enter the screen from the bottom-right as that places me by the switch that opens the door right above that roach. That should take care of that problem.
Unfortunately this causes those goblins to walk past their own arrow, resulting in a similar issue. This leaves us with a rather narrow area of the room to walk in that also leaves us with no way to reach either problematic section. If only there was some porridge-esque solution to such a predicament.
This approach is just right. You split the difference between the two, head up the middle, hit this switch that locks that roach in place, go kill some goblins and figure out the rest of the room.
Yay, another secret roo… oh god. This doesn’t look good in the least. I have no idea how to even begin to tackle this.
~5 minutes later~
Huh, that went so much better than expected I didn’t even manage to take any screenshots. When you enter the room you immediately step onto an invisibility potion, which now that I think about it has barely been used at all since it was first introduced. Almost immediately though you come across a purple potion you have to step on to make your way up to the rest of the room that makes you visible once more (I will talk a bit about that in a future update). It struck me that one would only start a room this way if it was somehow important, so I messed around with it.
In my second or third attempt I hung back and realized that if you are invisible the tar mothers won’t expand (the queens also won’t run away, that is less important). I timed it so that I only became visible when the tar cycle had completed, which gave me enough moves to get to one of the tar mothers and cut my way in before it could expand and prevent entry.
The problem is that I could only get to one of the mothers before they expanded, and once they did so a single time it became impossible to cut your way in towards the eyes. However, if one can get even a single queen roach next to the other mother it would prevent them from expanding, and that was the key. It still required some fancy footwork to battle two groups of brained-roaches on a floor of falling tiles, but once I made it to the other mother it was as good as solved.
Next time: Okay, I’ll talk about it.
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Fine, this puzzle. This stupid puzzle I had to think about for several hours during a power outage.
That screen is labeled “DROD250”. I maybe used and hence labeled one out of every eight to ten screens I took (gif screens remained unlabeled). That’s… a lot.
The puzzle starts simple enough from here (there is a road tile the next screen over that leads to this spot). You cut your way in, quickly come across some destructible wall tiles and continue up and eventually towards the eyes.
Took a bit of experimentation and failures to get this far, but we’re in good shape.
I must note here that each time a tar cycle concludes and the mother expands there is a possibility that the little space you’ve carved out could be filled with several bits emerging from all sides. You must keep an eye on the time and try to back yourself into a safe spot or corner when the clock strikes thirty, and even then there is a chance that it’ll all be for naught. Also note the lack of any save spots. It… can get annoying.
Here is where it all starts to go to hell. There really is no way to cut your way to the eyes as no matter where you try to you end up with a situation like this, an inevitable half-circle blocking your path. There are destructible blocks scattered all over the place and the room does introduce them quite early so I tried to use them to perhaps divine some less direct path. That was madness as many of them are located in places so useless that I don’t know if they even function as red herrings. I’d really like to know the logic behind the placement of some of them.
The other thing I noticed was all those various paths off to the left. I went to see what the next room over looked like and…
…I see.
This raised the possibility of it being a two-room super-puzzle in my head, something again which doesn’t really exist elsewhere in the series. Then again that godforsaken maze was like one massive puzzle so I couldn’t discount it. The other possibility was that this was another “where you enter the room is important” puzzle; the floor already had a few of these. In this theoretical case solving this initial room gives me access to five ways to enter the adjacent room, with only one of them being viable.
The other problem this raises is that if this is in fact a two-room puzzle, which room is first? Which tar entry point in either room, of which each has at least a couple initially viable ones, is the right one? This is why I described this idea as potentially poisonous, as if it was incorrect it could potentially take four times as long to discover that fact. Worse still, since I would no longer be aiming for the eyes but instead the side of the screen there would be little chance of stumbling upon a correct alternate path straight to the eyes if it in fact existed.
Fortunately this was the right approach and it was a two-room-er. I believe this is the only side exit you can reach from within this blob which raises questions about the ones above it, but in complete honesty I was so glad to get anywhere that I didn’t investigate further.
From that point it wasn’t that hard to make my way to the eyes in this second room, and look it even rewards me with a save point. How nice.
