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COMPLETE: Chocolate Castle
Much like Zen Puzzle Garden, I picked this up in the Humble Voxatron Bundle back in 2011 and it has been haunting me ever since. Now all I need to do is play Jasper's Journeys and I can finally exorcise the spirit of Lexaloffle from this household, I suppose. Man does it feel like an accomplishment to be done with this one, though.
So. Klotski puzzles. Also known as "sliding" puzzles, "daughter in the box" or "princess in a box" puzzles, "rush hour" puzzles, or "everyone's least favorite part of any given Professor Layton game" puzzles. With me so far?
Chocolate Castle is a slight variation in that many (but not all) blocks are various colored pieces of chocolate. The goal to clear any given stage is to have all of the chocolate eaten (the puzzle is solved when no more chocolate exists on the board) which one accomplishes by via the matching-colored animals. So, for example, if you drag that dark brown dog onto a dark brown chocolate block, the dog will eat the block and then disappear. Furthermore, if you end a move with two chocolate pieces of the same color touching each other, they fuse and are considered one block of that combined shape from then on. This often makes for a very interesting dynamic where you eventually need to Daedalian Opus every matching-colored piece together into one because you usually only have one animal of that color and need to get rid of all of it at once, but you'll want to keep them unfused so they're small enough to get around each other until the very end, which means you'll have to be very careful about where you move.
For the most part, it's a gimmick that's interesting enough to make Klotski enjoyable, which is honestly saying something. When they remembered to use that gimmick to good effect in the actual puzzle design, many of the levels were the best kind of brain-breaking fun, something I was delighted to be stuck on and mad-scientist-cackling when I finally solved. On the other hand, sometimes there's this bullshit.
Chocolate Castle has 120 built-in puzzles (40 each of Easy/Medium/Hard.) There's also an editor for the community to fling rooms at each other, and each puzzle keeps track of how many moves it took in case you want to go for a speedrun or something. I cannot possibly begin to convey the extent to which I don't care; if it took me 200 moves to get through a goddamn ocean of chocolate bricks, the important thing is I got through it.
And it only took, what, eight years?
So. Klotski puzzles. Also known as "sliding" puzzles, "daughter in the box" or "princess in a box" puzzles, "rush hour" puzzles, or "everyone's least favorite part of any given Professor Layton game" puzzles. With me so far?
Chocolate Castle is a slight variation in that many (but not all) blocks are various colored pieces of chocolate. The goal to clear any given stage is to have all of the chocolate eaten (the puzzle is solved when no more chocolate exists on the board) which one accomplishes by via the matching-colored animals. So, for example, if you drag that dark brown dog onto a dark brown chocolate block, the dog will eat the block and then disappear. Furthermore, if you end a move with two chocolate pieces of the same color touching each other, they fuse and are considered one block of that combined shape from then on. This often makes for a very interesting dynamic where you eventually need to Daedalian Opus every matching-colored piece together into one because you usually only have one animal of that color and need to get rid of all of it at once, but you'll want to keep them unfused so they're small enough to get around each other until the very end, which means you'll have to be very careful about where you move.
For the most part, it's a gimmick that's interesting enough to make Klotski enjoyable, which is honestly saying something. When they remembered to use that gimmick to good effect in the actual puzzle design, many of the levels were the best kind of brain-breaking fun, something I was delighted to be stuck on and mad-scientist-cackling when I finally solved. On the other hand, sometimes there's this bullshit.
Chocolate Castle has 120 built-in puzzles (40 each of Easy/Medium/Hard.) There's also an editor for the community to fling rooms at each other, and each puzzle keeps track of how many moves it took in case you want to go for a speedrun or something. I cannot possibly begin to convey the extent to which I don't care; if it took me 200 moves to get through a goddamn ocean of chocolate bricks, the important thing is I got through it.
And it only took, what, eight years?
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Oh my gosh yes. Immediately wishlisted on Backloggery <..<
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Congrats on beating it!
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How did I go through 120 levels of this and never realize