Just finished "Mutually Assured". Best yet! I had fun watching your video and hearing you concisely sum up the identical reasoning in a few seconds which took me ploddingly over an hour. But I loved it!

Fully completed this area today, it was the first one I went to after the paths divergence. I love this microgenre of puzzle games with so many variables that you're required to do everything with intention. The "parse" step can be brutal in this game, it's not as easy to work backwards from a solve than it is in bean & nothingness, Railgun took me a long time to figure out what the "problem" was. I actually had it wrong for a majority of my solve, and only realized my erroneous assumption after I realized that the false goal was just impossible. very precise design here.

The eyes are a nice break to deal with from keeping track of the movement rules for the various more mobile enemies. Very direct and simple enemies. Of course, they're usually combined with those other enemies in interesting ways... Railgun was very enjoyable. Flying snake movement was something I struggled to understand the intricacies of well into the later rooms of the game, often just fiddling around and undoing when things didn't go how I'd expect, but this one was very constrained in how they could move and easy to follow. Yeah, Mutually Assured was definitely a fun one; I liked the trick of shooting across the houses.

Railgun and Mutually Assured were both very fun to unpack! Very fun process of going for something that seemed like a solve, only to find one more additional wrinkle, particularly for the latter. I think Forbidden Sight is my favourite puzzle of the area, with Burrows a close second, though. Just very neat solutions with distracting the eyes.

20:40 Yeah, also this reorient move makes sense in-game, adding to a picture of bugs being less nimble than, say, flying snakes, and they probably see poorly in directions other than forward, so they need a turn to check if they need to turn to pursue you. And flying snakes like to fly fast so they stick to flying in the same direction because they have inertia. Kinda: this doesn’t explain how they can instantly reorient 180° when you go in an opposite direction. Maybe doing a vertical barrel is easier for them than rotating horizontally… weird snake physics. Eye resting is likewise: lasering should probably take a lot of energy so the eye needs to prepare for a turn before being able to shoot again. Slugs and statues are more straightforward and don’t seem to pack this much lore.

Probably the second hardest of the original four areas (with the marsh of course being the hardest). I was very glad of the open world and being able to leave puzzles alone until they had ripened. Some really great puzzles in this area though, especially Forbidden Sight and Mutually Assured. Burrows had me stumped for a very long time (not because I didn't know the trick, but because it was awkward to manipulate the bomb bug in the small space) but the solution turned out to be surprisingly simple -- which happens quite a lot in this game :) I hope it's not annoying that I point this out, but the eye is strongly reminiscent of the pulse cannon from the custom elements contest; it has the same prime, fire, then one-turn cooldown mechanic, though of course the details differ after that :) Very evil of you to tease us with the blue door that seems to grant access to a new area but immediately leads to more blue doors. I was a bit worried that I'd cut myself off from other areas, not permanently, but until I managed to earn more keys. Still, that gave me an incentive to persist with the puzzles I was stuck on!

WOW brutal levels 👌 you could rearrange levels to force the learning. Or, perhaps more subtle, add level numbers to the rooms to indicate authors' order (per realm perhaps - W3 for the third west-of-crossroad room)

Not in the playlist right now for some reason. Also the order of the playlist seemingly became backwards (E2 is first, then E1). Looking forward to the time you start commenting on the part after four green keys get taken from the tower! There are some wild mechanics in the extended block land. 👏💎 (well, in hindsight they seem plain necessary when you have what was already seen, but still that doesn’t subtract anything from the fact it’s fabulous).

These have been such an immense treat! Thank you so much!

'This is the most useless waypoint in the game' *uses it in the same episode*

I thought Assembly Hall was an error 😅 the area of defeating Statues