I’m not sure if this is an apology or not as I think the dialogue wasn’t in the original version. I don’t necessarily believe that the game admitting that a given puzzle is a slog makes up for having to go through said slog.
…Huh. Well I gotta go take care of the tar mother in the next room anyways, I’m sure after that it won’t take too long to figure out the way out of here.
What’s funny is that I couldn’t figure out how to get to all those tar bits in the previous screenshot, so I just took out the mother in the next room and then doubled back to try and kill this one a second time. Amazingly enough it didn’t backfire tragically.
Allow me to briefly document some of the things I figured out during my millennium trapped in the tar.
This is technically an older screen, but whatever. Look at that circled spot, particularly the destructible blocks I painted over in a polka-dot fashion out of boredom. By being located right next to the tar mother it would almost seem obvious that they’d either be the way to get to it, or the way to exit after slaying it. It does neither. It is another thing that doesn’t even work as a red herring as you can only really reach it after getting to the mother, and you cannot proceed beyond it at all. Even now I look at it trying to figure out what I missed as it obviously should do something. It baffles me.
There was another set of destructible blocks in this fancy circled area. I worked my way there assuming that they would eventually lead me to freedom. I guess this one qualifies as an actual red herring at least as it leads to just another dead end.
I eventually cut my way back to here, funnily enough where I initially entered that other room. It seems obvious in retrospect but I must stress that I had a hell of a time cutting my way back here, so much so that I initially surmised that it wasn’t possible. Then I ran out of other better options and had to try some more.
Free at last!
This puzzle gives just enough clues that I can’t argue that it is a terribly designed puzzle, but god it may have been my least favorite. The two room deal initially made it confusing, all those breakable walls made it even murkier and on top of it all it was a double-sized tar mother room. So glad to be done with it and I have hope that maybe there is no tar in the final floor, that I am done with it.
Before we get to the final floor I do want to comment on one thing about this game that has slowly been bothering me more and more as we creep closer to the conclusion.
From the secret room last floor, there was the potion that made you visible after you had previously been turned invisible. That was the first time we saw it, although to be fair there are only a handful of non-secret invisible potion rooms in the entire game.
From back on floor twelve we had this frankensteined screenshot from another secret room, where we had posts on the corner of each tile to prevent you from moving diagonally.
Even earlier than that back on floor ten there was a secret section I did not go over involving tunnels and yet another door that could not be opened. Tunnels are basically tiles that if you step into them allow you to instantly transport yourself to the other tunnel exit somewhere else on the screen.
What bothers me is that we are now at the final floor and none of these things have appeared since. The game would have benefited from their use, later games have crafted many puzzles based around them. I wonder aloud if the secret rooms were added in many years later and hence could grab objects not present in the initial campaign, as if not I don’t understand why one would create several mechanics that only appear as one-offs in secret rooms.
Next time: we end this thing!
The anti-diagonal posts were not in the original DROD or in Architect’s Edition, they are part of the upgraded version for the new DROD client.
The tunnels were in but frankly I don’t think they’ve EVER been used well in any DROD, so er yeah.
edit: most of the secret room did not exist in the original version, actually, thinking about it.
Yeah, there were a few secret rooms in Architect’s Edition, but the ones you’ve shown mostly weren’t.
Like mauve said, the anti-diagonal tiles weren’t in AE. Tunnels actually weren’t in AE either.
Invisibility potions were in AE, and they were definitely under-utilized. I don’t believe picking up another one toggled invisibility status at that time, though I could be mistaken about that (and there were a few versions of AE, so I could be thinking about an earlier one).
EDIT: Did some research! The ability to toggle invisibility potions was added late in the beta of DROD:AE.
That is good to know and it makes more sense that way. It would have been rather silly to hide things just in certain secret rooms.
Alright, last floor and…
…huh?
Oh my goodness, someone else, maybe even a friend. Hey!
No, I’m friendly! Ignore that whole genocide thing!
We finish up with a floor-wide confrontation between us and this fellow who I think is named Neather (he must be in charge of the town and by proxy its Board of Tourism). Basically he stays one step ahead of us and triggers all sorts of traps to keep us at bay. He also talks a lot of trash.
