The Stack

With every official hold, it seems, the creators of DROD felt a need to outdo the previous hold’s post-victory component. Gunthro and the Epic Blunder has the familiar locked-until-you-beat-all-the-secret-rooms area, with concept art and bonus puzzles, most of which are harder variations on rooms seen earlier. Some of these rooms aren’t content with just being the most difficult in the game, and add Challenge scrolls on top of that — indeed, there’s one room with two contradictory Challenges, one requiring you to clear the room without using bombs, the other to clear it using only bombs. But the Mastery area isn’t the end of it. The Mastery area contains a scroll (accessible only after solving a couple of tough puzzles) that gives a hint about finding a larger puzzle spread throughout the main game, like the metapuzzle in a puzzle hunt.

Solve this, and you can visit the Spider Cave, an entire additional level of the game. And unlike the kitbashed stuff in the Mastery area, it’s a proper level, with a uniting theme and style. Indeed, it’s more unified than most levels, because in some rooms it pulls the same stunt as level 6 of King Dugan’s Dungeon, repeating room layouts with just enough details changed to make the solutions completely different. Other than that, its main theme is the combination of spiders and shallow water. Spiders are invisible unless you’re close to them or they’re moving, and shallow water makes Gunthro invisible to monsters, so putting the two of them together has the peculiar effect that sometimes neither Gunthro nor the monsters can see each other. I imagine this was probably designed as an introduction to spiders much like the introductions to wraithwings and serpents and so forth, but then cut. As it is, we don’t get a real spider-introduction level, and it would be impossible to just slot this one in, because spiders get used before shallow water becomes available.

Anyway, I’m done with Gunthro, except for the last few Challenges in the Mastery area. Overall impressions: Yes, this is probably the one to start with if you’ve never played DROD. It’s shorter and easier than earlier episodes, but still gets satisfyingly tough towards the end. And I think the puzzles are just better-designed. It doesn’t lean on tactical fiddliness so much, preferring the big “Aha!” moments. This is a big part of why it’s so short: it has less of the filler where you’re battling roaches as fast as they spawn. As a side effect, I think the puzzles here are more memorable — at least, I feel like I recognized more of the rooms, and I don’t think it’s entirely because I played it a few years more recently.

GatEB doesn’t add a lot to the DROD toolkit, though — certainly nowhere near as much as The City Beneath did. In fact, it leaves a fair amount of the essentials out. There are no goblins here; soldiers take their place as the thing that’s a little smarter than roaches. There are no potions of any sort. Instead of mimic and clone potions, we have the horns that summon friendly soldiers and squaddies from offscreen, and instead of invisibility potions, we have the shallow water effect — all of which make things just a little bit more complicated than their potion versions. Most strikingly (and it took me a while to notice this), there is no tarstuff. No tar, no mud, no gel. That’s a pretty big deal, considering how those substances dominated portions of the previous games. And that domination of the experience is why it was probably a good idea to leave them out.

I guess the biggest thing it lacks is resolution. Gunthro and Beethro end their story no closer to the truth than where they started. There’s a boss battle of sorts, where Gunthro pursues the Tuenan captain through another Neather-style dungeon, but it’s a bit like the final boss fight in Metal Gear Solid 2: a phony conflict that the player knows is just a distraction from what’s really going on. And anyway, the Captain just doesn’t have the emotional oomph of a good villain. Even the original Neather, who was barely a character, earned some good villain points by being in control, and then inadvertently giving you an opportunity to wrest that control away from him. The Captain doesn’t have that. He’s as hapless as you.