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Got a perfect clear with no orbs used. I suspect it’s 80% early dumb luck, 10% early rat king and 10% strategy. Plus the rat king revealed the eventual location of the bomb scroll as the other corners had rats in them. I think detonating all the bombs as soon as you get to 10 hearts is an important step to a perfect clear.

One strategic insight is that it’s best to start with the squares around the dragon, as they’re more constrained than everywhere else. One has to have the egg, and the squares that are directly North, South, East or West of it can’t contain 7s. Essentially that means if you click all the squares around the dragon and clear them, you’ve probably got a good layout for this challenge.

Early on you’ve got to expand in whatever direction you have good information for, and I suspect that if this goes in the opposite direction to the King Rat area then it might be best to restart. The rat reveal is essential for two reasons: 1. The rats give you much more flexibility in using up your hearts, 2. The information you get from killing them is even more useful in this run where you’re very constrained by not using orbs.

But the design is minesweeper with hidden information. Every enemy except for the bats, skeletons and green slimes has a feature that you can use to make deductions:

• Why are there different sprites for the mice?
• Why are the shields of the guardians different?
• Why does the minotaur turn around when you open a chest?
• Is there a pattern in how gargoyles appear?
• Where does the mine-exploding scroll skeleton usually appear?

etc etc

It’s not a slamdunk with the three stamp attempt, because you likely won’t have enough hearts to clear the board unless you’re very careful about only spending hearts on unrevealed monsters (vs the slimes that get revealed by the slime mage scroll).

I found the best strat for the three stamp run is to restart the game (you can just press R for a quick reset) until you get a favorable starting reveal. Ideally you want the mice to limit the search area for the rat king to no more than 3 columns or, ideally, indicate the exact column it’s in. Otherwise it’s almost impossible not to accidentally click on unrevealed mice as you work your way through the board.

There is a way to make it less random if you’re just going for the Future Generations achievement

It only looks like RNG because you’re not observing enough of the hidden patterns. Those things provide you with the additional information you need to make logical deductions.

For instance, below is a spoiler about Gargoyles..

Or a question you could ask yourself about Guardians

Or a question you could ask yourself about mice

But it’s important in some instances to know where things were on the board — what directions mice were facing, whether you eliminated a guardian in a particular quadrant or not, etc. These are things that are easy to forget and the raw numbers don’t help to re-deduce them.

The broken walls are a really interesting addition. But I wonder if they highlight an issue in how the game conveys hidden information?

I assume that to avoid visual clutter, you don’t want to have fallen monsters all over the place. But equally, if you left dead monsters only where their position/orientation/etc was relevant, it might give away too much.

What if you had a toggle button or mouseover area on the bottom bar that just showed where the monsters you’ve killed were? It would allow players to make deductions without having to rely on remembering what they’ve killed. I guess an alternative would be a more elaborate marking system that could mark-up uncovered cells and distinguish between possible values and certain values (eg placing a purple 4 on two squares would denote the other gargoyle is here or here)

I had no idea the sort of a mental calculation involved in the raking of leaves. Eventually I stumbled upon the strategy of asking myself what the single most bizarre way to rake the leaves would be, and it rarely led me astray.

A+++ mechanic, would play Ilija’s Irksome Rake again! :)

Finally figured out the final manoeuvre.. phew!

Is the title a reference to the Jaco Pastorius track?

oh man, that last checkpoint was mind-warpingly fiddly, but I got there in the end!

What a terrific puzzle :)

A way a lone a last a loved A-plus

What a delightful sacrament.. That level with the crate wall-bound on three sides was a thing of pure joy to unravel!

brilliant puzzle! If it isn’t brain-melting to design puzzles this intricate, I’d love to see more levels using this concept & building on it :)

I lol-ed when I realised that one level was effectively Microban I and that I had botched it in the way that I always botch Microban I.

figuring out the top right twist made me feel like the smartest space cowboy, not least because I totally failed to solve it yesterday 🚀

hint: where do the boxes (as opposed to the colors) belong in traditional sokoban.. have you moved them to their targets?

Loved it! The emerging deduction genre is one of my favorite developments in puzzle gaming, and I’m still jonesing for more

I have rolled your cheese, wrangled your caramel and now stacked your sticks. Are we making cheesecake on an open fire?

great stuff :)

Sokoperson bringing the fire

10/10 would 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 again

Very satisfying! I reached a point of contemplating some pretty elaborate solutions, but then it finally clicked. So it strikes the unusual balance of being harder than it appears then simpler than it seemed like it would be :)

Ah, good find! That adds a nicer quirk of having to get the block back in place vs realising you screwed it up 100 moves ago when you solved the 14 block room ;)

Ah, turns out that you can’t edit a comment to use this after turning it on

If it's any consolation, I only realised you could save a block in the room because I incompetently tried to do it for about 5 minutes instead of realising it was pointless :)

That was a rollercoaster! So much clever stuff packed into such a small space and it felt great to figure out the final trick.

