To show you exactly how the game works, we thought it would be fun to take a close look at one room in Cramped Room of Death and walk you through the process of figuring out how to get through it.
This is room 17 in the game’s first area, the Dungeon. As you can see, you can’t even walk forward from the starting point, because your spear is too big.
You can step to the right... but this puts you in the path of a Vizardian archer. That red line indicates the path his arrow will take immediately after your next move. If you step up to try to engage him, it’s “game over”!
The only way to progress is to immediately move to the right, out of the archer’s line of sight. But here’s where it gets even trickier. See those broken floor tiles? You can stand on them, but your next move will cause them to break. And we mean ANY move—if you attack an enemy, or even just turn to face a different direction, you’re going down with the debris! So your next move HAS to be stepping off.
Now, the Vizardian with the short sword will slash you if you step into any adjacent space. Fortunately, he only attacks in the four cardinal directions (he can’t attack diagonally), so it’s safe to step on the tile at his lower left. But that’s a broken tile, and you know what that means!
The only place you can go from here is to the left, which puts you back in the path of the archer. Here’s the good news: If you’re in range to attack an archer while you’re in the red line, your attack will always take priority, because your spear is so friggin’ huge. That means you’ll take him out before he shoots you with the arrow. The trick here is to make sure you’re already facing in the “up” direction when you step into his path, because his arrow will end you if you have to make an extra move to turn and face him.
With the first archer out of the way, you can now step up to take out the swordsman and the second archer from a safe distance to unlock the exit.
This is one of the easier puzzles in Cramped Room of Death. As you progress, they get more clever and more fiendish, with new enemy types, new obstacles and new challenges. But if you keep your wits about you, no Vizardians will be able to keep you from reclaiming your stolen treasure!
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