Here is where Neather (I think it is supposed to be pronounced like “beneath”) unveils his most annoying tactic: he stands by the switches and closes the door whenever we approach it. Just makes me want to slap the guy. Other than that this is a fairly standard brained roach room.
The brain just going “???” is the best joke in the game IMHO.
You see all of those doors? All of those switches? All of those queens? Yeah. Basically whenever we close in on a queen he will try to shut the door to protect it until you kill enough of them that he shifts over to Plan B. Fortunately he can only do this for about half of the queens so our best bet is to head immediately towards the unguarded ones and try to take them out first.
Plan B I’m pretty sure is just him wanting us to come over to talk with him, which we’ll do so once we finish off these stragglers.
…jerk.
Now he’s to the point where he sends waves of goblins after us, but it ends up being one of the easiest rooms on the floor as we also have access to switches hence we can limit how they approach by closing some of the doors. I’m pretty sure we’ve got him cornered now.
Really? Fine.
Once we walk all the way over here he lets himself out and makes a dash for the door, but I think he left us just enough time to…
…or not.
Yes, we’re just dropping the whole puzzle examining aspect and going full-on narrative Let’s Play.
Believe it or not, this wasn’t the most annoying room on the floor for me. It’s actually not a “true” tar mother puzzle as we don’t have to go cutting through anything. Instead it works more like a faster queen roach one, where we must make our way through a maze while leaving enough time to defend ourselves against the brained-bits coming from all sorts of directions. The key is to position ourselves within the maze where we can either lead them all along beneficial paths or charge towards one group and kill it before another group can close on our rear. Also Neather keeps closing doors and making us take the long was as he is, as has been established, a jerk.
This is a tricky room to describe, but a decent little puzzle. The room is set-up so that we and Neather take turns going through that central section, selecting a path to take and switch to hit. Each switch when hit closes the door behind it so its path can only be used one time total. Our goal is that when all the paths have been taken all five doors at the bottom of the screen are open, while Neather is trying to make sure at least one is left closed and hence we are trapped.
We basically must come to two strategic realizations to complete this room successfully. One, we should hit the switches that only close a door first so that Neather can’t hit them later when there is no way to counter it. Two, some switches rather than open or close a door just switch its orientation… and there is no limit to how many times we can hit the switch while in their hallway. Once we figure those two things out it becomes rather simple to complete.
Here is what I love about this room: there is probably a nice, well considered proper solution to this room. That said, if we stand on top of a door tile that Neather then closes the serpents will all come towards it and kill themselves while Neather isn’t smart enough to just lower the door and prevent this from happening. It is a lot easier to kill all those brains when there is nothing around to attack us.
This room is terrible. Neather goes around opening and closing various doors, but the only two doors out of that initial area are many steps apart and he repeatedly closes them whenever we get anywhere near them. Perhaps there is a trick to it but on the several attempts it took to complete this room I could never manage to get past this initial section in under a few hundred moves.
As we go down these inevitably closed hallways the roaches build up. Finally we make it past the very first door and start the same game with the next set, trying to time it so that Neather is distracted with opening a different door so that roaches can attack us long enough so that we can sneak forward again. I once made it to the queens, miscounted by a single step, got cornered and had to restart the whole room again. A legitimately vexing room.
We finally have this guy cornered… except he is craftier than we anticipated. He will hide on the other side of that little pit in that central section and the second he gets a step on us he will dash out the door and close it behind him. This part is inevitable. What is worse is that he will then decide to go out the upper door, which takes him back to the first room and starts this chase all over again. At least the enemies are all dead and… who am I kidding, I just restored to the start of this room rather than run through them all a second time.
If, though, before doing any of that we step on that falling tile (we’ve gone down 25 floors now, how is there still pits where I can see sky below?) it cuts him off from that switch. He’ll then be forced to take the path to the left.
Yes I will!
Here we are, the last room, the final puzzle. Neather has to go hit the switch and then make his way to the central area while we make a mad dash to the same area. It’s a bit simple after all that we’ve been through but I won’t complain. To be safe I take the absolute quickest path to there and…
…
Let me retry that.
