An elaborate open puzzle that takes more than a few minutes to solve. I'd like to know if there is an audience for this type on TWP.

Click here to download In The End

Click here to download In The End

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The puzzle was originally made by my friend Dreamer. We collaborated to further improve the map. I suggested to him to post some of his maps on TWP but he declined to do so. If some people appreciate this puzzle I might be able to persuade him to change his mind.

toncica wrote:
I'd like to know if there is an audience for this type on TWP.

Where else? count on me... not today though...

This was certainly a complex puzzle. I'm not sure what you mean by "an audience for this type on TWP," but I can tell you what I didn't like about this map: it is just so unforgiving. If you make a mistake or if you have to go back a few steps, you are just screwed. Since it's a Workshop map, you only have two saves to fall back on, and if your mistake was three saves ago, you have to redo many steps to try a different route. This just becomes tedious. For example, to get into the first room you need to press a button, which not only gives you access to the room, but also drops a cube. If, at some point, you screw up and need to get back into that room, you kill the cube you worked so hard to get and you now have to retrace your steps to get the cube again. I just didn't see the point of doing that. Why punish your players for making a mistake? Also, I hate maps where I have to listen to a cube being fizzled every few seconds until I can go rescue it.

I thought the puzzle was very challenging, which I like, but the unforgiving nature of the setup made it tedious and frustrating.

Thank you for your in-depth feedback. I totally get what you're saying. The first time I experienced the puzzle as a player (I'm not the original author) those were pretty much the same thoughts I had. Of course it was easier for me because there were a couple of unintended solutions available.

The puzzle is unforgiving though and you feel a kind of punishment going on with that button that respawns the cubes. It's a dilemma because you don't want to get the player trapped, there has to be an escape path, but at the same time you need to prevent short cuts and alternate solutions. The button basically resets the map in case you were stranded on the other side and brings you back to the start. The best and only option I could see about this issue was moving the entrance to a position in which the first action of the map is to press the "reset" button (originally the map started in the light bridge room). At the start there is no harm done yet by the button and you might be able to draw the conclusion from it that pressing that button again won't be helping in solving the puzzle as it fizzles the cubes. I've sat there for hours and thought about how to bring back the player without having to fizzle the cubes but I didn't find a solution for that.

I also agree that constant fizzling noises or all sort of constant noises are incredibly annoying. Here the "solution" is to have the dropper far away from the fizzler so that the interval is hopefully tolerable and it might become not much more than a slow heart beat.

What I meant with "this type" is probably that it's a thin line between having an open map with a challenging but enjoyable puzzle and having it become frustrating, and that the line may be crossed in the view of some people.