The Stack

And now I want to describe another hidden room with a Challenge. This one is on level 22, and my experience of it is pretty much the exact opposite of the one on level 20.

The theme of level 22 is something I mentioned recently: rooms that you can’t solve on first visit, although with an added emphasis on exposing the player to monsters on the first pass. Perhaps the pinnacle of this theme is 2N2W (that is, the room two rooms north and two rooms west of the entrance). This room has six blobby chambers arranged like flower petals, each containing at least two immobilized roach queens — enough to spawn roaches faster than Beethro can kill them — plus a passage on either side containing a Brain to make sure you can’t escape the roaches. As a hint to the player, Beethro says to Halph on initially entering the room from the south that he won’t be able to kill everything and that they should just get the doors to the west open and run for it. (This is most easily accomplished by just standing by the doors and fending off roaches while Halph runs around the other side of the room hitting the orbs that open them.) The western passage circles around through four other rooms and lets you re-enter the room from the north, where there’s a little isolated nook containing a fuse that ignites the bombs in the roach chambers.

I describe that room in particular because the hidden room I want to describe, 3N, is a variation on it. It lacks the bombs, but it also changes the walls and the roach placement in small ways that, per Beethro’s assessment, make the room solvable without them. The conventional solution starts the same as in the original version, escaping to the west. This just takes you to a dead end in a different room — a room, in fact, that you’ve already visited by this point. The visible but inaccessible dead end is a clue to the existence of the hidden room. The point of visiting the dead end is that the room resets when you re-enter it from the west, granting you enough time to kill the Brain in that passage and then dash over to the eastern passage to kill the other one before the room gets too roachlogged to make that run. You still have massive amounts of roaches to deal with afterward, and getting past the first two chambers is difficult and time-consuming. But at least you get to engage the roaches on your terms, once the Brains are gone.

The Challenge scroll for the room is in the dead end to the west, and the Challenge is to complete the room without using the dead end. This is honestly not much different than doing it the normal way. My solution: First I ran into the southeast lobe of the flower and killed the queens there. That took enough time for the roaches to get perilously close, so I retreated to the western passage and killed the Brain there. Getting from there to the eastern passage took some time, and judicious use of Halph. I had reduced the roach spawn count to 28 every 30 turns, so I basically got to move forward just two squares every 30-turn cycle. It wasn’t steady progress — turning the corner from south to east was tricky — but once I was in the eastern passage, it was basically the normal solution from there on. That is to say, the most difficult part of the puzzle was still ahead of me at that point, the part that dominates the experience of the room and which is completely unaffected by the Challenge.

The thing that really gets me, the reason I call it the opposite of that other Challenge, is that the Challenge solution is less clever than the normal solution. I mean, I’m not at all sure I would have thought of using the dead end if the Challenge scroll hadn’t told me not to. Sure, it fits the level’s theme better, but as it was, the only reason I went to the dead end before completing the room was that I wanted to read the Challenge scroll. The Steam Achievement for completing this Challenge is “Smart, but Not Smart Enough”. It could be describing me.

Level 20 contains a Challenge that delighted me so much, I have to spoil it in detail.

To start with, it’s in a hidden room. Most DROD levels have a few rooms like this, reachable through hard-to-spot crumbly walls or subtler trickery. Such rooms are flagged as optional, so this is where the designers put the more difficult puzzles. In this particular room, the Slayer shows up briefly as an additional warning: all he does is say “Good luck” and leave, confident in his trap.

Stepping into the room means stepping on a fuse. The fuse automatically lights, then burns down one square per turn on a wiggly path until it hits a bomb, which detonates, along with every bomb caught in its blast radius, every bomb caught in the blast radius of those bombs, and so forth. This is a fairly common pattern in JtRH; it’s a way of forcing the player to make their way to a safe spot within a time limit. This room adds a strange extra step by having the detonations come in two waves. You’ll see a red wall around the area containing Beethro: a trap door gate, which lowers when all the trap doors in the room have dropped. The initial blast gets blocked by the gate, but it lights a second fuse that crosses the gate and detonates the bombs inside.