I'll put it below the fold, so as not to spoil anyone (wish itch had spoiler tags!!) but you could put yet one more slightly mean sting in the tail

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Not sure if this wholly avoids other solutions, but by removing one square in the wall of the room with lots of blocks in it, you'd maybe force the player to preserve one of the 14 blocks in that room to fill the gap in the wall

Ah! Was able to suss it out without having to resort to rot13-ing. I'd foolishly decided a certain move wasn't possible for the first missing 2 and the second 2 required such a feat of manoeuvring that I laughed out loud when I finally got it to work!

I think it's a case of spending too much time thinking I was missing something surrounding that one block that has sightlines to the big room and the last room, instead of being confidently logical. 

This is such a cool puzzle!

I can reach the last room, but fall 4 short of being able to finish out, and I can't quite work out what I'm overlooking! Below the fold I've listed the blocks I'm generating out of each area in order, in case that makes tipping a bit easier.

3, 3, 3, 4 & 8, 5, 8 & 5, 7

I have defeated.. *checks notes*

DECAF BOLOGNA BAG, WAT?!

edit: revised anagram guess now that I'm playing it all official-like

Cabbage, Goat And Wolf?

Unless, that is, it's another hit number from Cow Goat Fleabag Band..

there seems to be two requirements for the win condition — if I'm guessing correctly then the one you're missing just requires you to do something very standard sokoban in the middle of the level.

The start of level 13 was a 10/10 fiddly marvel -- felt rather smart when I figured out how to do that one.

All killer no filler, it's just how NinaBirb rolls

It's always a good day when NinaBirb graces us with another puzzlescript banger :)

I enjoyed this! The puzzles are interesting and the mechanics keep coming thick and fast. My only minor gripe is that I'm not a massive fan of the scrolling screen. I didn't feel like any of the levels were so massive that they wouldn't have fitted on a single screen and, more often than not, it made the puzzles needlessly more fiddly.

In the words of Julius Caesar: I comin', I seein', I pushin'

Cool game! It gave me strong Microban vibes -- just tightly designed puzzles where every bit of movement space has some intentionality behind it.

Excellent Spookyban -- surprisingly tricky!

My uncle is a fearsome man with a bad attitude who's recently taken to muttering about mounts and coves and bans at family gatherings. My grandfather charged me with figuring out what's going on. So while my uncle was at crossfit, I secured entry to his home and conducted a thorough sweep. Pinned to his fridge, I found a peculiar document that appeared to be tracking incidences of combinations of these words. I must say I now share some of my uncle's concern. The mounts are intensifying and the coves and bans are increasingly outmatched. By my estimates, we may only be weeks from some kind of mountmount calamity.

Does anyone have a hint for Spire-22? I believe I understand all the rules, and if this were a problem involving coins or marbles without a grid, I know the approach I'd take. What I can't figure out is how to map that solution on to this 8x8 grid, to the point that I'm starting to wonder if I'm on the right track.

Spoilers below fold

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I'm assuming I've got to form a star shape? But I can't figure out a rotation that makes five lines. I'm operating under the assumptions:

- I've got to make five straight lines

- A line is 4 pieces in either a horizontal, vertical, diagonal, or knight-move configuration

- A line can't have more than 4 pieces, so a line of 5 isn't two lines of 4

- the gate indicates the number of additional lines require to pass, in this case 5.

All my goals are achieved, thank you!

That was great — love these single screen puzzlers that pack an extraordinary density of puzzles into a small amount of space :)

Predictably and completely brilliant considering the people involved. I thought the difficulty curve was spot on — not the sort of puzzling death march that requires you to bash your head on a level for days, but stuffed to the rafters with deeply satisfying and hard-won a-ha moments.

I felt C4 had a very Le Slo sorta vibe, so was pleased to see that was indeed a Le Slo level. And I was delighted to see the D7 mechanic finally surface after what-iffing on so many levels that by the time I reached D7 initially I didn't even consider it.

10/10 would slime again.

What finally did me in — and I made it past the video gaming war crime that was the bouncy maze — was the pirate bridge. If this was one pain point, I might have persisted, but it was the accumulation of them.

I've played pretty much everything you've released, and they're often outstanding in terms of design. There are some decisions on this one that I just don't entirely understand.. If there are sections that are going to pile up attempts (eg the surfing, the checkpoint races, the booster slaloms, etc) it's super irritating to have a multi-second flying saucer interlude and then get placed quite far away and, in the car sections, to have my car almost always pointed in the wrong direction as if it's going to drive off screen.

Maybe it's just not for me, but I'll still look forward to the next one :)

v peculiar! I definitely cheesed it when I played it last night by walking off the castle on to the flag area without having to use any of the boulders, but now I'm trying again it seems impossible to do so?

Brilliant design! The last level especially was a banger. I think 11 might have some unintended overly simplistic solutions, but understandable when the core mechanic insists I screw with the level design ;)