by q 3 on Fri Aug 26, 2011 10:36 pm
I like alternate solutions and love tricky puzzles, but having a puzzle that the player literally cannot solve - where there is nothing that you can do or could have done to get past it, save restarting and hoping that the dice roll your way the next time - seems to me to be needlessly frustrating. Frustrating for the player who encounters the puzzle for the first time, and maybe even figures out a solution, but has no way of implementing that solution; and frustrating for the player who has solved it before, and knows that there are valuable resources to be had (resources which could well be the difference between victory and defeat in the main dungeon) but has no way of accessing those resources. I can't see how the completely random possibility of a 100% unsolvable situation adds anything of value to the game, while it definitely detracts.
With the new deity giving an additional 50% chance of obtaining ENDISWAL in any dungeon, perhaps this is less of an issue. I've also thought of a third way to solve the Yin-Yang dungeon (but none of the others) that involves a rather convoluted use of three different glyphs, but I haven't been able to test it and am not sure if it would actually work (and since it requires three specific glyphs, the odds that you'll actually be able to use that solution are even lower).