Now, opening the gate would sever that second fuse, so why don’t we do that? ¹Correction: Opening a gate under a fuse does not sever it. Only closing the gate under it does so. So that’s another reason to not pursue this strategy. Also, on looking at it again, it looks like some of the bombs inside the gate are within the blast radius of the bombs outside, and only shielded from them by the gate. So there’s that too.
[Added 29 May] No, never mind, all the bombs inside the gate are out of reach of the initial explosion even if the gate is open. The explosion does reach the gate tiles, but no farther. All you have to do is make one of the mimics in the upper chamber, which imitate your movements, step on the last trap door. That’s fairly easy. But if you try it, you’ll learn the reason: the entire area outside the gate is filled with spiders. The whole deal with spiders is that they’re invisible unless they move. Hiding crucial information like this is something of a violation of the spirit of the game as I understand it; presumably this is why spiders have been used so little after KDD. But they’re used here, and discovering them answers the question “Wait, I don’t see any monsters, so why are the green gates closed?” — something I didn’t even think to ask at first, so focused was I on obstacles rather than goals. (Mimics don’t count as monsters.)

The point is, letting the spiders out before the bombs kill them is disastrous. You can try to open the gate and kill them manually, but you’ll fail. So in searching for a safe spot to stand, you’re limited to the area inside the red gate. The only place inside the red gate that’s adequately shielded is inside the little crook in the upper left of the gate, and it’s blocked by both a green gate and a tar gate. So, that’s enough to give you goals! You have to get to the safe spot. On the way, you have to clear all the tar and mud, and kill all the monsters that spawn as a result of clearing all the tar and mud. You have to do this while keeping the mimics off that trap door and maneuvering around the bombs scattered around, which will blow if you accidentally stab them. And you have to do all this before the fuse burns down. This is not easy, but at root it’s just a matter of being careful and optimizing your movements, and that’s habit by this point in the game. The puzzle is essentially solved. You know what you need to do, and it’s pretty satisfying to finally do it.

On the way out of the room, you step on the Challenge scroll, which was inaccessible before. The challenge is: Don’t stab any tar. And it’s a beautiful moment, because it seems absolutely impossible.

It’s not just that it’s asking you to ignore a lynchpin of the puzzle. Lots of Challenges do that, and they don’t usually have the same impact. I think this is because most lynchpins aren’t quite as definite. Usually either you look at the puzzle and see a way to do it and it works, or you try it the wrong way a few times and can’t quite get it to work and start to think there must be a better way and look for one and find it. In the former case, the Challenge just tells you “Actually there’s another approach that would have worked too”. In the latter case, it tells you “The approach that you gave up on because it was too hard isn’t completely impossible”. But here? I didn’t merely notice a solution, I reasoned my way to one. Everything about it was a result of seemingly inviolable constraints. There is only one safe place to stand inside the red gate. To stand on it, you must clear all the tar. The only available means of clearing tar is stabbing it. And yet we are asked to not stab it. What this Challenge tells me is, “You think you understand this room. Actually, you do not understand it at all.” Solving it was a matter of re-examining my assumptions until I found one I could break.

After hitting a rough patch in the mid-teen levels, I’m making progress at a pretty good clip again. I’m up to level 20 now, so Rooted Hold is basically within sight, or would be if we weren’t underground. But let’s go back a bit, to level 13, a goblin level, because that level has a pretty big gameplay shift. In the course of solving this level, you encounter the Goblin King, who’s kidnapped Halph and is holding him for ransom. The ransom is more than Beethro can afford, and ultimately the King admits that he knew this all along, that the ransom wasn’t the point. His real motivation is revenge for all the goblins killed by the Budkin family over the years and the ransom was just a way to make Beethro squirm. Beethro’s reaction is to charge into the goblins’ living areas and slaughter them all, much to Halph’s dismay — Halph, as established back when he was just one of many unnamed nephews in the outro to King Dugan’s Dungeon, thinks goblins are cool and is eager to make friends with them. And really, the goblins were never going to hurt him. Like all the dungeon’s monsters, they recognize that he’s special. But Beethro comes to his rescue anyway, regarding the goblins as creeps and his nephew as an idiot.

