Wizordum 1.0 Playthrough: Chapter 1
3I returned to Wizordum the weekend after its full 1.0 release, starting from scratch (due to data not carrying over).
Episode 1 feels largely the same, but there were certainly a couple of changes that stood out: there is a new elevator at the beginning of e1m2 (previously, as far as I recall, no elevator was seen until e2), and e1m4 has some new aesthetics and features a new opening straight out of Blood.
That's not even the only Blood reference; for some reason, there are now kickable heads randomly found throughout the maps. I actually find these quite annoying, as they're never heads from enemies I've defeated, and 95% of the time I kick one without even seeing it, hear the sound, and turn around abruptly thinking something is shooting at me.
The map has a couple of improvements I can appreciate. First and foremost, the Magic Map (which indicates secrets) is a lot clearer, showing a question mark that disappears once you've found the secret, whereas previously it showed highlighted blocks that would stick around afterwards, which had made it confusing to track which secrets you had vs. hadn't collected.
Secondly, there is a new item in the shop that can indicate treasures on the map once you've found 98% of them (and also found the Magic Map, though I'm not sure that part is documented). This solves what I refer to as the "Blake Stone problem", i.e. accidentally leaving a single pile of gold sitting in a corner somewhere and then having to hunt through the entire map for it again. This new item has a pretty heavy asking price though, which didn't feel worth the cost vs. how much you'd find with its help, so I didn't jump on it immediately.
Sadly, a few map bugs and shortcomings still survive from early access, unfortunately, which continues to be my biggest criticism of the game, since they significantly encumber the whole exploration aspect, which is kind of a big part. Markers and moved walls still fail to persist with save files, and disappear/revert when you reload. And there's still no way to navigate "layers" of the map (i.e. different vertical levels), where other secrets/treasure can be "hiding", other than by physically relocating to them. (EDIT: I have been informed that apparently page up/down keys do this? I haven't seen this documented anywhere in the game itself, and it seems rather important...)
As far as my second playthrough is concerned, I had left a couple of loose ends in my first playthrough that I wanted to tie up; in particular, a Catacomb Abyss reference in e1m2 and the 7-switch hunt in e1m5. I managed to find the former myself, but the latter required the use of a guide, because while I did improve over my previous result by managing to find 6 out of 7 myself, that last one was unreasonably obscure, as not only was it not exposed, but also the breakable wall hiding it was almost impossible to spot due to extremely low contrast against the texture behind it.
With the help of the Magic Maps, I managed to get 100% secrets in almost all of the maps, which is better than I expected to do. I absolutely gave up on e1m6 though, because even as I was reading about what I missed, some of it sounded excessively obtuse.