Hey everyone! I hope you've all been enjoying the game, it's been amazing seeing so many of you puzzling your way through the city. No one's quite made it to the end yet, but I can see that some of you are getting close—keep it up, I'm rooting for you!
I've been paying close attention to all of the feedback that's come in and issues that have cropped up, and an update is now live that should address most of it! After all of the unfortunate oversights with the magenta flowers that have cropped up from players testing the bounds of the ability and getting themselves trapped, I've taken another full pass on smoothing out those interactions to make sure you can't trap yourself without a way back... and, proactively, I've added extra return flowers or cyan vines you can use to die and respawn to any location where there's potential for a one-way teleport just in case.
About The Beast
There's one feature I knew was going to be a little contentious before release, and sure enough there's been mixed reception from players on this. The Beast, on top of serving a lore and atmospheric role, is intended to function as a safeguard against players getting tunnel-visioned on a single puzzle for too long. Based on my own experience in similar games and observation of playtesters for this one, it's not uncommon to end up stumped by a puzzle, yet stubbornly insist on solving it before moving on to anything else even when you're not making progress, leading to frustration and potentially losing interest in the game.
As an answer to that problem, The Beast will occasionally block you from making progress in a zone as it prowls around the outer ring of the city, forcing you to shift your focus elsewhere and—if you were stuck on a puzzle—take a break from what has you stumped so you can come back to it with fresh eyes later. You may even find out there were elements of the puzzle you were missing that you had to go somewhere else to find!
However, not all players need this kind of nudge and may have no problem spending long periods of time wracking their brain over a single problem even if they end up in that situation. And beyond that, it's not impossible to end up in an unfortunate position where The Beast is blocking the only zone where you can currently make forward progress. (Though there are some safeguards against this in how it chooses what zone to go to when it comes to critical path progression.)
So, in this update there is now an option to disable The Beast entirely in the settings menu! It will remain enabled by default, but I hope this is a satisfactory solution for players that were more annoyed than engaged by it.
Patch Notes
Added a new option to the settings menu to disable The Beast entirely (can be toggled on and off at will)
Fixed a few more areas where it was possible to bypass intended puzzle solutions and get yourself stranded using the magenta torch
Additionally, as an extra precaution any area where being stranded is hypothetically possible should now have either a way to die and escape via respawn, or additional exit points you can reach even without the puzzle being solved correctly
The settings and keybind menus now have arrows to better convey when there are additional options that are not currently visible