But he can’t do that right away. He passes through several roomsworth of goblins that are tantalizingly out of reach, while he’s isolated in a parallel passageway. And it all ends in the staircase down. Back when I played JtRH the first time, I wasted some time looking for the hidden passage or crumbly wall that would let me through to complete these unsolved rooms, but there was none. DROD is extremely friendly about letting you go back and solve things later, though. You can restore to any checkpoint in any room, and still keep the credit for everything you’ve solved, which is a good thing, because everyone misses most of the secret rooms on their initial descent. So I did eventually move on, and thus found that the levels actually double back after a while. You solve level 14, then on level 15 there’s a second staircase leading back up, which leads to another staircase to the area on level 13 that you couldn’t reach before. I said before that there are no stairs going back upward, that going down stairs just deposits you in a room without any stairs in it, and that’s true for KDD and the first half of JtRH. It stops being true here. Floors 13 through 15 aren’t just a sequence. They’re a space.

Now, most rooms in DROD are self-contained, but even KDD had some puzzles that span multiple rooms. Most obviously there was the infamous maze level, but there was also a sprinkling of things like rooms that you couldn’t solve when you entered them the first time, and instead have to cross to a different exit and then loop around and come back from another direction that you can solve it from. It seems to me that JtRH engages in this pattern a lot more than KDD did, and that the goblin subquest simply takes it to another level ¹Literally.. This is a trend that The City Beneath will continue, as the rooms come to more and more represent places rather than just puzzles.

Level 14 of Journey to Rooted Hold is the first appearance of the Awakened Mud, which is sort of like inverse Living Tar. Where tar can be cut on its edges but not on its corners, mud can be cut on its corners but not on its edges. The result is that clearing mud is fundamentally simpler. Cutting away a corner generally creates a new corner adjacent to the old one, so in the absence of walls or other obstacles, you can clear any mudshape by shaving it away in layers. Thus, to avoid being trivial, mud puzzles tend to use walls or other obstacles.

When there’s something you need to reach in the middle of a large pool of tar — usually a Tar Mother — all you need to do is reach the pool’s edge and you can slice your way through the thick of it and straight to your objective. You can’t do that with mud. The only way get to the middle of a mud pool is by removing enough mud that it isn’t the middle any more. Relatedly, if tar growth leaves you completely surrounded, you can cut your way free, but in mud, you just get stuck, immobilized by stuff you can’t damage. In short, mud behaves very differently from tar, and has a very different effect on puzzles.

JtRH takes a clever approach to illustrating this. Level 14 is basically just a selection of tar puzzles from King Dugan’s Dungeon turned upside-down and with the tar changed to mud. I don’t remember this from the first time I played through JtRH. Maybe I noticed at the time and just forgot about it, or maybe I’m only noticing this time around because I played KDD so recently. Regardless, the impact of recognition here is the one good reason I’ve seen for playing KDD before JtRH. It must be very strange to see the mud versions of these rooms first, because the conversion leaves in elements that don’t make sense, design-wise. For example, there’s one room that, in its original form, has a door that’s opened by an orb that’s very difficult to reach, because it’s in a tar-filled area that’s only exposed at its corners. In the mud version, the orb is trivial to reach, but also kind of pointless, because both sides of the door are also trivial to reach.

