Tutorial levels (v1.4)
Hard levels (v1.4)
Old Version 1.3:
Old Version 1.2:
Old Version 1.1:
Guide Linton the devil as she gathers the riches of the underworld. Her goal on each level is to collect all gems, collect the gold cup, defeat all serpents and finally enter the portal. Some gems are locked inside safes that open with a key. Others are sealed inside tombs and will only be released when a wandering ghost is returned to the tomb. Beware of falling rocks - Linton can support a stationary rock, but a falling one will crush her. Use rocks to your advantage to crush serpents, or to help guide ghosts. Remember that rocks will roll off surfaces that aren't level.
Tips
- Collect a clock to reset the timer. If you run out of time, you will lose a life.
- If you become trapped, you can choose "give up" from the menu to lose a life and respawn.
- Press the X button to view the map and your progress. The game is paused.
- Your best time for each level will be shown. If you haven't beaten a level yet, your highest number of gems collected is shown instead.
- Ghosts always follow the wall to their left. Once you learn their pattern they are entirely predictable.
This is a fan remake of Repton 3, with new graphics and a new set of 8 original levels. The Repton games originally featured on the BBC Micro, and in recent years have been re-released as a PC version. If you like my version, you might also be interested in the official release. And if you don't like my version, the official one has a lot more levels with a much more reasonable difficulty curve! (I have no affiliation with Superior Interactive and they don't endorse this game.)
This version is intended to be compatible with the original, i.e. if you take a level created in the original game's level editor, it should play just the same here. There are a few differences:
- The game plays a bit faster overall.
- Various graphical changes: spirits replaced with ghosts, cages replaced with tombs, skulls replaced with mines, fungus replaced with mushrooms, crowns replaced with cups, monsters replaced with serpents, Repton (a green lizard) replaced with Linton (a red devil).
- You can play any level in any order without passwords.
- Rock behaviour is very close but there are still one or two corner cases involving rolling rocks and priority of movement that I think aren't quite the same.
- Mushroom growth probably isn't quite the same rate and is more predictable.
- Ghosts and serpents appear on the map.
I actually created these levels about ten years ago in a BBC emulator. I recently found them on an old hard drive and was inspired to create this remake. I could not remember most of the solutions. The levels "oppression" and "burial" were particularly tricky. I think "pressure" might be my favourite. I chose the name "Linton" because it is a the name of a village in Derbyshire, as is "Repton".
Be warned, these levels are hard! While I'm not sure they quite match the hardest levels from Repton 3, they are certainly all on the difficult end of the spectrum. You will die a lot trying to figure them out. (That's one reason I didn't bother with progression through the levels, as it seems unnecessarily cruel.) I may add some sort of a tutorial/guide and some training levels in the future, but I've been working on it long enough and wanted to get something out! If you complete some or all of the levels, please let me know! I'd love to see some highscores.
"Be warned, these levels are hard!"
Understatement of the year.
Updated to version 1.2!
New features:
- 4 new tutorial levels. These are much easier! Play them first!
- Smoother animation.
- Less ridiculously fast.
- Prompts to indicate your goals for each level.
- Linton now reacts to show which rocks she's propping up, to help you understand when it's dangerous to move.
- Rocks rolling off curved objects move more smoothly and are more accurate to the movement of boulders in Repton 3.
- New menu option to restart the current level from scratch.
Feedback so far has been that it's super hard and pretty hard to learn the rules. I'm hoping these changes and new levels help make it a bit more accessible. It's always going to be a (very) hard game, but I hope that it's a bit easier to get started now.
Minor update to 1.3:
- Loosened the extremely tight time limit on "Pressure".
- Replaced the bomb with a portal, since the bomb is a bit scary and confusing, and doesn't exactly communicate "finish the level here".
- Uploaded a graphical guide to help explain the basics.
Has anyone finished any of the hard levels yet? Here's my current times on 1.3 (there are no gameplay changes that affect times between 1.2 and 1.3, and high-scores carry across between them):
- Humility: 4282
- Consequence: 3602
- Patrol: 5290
- Sequence: 4359
- Oppression: 4075
- Proximity: 5700
- Pressure: 3898
- Burial: 6081
Update to 1.4:
- Four completely new tutorial levels, with a range of difficulties and styles.
- Minor revisions to existing levels to neaten them up. No existing levels have been made harder.
- Fixed some messed up graphics in the hard version.
- Fixed collision detection glitch that allowed you to walk through ghosts sometimes.
I'm hoping the new levels give a better introduction to the game. All feedback is welcome, even if you just want to say you don't like it. 😂
The new levels were built in a level editor I'm working on and hope to share soon.
Hi! I remember Repton, and I love this version!
Question - How do I use the editor? I can't seem to work out how to save and play my levels.. Thanks!
When you get to the ghosts, you automatically lose all your remaining lives every time you reappear from being hit. Suggest you have a "safety" timer that the player cannot be injured for 4-5 seconds when they first appear.
Wow, I didn't know anyone was playing! I'll answer the old questions first:
The editor in the game menu is a bit of a remnant, eventually the game got too big and the editor and game would no longer fit in the same cart, so I split the editor out into a separate cart, but clearly I forgot to remove it from the game. I'll dig around and see if I still have the full editor. It wasn't terribly polished and I kept meaning to tidy it up more before releasing it. Regardless, I don't think the level editor would work in the BBS because the whole point is to modify cartridges you have saved on disk.
It's actually really hard to adapt the original game rules to have "fair" respawning. There are just so, so many ways to make any level impossible, making remaining lives pointless. It's part of the reason why I made each level standalone rather than the way the original game makes you play them in sequence. I take the point about respawning into danger being particularly annoying, but ultimately I think lives don't work as they stand. Perhaps it would be possible to checkpoint the whole level state at teleporters and/or clocks and let you resume from a checkpoint.
Mushroom/fungus growth is actually not random, which is a divergence from Repton. I found it too annoying and unreliable for making puzzles. Instead, imagine the map is a black and white checkerboard. Over a period of time, every white square is visited and allowed to grow a mushroom if adjacent to a mushroom. Only once every white square has been considered, does it switch over and do the same for the black squares, and so on. It's still hard to predict exactly when mushrooms will grow, but it means you can't be really unlucky and have a mushroom grow several times in the same direction in quick succession. This way feels fair - if you have the right solution for a level and you don't make a mistake you shouldn't need any luck.
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