Having completed the game with all the upgrades and having discovered all the endings, I have some questions regarding some game mechanics I'm still not entirely clear on. Spoilers for anyone who hasn't finished the game, of course.
1) How does the "light" upgrade work exactly. The way I believed it was supposed to work at first was that it would reveal hazards as soon as you step on a tile bordering them. This, of course, would trivialize the game and its core mechanic. Still, it does reveal hazards... sometimes. I know stepping on a tile bordering a hazard is a requirement for the light upgrade to reveal it... I just don't know what the other requirements are.
2) How exactly does treasure discovery work? If I'm not mistaken, the "night vision goggles" upgrade reveals treasure if you walk on a tile it was hidden on. However, I accidentally discovered treasures can automatically get revealed on some maps before getting the upgrade. I'm not sure how exactly this happens, it mostly happened during backtracking on the way back to the village to restock on troops and then back to the region I'm currently exploring. I've noticed it happened more often once I got the "crops" upgrade and began mapping out all walkable routes of areas I've already explored for personal satisfaction, so it might have something to do with exploring everything on a specific screen. Even so, exploring everything didn't consistently unlock treasure prematurely, and many screens had completely inaccessible tiles due to hazards.
3) What's the point of the "night vision goggles upgrade"? From what I gathered, it reveals treasure and slopes. Unfortunately, it is only accessible by collecting 1+2+3+4+5+6=21 treasures, in other words, it is only accessible after having gathered literally every treasure outside of heaven, assuming you want it to have any utility before entering heaven. By that point you've definitely passed the mountains and probably located the slopes using the "crops" and the "building" upgrades, so the slope feature is useless. And you've clearly discovered all the treasure, so you don't need it for treasure hunting either. The upgrade is only useful either for a clean-up run after having reached heaven or as a "new game +" feature if you use the password room to access heaven immediately in order to collect the treasures faster. Still, it FEELS like an upgrade that would have been far more useful earlier down the line.
4) I still have absolutely no idea how the woodlands predator mechanic was supposed to work. The impression I got was that there is one dangerous tile that is not a hazard but rather a predator that... maybe moves? Hazards on the other side of the screen do get revealed automatically according to some pattern the first time you enter a woodlands area, but there's only ever been 1 predator tile on each woodlands screen I've ever died to. After a while this predator tile just... disappears and what I assume is the relevant predator just pops up on some hazard on the other side of the screen? Does this mean the predator walked into the hazard? I have no idea. I also don't know what triggers predator movement progress and eventual predator death. I suspect it has something to do with exploration progress on the screen, but it's inconsistent and potentially bugged. Even after competing the game and having all screens fully explored, there's still 1 or 2 woodlands where the predator simply hasn't died yet. Fortunately, the treasures the predators seems to insistently share a tile with are still accessible even if you have to tank a death to get to them.
EDIT: Having replayed the entire game again, I have some more mechanics-related questions. These are mostly end-game related, so even more spoilers ahead:
5) I just realized the "night vision goggles upgrade" is actually crucial for the hell section, as without them you wouldn't be able to see which way the "slopes" are going. Considering this, I'd like to ask the criteria for revealing slopes is. Clearly when you "fall off" of a slope, you reveal it, but sometimes slopes get revealed without you having to fall down off of them. Is it a similar mechanic to the "light" upgrade?
6) Thinking more about the "wildlife" upgrade, I'm starting to suspect the predators in the woodlands behave similarly to the domesticated dog from this upgrade. Both the predator and the dog mirror your movements on the other end of the screen. This also explains why the predator's only "kill square" seems to be in the middle of the screen: it's the only point where the player and the predator would intersect. Following this logic, I recognized that the way you "kill" a predator is by stepping onto a tile whose mirrored tile on the other end of the screen is a hazard, so that you get to survive and the predator gets to die. There are such special "kill tiles" in most woodland screens, woodland 1 being the only exception, where in order to kill the predator you have to exploit the fact that the woodland 1 screen and the bridge screen immediately prior to it aren't the same size. This allows you to do some corner shenanigans (which I suspect are intentional, as that's how you made the connection between "Memories of the end 10" and the password room a 1-way connection) in order to spawn into an otherwise deadly corner unharmed and kill the predator. Is this correct? Also, the dog (and the predator, presumably) feels like a much better scout than the player character is. Besides being immortal and phasing through hazards, does it always automatically reveal all hazards and slopes that border the tile its on?
7) I'm curious about the "ending" trigger condition. Since the endless void is the very last thing a player can discover (usually), I assume ending 3/3 is always available when you enter the void. As for ending 1/3, it's obviously available if you enter hell through the password room unprepared. It also isn't available if you enter hell properly, through the depths. I'm curious as to what the exact trigger condition is for ending 1/3? How does the game judge whether you are hopelessly unprepared or not if you end up in hell, say, in the middle of the game.
8) Most of all, I'm curious about ending 2/3. If it was meant to be a choice between going through the depths or staying in heaven forever, shouldn't ending 2/3 be available as soon as you enter heaven, regardless of anything else. I only discovered ending 2/3 after opening a portal to heaven in the password room to fast travel there. What are the trigger conditions for ending 2/3? What is the "organic", "intended" way for the player to discover the endings?
