Going to be honest I died fairly instantly on pretty much every combat encounter. The scales fairly weighted against the player with any error I felt.
The exception of course the last fight in the map where you are seriously overpowered for the encounter haha...
If I played through again just the fights I'd wager I would do a lot better, it was mostly unexpectedly getting jumped and initially reacting wrong after taking the gems. Jumping up for the fliers then the shades coming in with nowhere to go whilst landing the first jump ooof.
Getting the blade of grass and immediately switching to it when I think the iceblade would've made bacon easier.
The initial spider cave was probably on the difficult side of fair. Silver sword slightly inefficient for the area but passable.
I'm 100% here for the parkour though and honestly these sections were nice to play through, again on the difficult side of fair.
I don't think the following suggestions fit in flavor of the map considering it was made for yrimir's return haha but i'll list a few things anyway I would consider to make things take a more casual approach:
- Personally I'd probably remove the shark spawners and hellstone floor Or work around some way of lessening the time between retries (that instant teleport on spawning for the last area was pretty cool on this).
To me all these do is make the player take the extra time to run from spawn instead of climbing up the ladders to retry the goal.
This is more of a personal grievance when coupling death with parkour sections, considering whether serious failure should result in a full fledged death or not. To be fair death has its uses and it can be pretty entertaining to unexpectedly be overwhelmed.
- I found it hard to see some of the hazards (spikes) without first jumping into them / shooting the ice blade at every square on the map first.
Hard to see the detail of some of the hazards or where one should be jumping in tight spaces.
- A few times I literately had no idea what to do next (especially being new to a few map mechanics)
I think chippy's video shows this as well where he got lost at the rope windows and the waterfall area with the sand(?) block that made jumping harder.
Sometimes it can pay to have a short seeming superfluous area which in actual fact introduces the player to an upcoming challenge to teach the player ahead of time to climb or how to deal with jumping.
Though I had a fair expectation of what to expect and had fun with the deaths/unfairness.
I think the prize a the end rolled pretty well!!