Oh, I wouldn’t say that the roach is guaranteed to kill you, but it leaves you with no good option to then kill Neather. I also know that if you try to spare him inside his little cubbyhole he will kill you himself.
I… may have tried everything except the obviously right solution for a bit longer than I let on.
I tried looking up a youtube vid of the 25th floor to see how it originally looked and instead stumbled upon one running it in a more current engine. It looks so gaudy! I mean, not really, but the lighting threw me for such a loop.
BTW @Gate88 my PC suffered a catastrophic failure since I played JtRH but I may have an end-game save on here somewhere still, so if you ever lose interest and want to skip ahead it may be an option.
Up to Level 20 in JtRH. Still mostly enjoyable, although there are some tedious rooms. I tend to dislike most puzzles with lots of trapdoors. They feel really constraining, but not in a way that adds to the puzzle, really. I just have to pay an annoying amount of attention to how I move. And there are some efficiency puzzles that could use less hacking, although even that can be fun as a change of pace.
I had to look up on which floor the bane of my DROD existence is on, and it is JtRH floor 24 so you still have that to look forward to. It is 1S, 1W if you are curious.
The reason this room sticks out to me, beyond the whole “being so hard that I had to look up a hint” thing, is that when I walked away from the game for a bit I came up with an utterly brilliant solution that made me go “A ha! That is such a clever puzzle!” except for the fact that it wasn’t the right solution at all and instead it was just a grindy slog of gradual optimizations.
[spoiler]My completely wrong solution was that the trick was that you would have to advance ahead of the timer mud thing, get onto that row of one way arrows, cut the mud back a bit from there, finish off the rest of the tiles and tar in that main section and then take care of the rest of the mud. It is obviously wrong when you look at a screenshot but when you are away from the computer all day and have that revelation early on… it being so wrong was very deflating.
Also finally completing it only to realize there was a bit or two left behind in that initial section I could not get to? Yeah… did not take that well at all.[/spoiler]
There does seem to be an emphasis on tar/mud in the latter portion of this game. I mean, I guess that’s not terribly surprising; they’re probably one of the more complicated elements and they weren’t terribly well explored in the earlier introductory levels.
It’s sort of like roach/brain puzzles in that the harder varieties force optimization too, which tends to be more difficult that linchpin solutions (unless you’ve got a particularly clever linchpin, or I guess a chain of them).
I’ve been thinking about DROD more in comparison to other puzzles games. Are there any others that are quite so long? The only one that’s coming to mind is Stephen’s Sausage Roll. SSR gradually introduces mechanics like DROD does, but they feel more like natural extensions than brand new ideas. That might be just a trick, though. Does DROD represent breadth and SSR depth, or are they attempting the same thing just with a different framing?
SpaceChem is quite long, but it’s also quite obvious that game is trying to do something different. It’s an optimization and engineering puzzle. And while DROD approaches some of those ideas, it certainly doesn’t go as deep.
Has anyone played through and beat Chip’s Challenge? I played it when I was pretty young and never got too far. I revisited it recently, and while there are some neat ideas there, are lot of the levels are super tedious in practice. It sort of does a similar DROD breadth thing, but some of the levels are really fiddly and tedious (the real time component can exasperate this).
I’ve spent more time on certain puzzle games, but they are more along the lines of Picross or similar numerical ones. I think that is an unfair comparison though.
The Talos Principle probably took me about 24ish hours to 100%, which is within the same ballpark I guess. I have no idea how much time I had to put into Hanano and Jelly no Puzzle to complete them.
I tried Chip’s Challenge again a year or two back and… I think tedious is probably the best word for it. There are some decent ideas in there but I found it to be too much of a chore to deal with after a while.
For me, Jelly no Puzzle was spread over months of Friday nights where I and a couple friends would work together and solve the puzzles for a couple hours. So I’ve no idea how long it took me, either.
Big warning regarding that bundle: due to Steam/Greenlight silliness they would only let Caravel release the first three games (i.e. the three in the bundle) as DLC for the 4th game (DROD: Gunthro’s Epic Blunder) so if you don’t own said game on Steam you wouldn’t be able to actually play any of those three. It’s… really dumb.