You’re kidding me, right? Because I entered this room from the central tile in that hallway, in a room I cannot exit due to all the one way arrows, it is now impossible to complete? That is the final puzzle you are gonna go with? Over 350 rooms and you want to close on a puzzle that can be made impossible to complete based on information I couldn’t have possibly known before…
You know what, fine. It’s late, let’s just do this.
Hark, We are now two steps to the right. How fortunate.
Neather closes the door a step too late and finds himself cornered.
Oh wow, when I go to strike him dead for making me run all this time he pleads for his life, leaving me with the choice to spare or kill him. Since games have gained aspirations to become something more, to give the player more of an active role in how the story unfolds we have seen player choice become more and more common of a design element. I recall that time I was given the choice to spare or kill someone, or that other time I was given the choice to spare or kill someone. Such creativity.
I mean, yeah I obviously killed him. We’ve gone over that whole genocide thing how many times now? Plus I might need the extra ADAM.
Here it is, the final roach in the game. It’s been a long journey (when I step on the staircase it says it has taken me just over 32 hours) but finally it is mission accomplished. Look at the smile on Beethro’s face as he hits that roach, it’s good to see him that happy.
It is just fading off the screen but you can see that we finished with 54% of the secrets completed. In case you are curious, no we will not be going to find the rest. One must know their limits.
.
What I always liked about these games is the extra-chummy credits. They generally start with a basic note from the team lead going over some production stuff and thanking you for supporting them, and then give you a paragraph or so for each of the major team members to tell you exactly what they contributed. It’s a nice pleasant way to end things.
~Fin~
So that’s that. I think I’d give myself a nice solid C grade for this. I did lose half a floor’s worth of sceenshots early on and only figured out a format that I liked right at the end of the 22nd level (one post going over the general idea of the floor and a second taking a deep dive into one stand-out puzzle from it), but I also managed to both finish the darn thing and get those snazzy gifs working. I even got a new avatar that I think might actually be working correctly now.
I think King Dugan’s Dungeon redeemed itself a bit with its final third or so. There were a couple of rooms that I found irksome but the complexity finally progressed to a point that floors began to regularly feature multiple clever puzzles without going too overboard. I think the lead-up to them is probably still too long and the middle of the game is hamstrung by some questionable gimmick levels, but it ended up in a good place. Now to get to The City Beneath sometime around 2018 or so.
A quick thanks to everyone who dropped by to leave a comment or a blood potion. This was one of those things I had bouncing around my brain for a good long while that I just needed to finally get onto (digital) paper and hence out of my head, but I’d have probably felt silly at some point if it was met with absolute silence and indifference. Hopefully you got something out of the 27.5k+ words, 289 screenshots and 55 gifs that littered this thing. Let’s hear it for spectacularly wasting time together!
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I mean, you’ve clearly not played DROD: The Second Sky. 
I have played both The City Beneath and The Second Sky but have probably only gotten through a third of the way in each.
I got much closer in JtRH (I think level 22 or 23).
I think the elements introduced in TCB and TSS are a lot more awkward than the JtRH elements, but some of them are pretty clever regardless. Also, the story stuff ramps up in a way that makes them more obnoxious to play. They features sort of faux hub things. It’s nice to just go straight down like in JtRH and KDD.
Gunthro and the Epic Blunder had a hub/world map as well, but it didn’t bother me too much. At the very least it gave a better justification for the different tile sets.
If you had just put a bit more time into JtRH you could have gotten to the final level that some people found rather annoying (I thought it was fine). I will say that of the three DROD games I’ve completed JtRH had the most satisfying final puzzle.
Yeah, and unfortunately I lost that save. I’m working my way back, slowly. On level 15 now.
Level 14 in JtRH was probably weird if you hadn’t played KDD. It’s the level that introduces mud, and a lot of “puzzles” are super trivial because they’re just recreations of KDD level 8 puzzles except with mud instead of tar. It’s like a weird joke? There are only a few real mud rooms in that level.
(The 3 mother room is still pretty difficult, but I think still easier than the tar variation).
Huh. The final floor had a custom tileset in the original version / Architect’s Edition. Just the standard blue/ice tileset here. I am not playing through it again to take a screenshot though.
I doi know that if you do not kill the Neather, he traps you in such a way that you will die to the roach.