Doesn’t failing fish% mean just running out the clock and trying the fight again? You could have it break bad a few times and still get your credits I think.
To the best of my knowledge, the final checkpoint in the level is at the beginning of the fifth room in the castle. There's one on screen when you enter the room with the boss door, but you can't get it -- there are kaizo blocks in the way. I don't know if the game checkpoints you automatically when you enter that room, but 1) I wasn't going to risk having to do the final room again to find out and 2) it's a moot point because hey, I beat Mostly Harmless tonight! The final castle took three hours in all. The first two rooms took about 10 minutes each, which gave me some hope, but the last three got way harder. I probably should've split this into two days, but I was feeling determined and I pushed through.
This hack was really something else. Aside from the early frustration (and late frustration -- the last two levels are
tough), I ended up really enjoying it. ThirdWall is a really idiosyncratic designer, and he's made so many creative levels while staying almost entirely vanilla. Yes, the setups are frequently fucked up, and you're asked to perform the platonic ideal of whatever fucked up trick you're supposed to do, but accepting that meant that it really stretched my abilities as a player too. Much like Invictus and GPW2 before it, Mostly Harmless has made me a better player. I wasn't sure if I could handle some of the obstacles in this game when I started, but just like beating Sawrfing Castle for the first time, it still feels great to come out of a hack demonstrably better than when you went in. It'd be nice if I could finish a hard hack in less than 30-40 hours, but I guess that's the next step.
So after all that, would I recommend this hack to you guys? Yes, but with caveats. The bottom line is that it's a solid hack full of really weird, really creative setups, and I know that's something you both value. I think you'll really like it, but you have to be up for the challenge first. I don't know if it's harder than GPW2 necessarily, but it's at least in the neighborhood. While the levels are shorter in Mostly Harmless, I think it asks more from the player in those short levels, so it's hard to compare the two. Really, it's hard to compare Mostly Harmless to any other hack I've played, which is a testament to ThirdWall's level design.
Yeah! I've been watching Slop_core playtest/speedrun* this on and off all week, and it looks absolutely wild. I'm not gonna play it right away (and I'm not sure if I even want to, to be honest) but I think it's gonna be a big hit in the community. Seems like a lot of the bigger streamers were super into it, which will probably get a bunch of other people to play it too. Which is great! I want to see ThirdWall get a bunch of praise for his design chops since Mostly Harmless probably flew under the radar for a lot of the community.
I haven't picked a hack to play next, but my own one year kaizoversary is coming up next week, and there's something I'd like to do to celebrate. More on that as we get closer, but for now let's just say I have some unfinished business from the early days.
*I don't know where Slop ended his stream tonight, but his last PB I saw was 12:30 or so and he's pushing for sub-10. The hack looks super hard, so this is really impressive.