What really tickles me is the way the game builds story around all this. Overheard conversations and discarded memos depict a feud between the Tar Technicians and the Mud Coordinators, the latter being a recently-formed group that’s regarded by the former as upstarts peddling an inferior imitation. And the Tar Technicians have a point. Mud is inferior to tar from pretty much every perspective. As a defense, it’s more easily defeated. Because it’s so easily cleared, it has less potential for interesting puzzle design. Because you have to peel it away in layers instead of just plowing through the middle, it’s more tedious for the player. The reuse of old tar puzzles doesn’t just illustrate the differences between the two substances, it reinforces the “inferior imitation” idea, as if the Mud Coordinators didn’t have any new ideas of their own. From one overheard conversation, we learn that the reason that the rooms of Level 14 are all upside-down from the originals is that the architect was holding the blueprint the wrong way up, further emphasizing the sense of incompetence.

This is stuff we didn’t see in KDD. When tar was first introduced, it was just a new puzzle element, one of those things you find in dungeons. In JtRH, new elements have stories associated with them, with characters and conflicts and meaning. And old elements gain these things retroactively.

A couple of levels on, and I’m once again finding myself spending a lot of my time clearing tar, not just because of those tar gates, but because clearing a room completely of tar has become a fairly common subject for Challenge scrolls. The mechanics of it are seeping into my dreaming mind, occupying my idle thoughts. Let me get some of this out in words.

Tar lies in multi-square puddles, which you can cut with your sword along any edge, except at the corners, which are vulnerable only to explosions — which is to say, invulnerable in rooms without bombs, which is most rooms. To remain stable, the puddles have to have a width of at least 2 in all places, both north-south and east-west; any square of tar that lacks a neighbor in either dimension will break off and start chasing you. Thus, the smallest stable configuration of tar is a simple 2×2 square. Since this puts all four tiles at a corner, such a square cannot be cleared. It’s the basic kernel of most unclearable tar shapes: if you can clear everything except a 2×2 square, you were doomed from the start. There are other invulnerable shapes, but they basically amount to multiple 2×2 squares stuck together by shared corners.

The basic clearable tar shape, on the other hand, is the 2×3 rectangle. Poke that in one of its vulnerable longer sides, and the remaining five squares break into monsters. This can be generalized. Given a 2xn strip, the only things you can do are cut off two rows at one end, or remove one row in the middle and split it into two pieces. If n is odd, you can cut off two rows repeatedly until it’s 2×3. If n is even, then it will still be even if you cut off two rows, and splitting it in the middle will always create one strip with an odd length and one with an even length; thus, you’re always going to wind up cutting it down to a 2×2 square at the end. So strips of this sort are solvable if their length is odd and unsolvable if their length is even. Many rooms have a checkerboard pattern on the floor, allowing you to tell odd from even at a glance.

Similar logic, which I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader, shows that a rectangle is solvable if and only if it has at least one odd side. It’s basically a matter of parity, an odd-or-even property that you can’t change with your sword, except with “odd” and “even” confusingly swapped: an odd length represents even parity and vice versa. That is, by assigning “even” to odd lengths, an nxm rectangle has even parity if either n or m has even parity, just as the product of two integers is even if either of them is even. It works out this way because of how splitting a rectangle into two pieces requires removing a row. When you split a rectangle in two, the pieces will have similar parity if the original had even parity, and opposite parity if the original was odd.

At any rate, all rectangles with even parity are solvable, but things get more complicated when we move beyond rectangles. You can have lumpy shapes with corners in inconvenient places that keep you from making the cuts you want. If you can reduce a shape to two separate 2×2 squares, it had even parity, but might still have been unsolvable. Odd parity is always unsolvable, though, no matter the shape. Assuming that Challenges are never completely impossible, it’s therefore safe to assume that the parity of any completely inert tar pool you’re supposed to clear will be even. But if there’s a Tar Mother in the room, making the tar expand at regular intervals, it’s possible for the parity to change. Thus, when you kill the Mother, it’s imperative to make sure that the remaining tar has the right parity if you intend to clear it all. I have no better way to do this for wiggly shapes than to attempt to clear it and see if it I wind up with a 2×2 square left over. But if I do, at least I know better than to keep trying from the same point.

