08-10-2011, 07:32 AM
Phew. Just finished Nightmare Mansion Hard. You might be interested to know that I finished the game with no less than eight keys (4 purple, 3 yellow, and a blue). As a key/door count of the original mansion reveals that all types of keys are balanced (except red keys), you can indeed take some mighty strange paths through the mansion.
Mind you, I was going out of my way to collect as many keys and avoid as many doors as I could. In some cases, I'm pretty sure I made things significantly harder for myself where I could have just rushed ahead.
Regarding the difficulty of the mansion, I am of the opinion that one specific stage of the mansion is much tougher than the rest of it. The stage is after the final save pedestal, in the blue brick section before the ladder maze and the treasure room. Typically, most of my deaths in the segment were attributable to the monsters (not to mention the circuitous route I took to get rid of keys to open up slots so I could collect the keys that were already there... I already had 8 keys by the time I got there, you see).
One more thing: There's a secret-ish room in the white brick (ladder maze) segment that doesn't have a 'Secret' tag (so it won't increment the counter). It's room 18702. It's in the ladder maze segment, so there shouldn't be any trouble with forks and secrets%.
Mind you, I was going out of my way to collect as many keys and avoid as many doors as I could. In some cases, I'm pretty sure I made things significantly harder for myself where I could have just rushed ahead.
Regarding the difficulty of the mansion, I am of the opinion that one specific stage of the mansion is much tougher than the rest of it. The stage is after the final save pedestal, in the blue brick section before the ladder maze and the treasure room. Typically, most of my deaths in the segment were attributable to the monsters (not to mention the circuitous route I took to get rid of keys to open up slots so I could collect the keys that were already there... I already had 8 keys by the time I got there, you see).
One more thing: There's a secret-ish room in the white brick (ladder maze) segment that doesn't have a 'Secret' tag (so it won't increment the counter). It's room 18702. It's in the ladder maze segment, so there shouldn't be any trouble with forks and secrets%.