Own
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Puzzle Tower used to be planned content where the Staff of Slimes currently rests, a tower chock full of puzzles and challenges. There was a thought that someday it might return, but that's not likely to happen unless Teddy feels like delving deep into post-release feature creep.
On the off chance that someday it does warrant an addition officially or mod-wise, I was thinking of various puzzles that would be easy to accomplish in SoG. Things utilizing existing in-game mechanics without being pushblock or phase puzzles. Puzzle Tower might indicate that to complete it you might need to change your skills, change your items, or even change yourself. These are all individual ideas of floors that might work.
1. Entry puzzle, Death Lasers. A room lined with chicken statues, a several rows of insta-kill lasers. Immediately burns through Barrier, breaks shield, too long to Blink through. Solution? Become invincible, quaff that chicken potion and waddle through.
2. Floor - Mirror Mode. A series of paintings on the wall that you need to recreate in order to proceed. Skin color in these paintings is set to statue gray, gender isn't indicated.
For example, one might show A) Spike mohawk hat + B) Spiders crawling around you + C) Hiding in a Barrier + D) Screaming (via Provoke), titled 'Strong, yet Sensitive'.
Another might show A) Party Hat + B) Masque facemask + C) Blood droplets coming off you (Boots of Bloodthirst activation) + D) A shadow next to you shrugging (Spirit Slash), titled 'Vampire's Masquerade'.
A third might be A) Mushroom cap + B) Mushroom Staff wielded at your side (charge 2H skill) + C) Mushrooms on the floor around you + D) A training dummy in front of you with a miners hat on. This one titled 'Steve's Lament', with a silhouette of the Cursed Sword next to the sign. Making you hit the training dummy, shield the echo of madness with mushroom shield to make mushrooms, quickswap to Mushroom Staff and charge up.
A fourth, A) Pope Hat + B) Card 'pet' + C) Floating up off the ground in prayer (Focus being channeled) + D) Angel's Thirst being embedded in the ground next to you (Weapon Toss), titled 'Grindea's Chosen'.
Maybe nothing quite so complex as these, though.
Might be this is a little too gimmicky, too, requiring knowledge of a bunch of different skills and item effects.3. Floor - Archery Challenges. Just 3 sets of 3 archery challenges, copy pasted from Arcade Mode. Beat all three of one set in one go to unlock the next.
4. Floor - Enemy Manipulation. This floor sometimes utilizes the Enemy Summoning panels found in the desert math cave to summon various enemies from a group of options that you might think can help solve the requirements.
First Challenge: Potions and Skills don't work in here. There's a conveyor belt, a few death lasers, a line on the ground enemies can't cross onto the conveyor belt, and a number of enemy panels with a yeti among them. Lure yeti next to the conveyor, get them to encase you in ice, get conveyed past the lasers.
Second Challenge: Spinball. A remix of the 'Smash the Boulder' challenge, where different unbreakable targets are set up around the room with different point values. You only have basic attacks available to you, with a penalty if you let it hit the bottom of the screen. Set a high score in the time limit.
Third Challenge: An image of a pig with wings high in the air above super pointy mountains, titled 'When Pigs Fly'. Spawn a boar, lure it onto a pad, get it to pause there and launch it into the air with Earthspike to satisfy this requirement.
Fourth Challenge: Superstomp. A rusty, spike-covered panel exists in the middle of the room that destroys any enemy that walks over it. Out of the pool of possible enemy buttons are Statue, Guardian and Skeleton Mage. Guardian needs to protect Statue, then Mage needs to Elite the Statue.
Fifth Challenge: Monster Painting. An image is on the wall using a specific set of colors. There's a bunch of empty gray squares in the middle of the room vaguely in the shape of that painting. Among the many monster buttons are included Elite Green Slime (green), Red Slime (red), Elite Blue Slime (blue), Queen Bee (yellow), Larvacid (different green) and Hauntie (purple). Lure the monsters onto the right sections of the squares, causing them to be permanently filled in with the monsters color goop if in the correct square.
5. Floor - Skill Usage. Utilizing combat skills in interesting ways!
Smash Challenge - You're given a Smashball with 10 hits available inside of a miniputt course with various hazards moving back and forth. Bonk it around the inside trying to get it to the end before it blows up.
Stasis Challenge - Like the photography sidequest. You're given a series of images on the wall of enemies in poses. Stasis them in that exact pose to turn it into a statue, similar to Marino Manor's solems.
Blink Challenge - Jumprope! A bar of flame will continuously sweep across the room, growing increasingly fast as time goes on. Blink past it to dodge it and avoid being hit a certain number of times to proceed.
6. Floor - Fun with phasing.
First Challenge - A bunch of mirrors pop out of the floor at various angles, as well as several phase plates around you. Quickly assess which one will keep you bouncing around the longest to not get zapped by a wall of flame blowing through the room on and off, while invincible in phase form. Sort of like reading the directional paths of the Toy Machine choo-choo trains, only without tracks.
And that's all I've got. Likely pointless, but I had fun thinking on the games mechanics.