JtRH Level 10 brings back the Living Tar, DROD‘s equivalent of slimes and oozes. Although not a new element in DROD, it was absent from JtRH until this point, and Beethro greets its reemergence with an “Oh no”. As well he should: it’s worse this time. One of the hard but useful lessons of the first game was that, although it’s often a good idea to clean up tar deposits completely (especially in the presence of a Tar Mother, which makes them grow and spread), it usually isn’t strictly necessary for the completion of a room, and in some rooms it’s actually impossible. Tar can spawn monsters — any tar that’s reduced to a width of 1 tile breaks off into a Tar Baby, which is functionally equivalent to a roach — but it doesn’t count as a monster itself in its senescent state, so a room can be full of tar and still count as conquered. (This has the peculiar effect that you can clear a room of monsters, and then, before you leave, cut into some leftover tar and spawn new babies, returning the room to
its unsolved state.) But JtRH adds a new element that changes this: Tar gates. Just as green gates open when there are no monsters in the room, and red gates open when all the trap doors in the room have dropped, the black tar gates open when all the tarstuff in the room is gone. ¹To be more precise, these conditions don’t necessarily open the gates, but rather, toggle them. It’s just that gates usually start off closed. It’s possible to author a tar gate that starts open and closes when you clear the tar, but I haven’t seen this done in JtRH so far. So from here on out, clean-up-all-the-tar puzzles are a possibility. And that means it’s not only going to be necessary, it’s going to be difficult.

There’s one other thing JtRH adds to tar, though: context. Back in King Dugan’s Dungeon, tar was just one of those things you find in dungeons. There was no explanation for it. In JtRH, there’s… well, call it half an explanation for it. We know from notes found around the level that the the tar is artificial, concocted by the Tar Technicians of the Rooted Empire. What we don’t know is why. Very likely there is no real reason, or at least none that anyone remembers; I’ve commented before on how the Empire as a whole is an irrational system without a guiding purpose. Some of the notes we find describe experiments the technicians are doing on the tar, and the intro text for the level mentions “the crackpot theory that tar is in fact an artificial creation of a clandestine underground society whose scientific knowledge far exceeds our own” (emphasis mine). In short, this is the place where the game starts to suggest that this fantasy world may be a little sci-fi, possibly even futuristic.

The next level undercuts this severely by mentioning items of untold destructive power, which turn out to be round black ball bombs with long sparking fuses, an antiquated technology used today only by cartoon characters.

It’s only after I killed the Slayer in L7:1E using advanced techiques that I found out that there was a much easier way to do it, and that it was one I really should have noticed, because it’s basically just the exact same trick I described in the post where I complained about being unable to figure it out, just turned backward. Instead of forcing the Slayer to step on the force arrows, you walk on them yourself while approaching him. Done right, the effect is the same: the force arrow prevents the slayer from simply stepping onto your square, letting you make moves he doesn’t know how to counter.

Still, I’m past that, and galloping through the rooms at a pretty good clip again. And that means I’m well into I-don’t-remember-this-part-at-all territory. There’s a plot point on level 9 that I think is worth describing.

First, it should be noted that even though the title is Journey to Rooted Hold, journeying to Rooted Hold was never Beethro’s intention. He just wanted to get a look at what was behind that unopenable door in King Dugan’s dungeon, but then he had to go find Halph, and then he had to go down stairs a few times to escape the Slayer, and before you know it, he’s down at level 9 with no way back. There, he has an idea. He’s noticed that the levels have been heading generally southward for some time — that is, the stairs down on each level have been south of the starting location ¹As in the first game, there are usually no stairs leading back up. You just go down some stairs and get deposited in a room in the next level.. So he figures they’re going to be under the neighboring city of Blorn pretty soon, and remembers a similar unopenable door in Blorn’s sewer system. Blorn isn’t where he wants to be, but at this point, anyplace where he can escape the dungeon with Halph in tow is good enough for him.