Viewing post in Mapped by our ancestors comments
oh wow that's a lot to respond to, I'll do my best :)
1) the first light upgrade you get reveals traps to the right of your character. If you're moving right step by step you're mostly safe, but if you move in any other direction you may fall into a trap. When you die, you also get the chance of revealing the tile to the right of where you died.
2) most areas (an area is a set of consecutive rooms with similar names and background and music) have a chest revealing requirement: step on every tile, automatic, get to the end of the screen without dying, defeat the wolf, enter the room from the right side, touch all 4 flowers. A few treasures require you to exploit the "entering a room from the top or bottom" mechanics, which may erase some traps. The night vision goggles reveals every tile you step onto and to your right, which includes chests.
3) there's actually a big chance you reach heaven before having collected all regular chests, so the night vision goggles help you get the chests you miss if you backtrack. You can unlock it after grabbing every heaven chest and a few of the regular ones. Also as you've noted in 5, the arrow slopes are tiles and it helps a lot to have the goggles by the time you reach hell.
4) they're dogs, but dangerous. They always move opposite to where you are and reveal nearby traps, except they kill you on contact unlike dogs. Your 6th question answers this.
5) you reveal tiles to your right and tiles under you with night vision goggles. The GOD upgrade lets you reveal all 9 surrounding tiles.
6) The wolves and dogs only reveal traps, not other tiles like chests and slopes. However you are right about them being much better scouts than humans in any area that is not hell. Greatest companions 🐶
7) endings trigger only if you enter a room with one of the 3 passwords. The game will actually not judge you unprepared to enter hell at all and the section is possible to complete without any of the upgrades (some players on my discord server did it) but you might have a really bad time trying this. Your hubris has brought you there.
8) ending 2 is only available after you've discovered heaven, decided that you wanted to explore more anyway, circled back through hell, and came back to heaven to decide you want to stay there. There is also a secret ending in heaven for those who make the journey there without a password, and then press Escape and accept to stay there without venturing forward into the depths. You immediately have a choice between going through the depths or staying in heaven forever, but the game is enticing you to continue, because you're curiosity will never be quenched, because you must always know what's next, because you always want an ending.
Everyone may have a different journey, but the intended one is to reach heaven with a few upgrades, realize there is more to the game, either go back to grab all upgrades or continue immediately, venture into the depths, suffer into hell, get knowledge in the memories of the end, and then decide for yourself whether heaven is the right place for you after all. Ending 1 is for smartass players who think they can try a password in the password room without having been told any passwords.
Thanks for the thorough reply :D
I do think some of these things could have been communicated a bit more clearly. I get that discovering everything for yourself is half the fun, but when it's possible to make progress without properly understanding the mechanics you are using fully, you risk having the player get very frustrated later on in the game.
I tried approaching this game very algorithmically (as in, making up rules for myself to follow in order to minimize casualties during expeditions) after screwing around a bit to figure out the core gameplay loop. It's how I usually play puzzle games, and I find the fun in "refining" my "algorithm" if I discover it to be inefficient or ineffective. I can't really do that if I don't understand the way MY abilities work. Although it could just be a "me" thing.
I absolutely adore the idea of hiding the choice to stay in heaven without going through hell behind the innocuous "escape" button. Extremely clever all around.
One last lore question: what actually happens if you "choose" ending 3? Does the entity release you from the void (if so, it'd be cool to instead have a 1 time exit from the void so that you can get a chance at redemption or even be re-tempted to return to the void and explore it further)? Does it kill you permanently? Or are you still stuck in the void and the choice you're given is simply whether you LITERALLY "accept your fate" (if so, maybe you can make quitting in the void a secret ending as well).
Fun fact, by the way: in Christian theology Hell is considered less of a place and more of the state of a soul being eternally separated from God in every meaningful sense: the suffering comes from the permanent severance of the union between creation and Creator. The fact that the void is the only way to actually permanently deprive you of heaven (since hell is escapable, even if you enter early through the password room) makes it more of a "biblical Hell" than the in-game hell itself, ironically. It's also thematically appropriate: you disobey "god", he puts you in "hell" (which I guess here would be more akin to the Catholic Purgatory, as it's very painful but also temporary), you escape, "god" gives you a crash course on why what you did was bad and gives you one last choice to either redeem yourself or damn yourself forever through the password room (in fact, he actively tries to nudge you towards ending 2 with the "Do you remember what Heaven looks like" hint. He absolutely never mentions anything about a third option for the password room: you discover it by "sinning" the way you always do, by searching for secrets in "Memories of the end 10").
Absolutely lovely game all around. It scratched this very specific itch I have for games hidden within games that recontextualize everything. Your "Idle Nightmare 1" was excellent in the same way, with the entire journey through the darkness always quietly being an option during your first playthrough, only to recontextualize everything during the second. It was the reason why I was actually quite disappointed when I tried out its sequel: the "surface layer" that used to itself be an entire pretty fun game on its own in the the first game was extremely flimsy in the second, almost immediately giving way to the forest stuff. That, and I simply didn't find the shock humor and the adult stuff particularly appealing.
Anyways, on "Mapped by our ancestors", it's a solid 4/5 for me, though I'll rate 5/5 because of your thorough reply. Your games are absolutely fascinating, so keep being creative :)