Real Game / Ultimate Challenge Thread

[TheBlaskar]

Netting 5 wins on hard in order to unlock Abyssal is challenging enough, and beating it on Abyssal is a step way beyond that.

 

Share your tips for your Hard/Abyssal runs here to help others (namely, me) achieve these victories.

 

0) What I've learned so far: wins 1-4 can be a cakewalk. You can change just about every "walking" enemy into a worm via the lab/basement, and every flying enemy into the most basic one-tap flying enemies around, which makes floors 1-8 hardly a challenge. You can also use the "cheat" function and insert DMGUPx2 (if you've unlocked it) to make the floors even easier. You'd be hardpressed to recognize hard mode with all of these. Some rooms clear themselves and everything else is dead in the blink of an eye. The challenge is the 5th run in order to unlock Abyssal. Here's what I've learned about that:

 

1) It may seem to be a good idea to use Alter Ego James in order to combine weapons for unbelievable DPS, but it's also very risky to count on being able to avoid every single attack by every boss/enemy you encounter. I tried this, and ended up calling it on floor five. Using somebody such as Anna, who offers a little more wiggle room in terms of making errors, is recommended. Of course, you can limit yourself two 2 weapon combinations with AE James if you'd like to increase firepower and still have room for error.

 

2) if you see the "game over" screen, that's it. There's no closing the application to retry. You can, but it's punishing. If you do close app to retry, you will be able to click "continue" and pick up where you left off on that floor, but the dots over the "hard mode" will decrease each time you fail. It's recommended (especially if you use AE James) to quit once you lose more than you're comfortable with losing. Using the "close app" function, I went from 5 dots to 2 dots thinking I was sly by retrying a few times. It's best to just cut your losses at one if it gets to that point.

 

3) Once you get the trophy for Unlocking Abyssal (The Real Game), and you lose on Abyssal, you can remove enemies, weapons, and pets, and use cheats to get back to Abyssal, so you really only have to do two challenging things: Unlock Abyssal (once) and Beat Abyssal (once) as getting to those points before and after the trophy can be as easy as you want it to be

 

4) Quick Restart / Exit to Main Menu... You can reroll your seed, as long as you don't die, by using the "quick restart" option. If you use the "random" character, you can also quick restart until you get the character/bonus item/starting room you want - but 'quick restart' will remove any Free Trial items that you purchased for the first time you entered. You cannot, however, reroll floors 2-8. You CAN restart the floors in order to ensure that the Game Rooms unlock when you deposit 5 tokens, or until you win the prize(s) you want. I've found that the random drops don't change. For example, room 2 may drop a half shield and a silver coin, but it'll never drop anything else - it may not drop anything at all, but the most you'll get is the blue half-shield and the coin. Certain things like coin barrels and yellow stones are almost certain to spawn each time you re-enter a floor, as will be the floor layout as mentioned previously. So, you can find the best route, restart, and fast track to the boss if you're happy with your loadout and want to remove the potential loss of health. Golden Item rooms (that give you the option of two items), Athena/Hades rooms, and the Game Rooms will always offer you the same things. For the Dancing Game Room, I retried about a dozen times and only ever got two different choices for that game room. So, playing it an infinite number of times will only offer diminishing returns.

 

5) If you remove "rules" that you've purchased, it does NOT increase the spawn rate of the ones you still have 'allowed'- like the random drops mentioned in Tip 4, simply nothing will spawn in lieu of that usual drop. The way the Seeds work is that each room has a specific drop(s), and nothing else will drop instead of it- the only other possibility is that nothing drops/spawns at all. Very few things are truly random - it's just the luck of "TRUE" or "FALSE" in terms of dropping in each seed room. The enemy spawns are always set to TRUE.

 

That's where I'm at so far. If you have any tips beyond this, comment them below to help out our fellow gamers and hunters