So you find the exit to the Blorn sewers, clearly labeled. It’s in the same room as the down stairs. But the Slayer is there waiting for you, and it’s clear what’s going to happen: Just at the point where Beethro is about to escape, he’s going to have to go down another floor instead. The irony of this is that the whole reason the Slayer was dispatched in the first place was that Beethro was unwilling to leave the dungeon. Now that he’s found Halph, he’s positively eager to leave, but the Slayer prevents it.

It strikes me that most of the plot of the game is driven by character flaws. Halph’s headstrong lack of cooperativeness draws Beethro down. The Slayer’s pride, his unwillingness to give up on a quarry even when the original purpose is lost, keeps him there. Even the Negotiator arguably takes some blame for the sense of superiority that makes her unwilling to listen to Beethro and therefore not actually very good at her job. Beethro himself is of course the hand that sets the dominoes in motion. His motivation? Curiosity, I guess. But if we want to peg it to a flaw, it’s the lack of consideration that led him to indulge that curiosity on a day when he was looking after Halph.

No progress on the JtRH L7:1E Challenge. I noticed that Steam’s description of the “kill the Slayer” Achievement is “(JtRH) Kill 39th Slayer in any room except L7:1E, L22:3N2W or L25:2W”, specifically excluding the room I’m stuck on, as well as the room on the final floor where the Slayer is supposed to die. I figure this could mean that completing the L7:1E Challenge requires killing the Slayer after all. Or it could mean that doing things the normal way and getting the invisibility potion makes killing the slayer way too easy to count as a Challenge. Regardless, I spent some time trying to kill the Slayer, but had no success.

At this point, I’m ready to openly ask for help. I’ve tried looking online already, but the old Caravel forums where the Challenges were first mooted don’t explain how to do them, and the new Steam forums are pretty thoroughly useless for anything other than tech support, and the game is obscure enough that just googling for help doesn’t yield much of anything other than the Caravel and Steam forums. In fact, the top hit for “drod L7:1E” is my own previous blog post on the subject, which is oddly embarrassing.

The Caravel forums turn out have some good general advice on killing the Slayer, though. The first time I managed to do it in a room where you’re not supposed to, I managed it by making the Slayer walk onto a force arrow. Getting within killing range of the Slayer makes him counter your every move in ways that are often symmetrical about a pivot: you tilt your sword this way and he tilts his the opposite way, you move south and he moves north, more like you’re dancing than fighting. The force arrow broke this symmetry, allowing me to get close to him without him being able to do his usual counter. But it turns out that special-terrain tricks like this aren’t really necessary. All you really need is walls in the right configuration — an interior corner with a single block jutting out will do. Alas, L7:1E has no such thing.

…Is what I was in the middle of writing when I suddenly found some threads on the Caravel forums about more advanced Slayer-killing techniques. It turns out that there are Slayercidal dances that require only a straight wall and enough empty space. It took some finagling to get Beethro and the Slayer into the starting positions for such a dance, but it was quite possible within the constraints of L7:1E. So now I get to continue! Yay!

Since I’m still stuck on the 7F:1E challenge, let’s take a brief look at what’s happened on the floors I’ve glossed over. A couple of new monsters were introduced — well, not new to me, and not new to people playing Journey to Rooted Hold as DLC for Gunthro and the Epic Blunder, which also had them, but they were new once.

Floor 5 is the first appearance of the puffy marshmallow-like Wubbas, an entirely new concept for a monster in this game: they don’t attack you, but neither can they be attacked. Your sword just passes right through them without harming them. As such, they’re not counted as monsters for the purpose of conquering a room. They’re dangerous all the same — it’s just a danger of being surrounded and immobilized rather than killed. Wubbas tend to come in quantity, and they chase you like anything else. Their one weakness is that they’re a little stupider than most monsters, and get stuck on obstacles easily. The standard movement algorithm for most monster types is:
1. If the player avatar is due north, south, east, or west of you, just try to move in that direction.
2. Otherwise, try to move diagonally towards the player.
3. If there’s an obstacle in the way of moving diagonally, try to move around it north or south, whichever brings you closer to the player.
4. If you can’t do that either, try east-west.
(Some monsters, such as Goblins and Wraithwings, embellish this with special behavior when they get close to you, but use the standard algorithm from a distance.)
Wubbas omit steps 3 and 4. If they can’t just move straight towards you horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, they give up. Just as they try to block your path, so are they especially vulnerable to having their path blocked. In some rooms, though, this serves to split the Wubbas up, so they can keep coming at you from multiple directions as you move hither and thither.

