After stepping through the teleporter in the Hall of Champions, I was teleported to a long hallway with a row teleporters to the various quests along the side.
I chose Village of Thieves as the first one, which in hindsight probably wasn't the smartest choice. Since I spent the majority of my food bar at the start training up my priest skills to get my buffs up and running and a little bit of wizard training as well, food started to become an issue towards the end. I had expected to find food further into that dungeon.
I already saw some familiar elements from CSB there like torch sconces used as switches, and "run and jump". Also saw some interesting new stuff like timed doors needing to be opened in sequence in the correct order.
I got very close to dying in the run and jump section when I entered a room with a bunch of gigglers and a giant scorpion, and got surrounded by gigglers while the scorpion attacked me. At that point I hadn't got any weapon yet. Luckily one of the gigglers got tired of trying to steal from my empty hands and moved away, and I ran to the other side of the room and tried to punch some gigglers to death. The scorpion soon came along again though and I had to escape out of there due to being poisoned and only having a sliver of health left.
I then proceeded to lure out a lone giggler, and he dropped a ruby key. I used that to open one of the doors in the starting room. Luckily I found the weapon Fury there (along with a scorpion guarding it)
Towards the end of that quest, my food bar was getting dangerously low, and in the end I got out of there with only the tiniest sliver of my food bar left.
I then decided to do the rest of the quests in order, and luckily I quickly ran into some screamers in Aktuba and could finally fill my stomach.
There were some interesting puzzles, and I recognized some familiar elements and parts of sections from both DM and CSB. It seemed more focused on puzzles than difficult fights. The monsters seemed overall weaker compared to some of their CSB counterparts at least.
All in all it was an enjoyable experience. I'm glad I decided to play it
