> Hi Sam, I finally beat this game and am very glad it's over at last. I do like a challenge and this one is certainly that in spades. It is also, however, not one I would care to repeat even knowing what I know now. Too darn many head-aches and frustrations that go way beyond challenges.

Your feeling about the game is perfectly fine. I had no expectation that Murkon's Vengeance would appeal to everyone. I am, as with nearly every game I write, surprised and gratified that as many people enjoy it as do.

However, "that go way beyond challenges" is an opinion, not a fact, and an opinion that I think is precariously founded: Undoubtedly your game-playing experience would have been greatly improved if you approached it more in line with the game's own wavelength. It really seemed to me that, when confronted with individual challenges in the game, you leapt to wrongheaded conclusions that quite understandably spoiled your experience.

The foremost such erroneous assumption was this: if a particular task appeared to be impossible or tedious to solve, you seemed from your posts to assume that there would be no easier way to face the challenge -- that I, as the game designer, intended for you to do the impossible and tedious in order to prevail. Did you know that the second-to-last fight on Level 1 that you had such trouble with, while admittedly a difficult battle, can be handily won via uses of a particular magical object? Did you know that the room on level 3, the one *packed* with blues that you fought your way through singlehandedly (thereby populating the rest of the level with blues that made the whole rest of the level abnormally difficult) can be cleared out without so much as engaging in even ONE battle? (Hint: you didn't need to use any item, nor go anywhere else; you simply had to make use of the tool that was sitting *right there* at the time.)

In both cases, you would have figured the easier solutions out, if only you hadn't assumed I were such a poor game designer as to create something intended to be that impossible and/or tedious. This was particular true in the latter example. I would *never* create a game where you had to do something that awful. But the assumption that the game would be unconscionably difficult prevented you from considering alternative solutions.

There are more examples of this same thing. I watched you confront one puzzle after another the hard way, without experimenting with resources that would have made things tremendously easier (and more satisfying), but the point is that, yes, the game is difficult, but the way you played it made it WAY more difficult than it needed to be. I'm actually kind of shocked (and impressed) that you finished it at all, because if it had been me solving the game the way you did, I'd have given up on it long before.

Anyway, I'm not saying that you're somehow wrong for finding the game too difficult or frustrating. It's not your kind of game, and there's nothing wrong with that. But I think *what* you found frustrating has absolutely nothing to do with the game itself and everything to do with how you approached it. You can't force a game to your own wavelength; you have to meet it on its own, if you are to get out of it what there is to have.

In any case, congratulations for solving the game. Congratulations are surely in order, for the ordeal you had.