Floor 6 introduces Rock Golems, which, I only realize on preparing to write this, are essentially a variation on the same theme as Wubbas: things that clog your path and don’t go away. The mechanics are different, though. Rock Golems can be killed (and can kill you if you’re careless), but once you kill them, they turn into impassable piles of rock. So where Wubbas are all about outpacing the herd, Rock Golems are best handled by luring them one by one to an open area and murdering them where their corpses won’t cut off any passageways. (Unless you want to cut off a passageway to keep the Slayer away or something.) Curiously, they have the same diminished movement algorithm as the Wubbas, the better to get them stuck on each other’s remains, for good and for ill — after you’ve led a few of them to your chosen killing grounds, it can become difficult to get more down there.

Time for a confession: Although my posts about DROD stalled last year, I didn’t really wait four months after finishing King Dugan’s Dungeon to start playing Journey to Rooted Hold. I started playing it from the beginning back in December, and got all the way to the end of the 7th floor without posting anything here about it. Then I got stuck. And now, having started from the beginning again, I’m stuck in exactly the same place.

“Stuck” isn’t really the right word. I can continue to the 8th floor any time I want. In fact, I have already done so, only to reload back into floor 7. What I’m stuck on is one of those Challenge scrolls. To date, I’ve been meeting every Challenge I find — as I noted before, this is the main part of the remakes that’s new to me, so it seems a shame to skip them. But this one Challenge has been a lot harder for me than any other I’ve seen.

The overall theme of the seventh floor is puzzles involving invisibility potions and/or evil eyes — in particular, it makes puzzles out of the non-obvious fact that being invisible can be a liability, because monsters that can’t see you won’t chase you, and if they’re not chasing you, you can’t manipulate them into going where you want. The Slayer makes one appearance on this floor: after the repeated failure of his usual approach, he’s decided to just wait for you by the exit stairs. The stairs are near the floor’s start, but access to them is limited by an orb at the end of a long, winding hallway. If the Slayer follows you into that hallway, there’s no way to get back out. Thus, you need to be invisible, so he won’t follow you. There is an invisibility potion in the room, but you can only reach it if you enter via an alternate route in the south, which only opens after you conquer all of the other rooms in the level.

Or that was the intent, anyway. Someone figured out how to open the stairs without going through the alternate passage, so now it’s a Challenge. As the challenge scroll notes, you can skip the entire rest of the level this way.

Now, I can see only two possible routes to this goal. One is to kill the Slayer, but I don’t think this is likely. The room lacks features that can be exploited for this, and besides, would they really include both a Challenge for killing the Slayer in any room and another Challenge that requires killing the Slayer in a specific room? The other possibility is to take advantage of the Slayer’s Wisp. The Wisp is the thing that the Slayer uses to find a path to the player. It moves at one square per turn, leaving a trail of swirlies as it goes, and while it’s moving, the Slayer himself doesn’t move at all. So if you could lead the Wisp on a sufficiently long and winding path through the room, it would send the Slayer on a long and winding path while you escape from the long and winding hallway. I’ve managed to get within a hair’s breadth of making this work, but I assume that was the intent behind the room’s design: to make this approach almost but not quite workable.

I feel there must be some trick to making the winding path approach work. Some insight that I’m missing. And that’s largely why I’m still working on the problem. Most of the Challenges are of the form “Forget about the lynchpin, there’s an incredibly fiddly solution that you can do instead.” But this Challenge may well be introducing a lynchpin of its own.