Originally posted by Kailieann

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I beg to differ. Bad level design is bad level design, regardless of how long it takes.

Levels -- especially in adventure games like this, should be at least somewhat streamlined, and not require the player to spend hours going back to the start of the level over and over again to find item after item.

As I said, everything up to the Guardhouse was great, but once I actually got there..

*shrug* I prefer games that are fun, not frustrating.

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Originally posted by Kailieann

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You seem to be using a lot of terms without understanding what they mean

The term "Interesting" does not equate to "You missed an item because there was no clue as to its location, go back through the entire dungeon and look for it" repeated ad nauseum.

The distribution and quantity of monsters and items are a huge factor in the definition of "level design".

And, you're right. Backtracking is not the main factor in the game. The main factor in the game is wandering around with no clues as to what you're supposed to do, and only being able to find anything by sheer dumb luck, all the while being pursued by monsters that will kill you if you're not lucky enough to avoid them, forcing you to start over from scratch.

And, yeah, most hacks are more difficult than the original game. Hell, I don't even mind the difficulty level when it comes to the monsters and so forth. It's the fact that the game offers no hints whatsoever on what to do or where to go, forcing the user to stumble around blindly until they manage to find the right location (assuming they don't walk past it completely because there are NO CLUES WHATSOEVER where ANYTHING is)..

Also, since this has come up several times in the chat but hasn't been mentioned once in the thread, I'll take this opportunity to point out that most of the people praising this hack have less than 30 posts under their belts, and a good chunk of them haven't said anything more than "It looks good, I can't wait to try it", which literally means they haven't played it yet.

And again I'll mention that, after the fourth time backtracking through the entire dungeon, I decided to cheat. Infinite hearts, infinite bombs. The game was still too tedious for me to bother finding the fourth key.

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