Puzzling

I made a temporary account just to vent about this one. Minor spoilers on some of the puzzles.

On the surface, this is an interesting idea for a hack. However, the hack suffers immensely from a fatal flaw with all of its “timer puzzles”. While the hack has some good puzzle design throughout each trial, there are an overabundance of these “beat the clock” style puzzles that rely on figuring out optimized movement through a room to reach a gate in time. These puzzles wouldn’t be overly offensive on their own, but for some reason, these have their timers set to the absolute bare minimum amount you can possibly complete their objective in. There was one particular room in the “Fire Trial” that probably took me over 90 minutes, and for sure at least 5-7 deaths, even though I knew exactly what movement I needed to perform in the room from the first handful of attempts. This hack could be improved immensely if these timers were extended by even half a second. You’ll figure out what the room requires relatively quickly, then spend five times as long just trying to hit the correct timing. In my view, a “puzzle dungeon” hack shouldn’t be similar to kaizo games where repetition is required to conquer an arbitrary timer, but instead it should prod the player’s imagination on how to overcome the obstacles presented. While this hack does contain many pretty creative puzzles that will require attentiveness to your environment and making use of all available tools, the over reliance on timer puzzles and the absurdly tight timers used end up overpowering the rest of the experience, and far more of your time in this hack will be spent frustrated, trying to memorize and execute each timer room flawlessly, than actually solving any real puzzles.