Level Breakdown

The Swings of Sirumen Kez

Context

Sirumem Kez is a tropical archipelago, located south-east of Clover Island.

Walkthrough

Jump up the platforms and get to the first swing node. Swing across the river and land on the mushroom and extend your jump towards the first small island. Follow the broken bridge and use the swing nodes to get across to the man made atoll. Jump across the mushrooms gaining height and land on the larger man made structure with the house on top of it. Follow the gems and grab the swing node and move towards the small island in front of you. From there jump on the mushrooms to reach more swing nodes and reach the small beach. Climb by jumping on mushrooms while avoiding the turrets. Follow the mushroom and swingnode path till you reach the towering island with a plateau. Keep climbing using mushrooms and avoid even more turrets. Catch the final swingnode and mushroom and reach the leaning tower.

There are other possible paths as well. Red is the core path, blue is a medium and green is a hard.

From the house there is a set of swing nodes where all the height the player has gained is lost due to a big drop between the first and second swing node. This is to exhilarate the player and provide a “wow-moment” where the following swing places the speeding player just slightly above sea level – creating a swoosh-effect.

The beach area that follows after a few more swing nodes has a slightly harder mushroom climb where the height difference between the mushrooms is increased. Forcing the player to double jump. A set of turrets firing away provide an illusion of danger and adds urgency for the traversal. The area is quite safe though and the sandy beach below provides a safety net so players can’t move on before they use the double jumps on the mushrooms. The technique is then revisited in the final climb of the level.

For returning players the possibility of shortcuts is presented by two oddly placed gems to the left of the very first mushroom. If the player turns and looks at them a set of swing nodes slides into view beyond the gems. By using them the player immediately reaches the first man-made atoll.

If the house on the second atoll intrigues the player to stop following the bread crumb gems and instead climb the house a view from the second platform shows another swing node letting you shortcut once more to the beach.

All of these shortcuts are, however, red herrings as the really speedy path is cutting across the open water. By hinting towards the two “lesser” shortcuts, the hope is that the players will investigate as to where else they might find shortcuts to use. I have provided them with helpful landmarks (as the swing node placement is so extreme that they sometimes aren’t in view).

Gems are placed below some swing nodes for core path players to pick up as they swing, but also as directional targets for speedrunners to aim at.

For more casual players the swinging and jumping are made exciting with the help of swinging close to the water surface and hurrying to avoid turrets. For exploratory players there are a multitude of paths to explore and many swing nodes are placed so they can encourage these players to try and reach “off-path bridges” between different arms of the core path.

Every mushroom and swing node placement has been tweaked for optimal placement with razor thin errors of margin for the extreme players.