Okay, I tried a couple of variations on the puzzle with teammates blocking off boxes and blocking off lines from the sidelines, and pausing to move my teammates around to cover whereever Reed was walking, and none of it works.

Even with the explanation, I don't understand how to do this piece of the puzzle.

Edit: okay, pushing on since I can't figure out the puzzle.

-I'm finding myself skipping a bunch of random combats between locations. The levels of the enemies are too low to provide any challenge, but they still eat up a bunch of mp to kill, and I'm swimming in lockpicks, so there's no justifiable reason to confront them.

-Similar issue in the revisit of Snowberry Woods, compounded by the hidden chests and narrow chokepoints. This area felt like a trudge with the old enemies, rather than things that could present threat to the party.

-Melody's battle sprite is great

-Wound still overrides burning

-Fleshfly's bite does nothing, and I've also seen them use it on themselves.

-The combats in the marsh are really well balanced. No damage-sponge enemies, but everything provides a nice mix of threats

-Goblin drops in a single hit?

-So, I looked at sky's crit chance, since she gets that crit+ bow, and hers can go as high as 25, whereas Reed's is capped at 20. Is this a bug? This now seems like a bug.

-Bat at a distance uses a skill called "buff". Was this supposed to be it flexing its bat muscles, or is this a generic spell name?

-Oh thank god that's the last of the marsh chests

-Squid dropped a little too easily. Melody hit it for 1.3k, and then Sky followed up for 300, and it dropped on turn 1.

-Thoughts on Conjuring and Summoning magic: neither is worth the Skill Point investment. Summoning is worth maybe dipping into a single 1 Skill Point spell for the ability to throw up a weak shield against damage, but the summons don't seem to do adequate DPS or heals, even passively, to justify investing the number of points you need to invest in order to be semi-decent at summoning. At the same time, even conjuring major weapons (which is another significant investment of Skill Points) provides only a minor bonus--trivial compared to a buff skill like Rally or a DPS skill like Flare 3, Lightning 3, or Power Attack--and it eventually gets eclipsed by your gear.

-I love the underwater exploration sections. I haven't seen any other rpgs on the market that do this, save for maybe FFX, and I like the feeling of the ones in Tallest Reed way better.

-Trench Eels are HP sponges, but do no damage. I put about 1k damage into one, and it dealt 4 damage to me?

-One-shotted the Sudden Presence. Is this supposed to happen?

-Okay, so I killed all the ghosts instead of throwing away the stone, and it game-overed me? Is that supposed to happen? It's really not too hard to screen-clear all the ghosts if you have anyone with rank 3 lightning magic, let alone rank 4 or rank 3 plus charge

Still more notes:

-CRASHBUG: Sky used a weak potion of sorcery in the ghost battle where you're supposed to throw away the stone. Same summon weapon equippable crash that's been caused by other potions in other areas. Other types of potions (censers of sorcery, censers of healing) seem to work fine in this battle.

-Trick Shot seems to deal nonexistant damage. Sky can deal about 100+ with Power Shot 1 against the ghosts in hominid form. Trick Shot deals 18 damage against the same. Since it doesn't cause status effects like Power Shot, Trick Shot feels like its dps should really get a buff.

-Snowberry Woods gets more tedious with every mandatory backtrack. A few cutscene skip-to-locations would be really helpful here. Also, I don't think I've found a single ironwood nut on the ground in any of my playthroughs, although allegedly they are supposed to be here.

-Okay, I equipped a Fired Clay Shield on reed, and that brought my crit chance up to 30. As far as I can math it, that;s factoring in the shield, the mempo, the bladesman level 2 perk, and none of the three bolette blues I used.

-re: the grid puzzle, you can revisit the area with different numbers of party members. Are there certain numbers that make parts of the puzzle unsolvable? I don't think you can do it when it's just you and Vigil, for example.

-The map icon rename to fox village is a nice touch.

-Overall, I've found I had less need of food items in ch 3 than anywhere else in the game. Combats weren't really threatening, but at the same time enemy hp was lower, meaning I didn't have to sandbag everything with high damage specials to get through routine fights in a few turns. I think the difficulty on this chapter could be turned up overall, but I'm not sure the best way to do that. This is partly an rpgmaker engine limitation, I think, one that a lot of rpgmaker games seem to get around with aggressive use of status effects, but it's also a TES issue. My biggest gripe with everything from Morrowind on is that I never found the games challenging, since combat was mostly just whacking your numbers against someone else's numbers. Tallest Reed has a damn amazing world-feel, since everything is from the Argonian perspective, and the first chapter combats where pure dps is not the objective felt great. However, bog-standard dps-based combats throughout the game kind of drag in comparison--especially against random enemies. For the third chapter stuff, without bringing out lots of fight gimmicks, I think a mix of higher single-damage attacks and AoE wound effects would up the challenge without dramatically changing overall balance--and this could help to inject a little more tension into the chapter, too. Of course, even if this is desirable to implement, I have no idea what the time cost would be. That could quite reasonably be prohibitive to making a balance change.

-Nice nods to Morrowind in the dialog on the mountain. "No one person can do all of that."

-Nice obligatory Argonian maid reference

-You can't run from battle against clannfear. 12 out of 12 attempts to flee, all failed.

-Clannfear and scamps have vanishingly little HP. I'm one-shotting scamps with Reed, and Reed is...damage challenged.

-The mountain seems really bare. The layout is cool and looks natural, but it doesn't have much to interact with. The only treasure chest I spotted seemed to be completely inaccessible without a bunch of backtrack, so I didn't bother.

-Tried increasing Reed's Bladesman to level 3 to see if it would stack into the crit equation. It does not. Bladesman and Bolete Blue seem to only contribute up to a maximum of 20% crit. Everything after that can only be provided by gear.

-Re: the Daedroth. Melody one-shotted it on turn 2. It got off exactly one attack in the boss battle, a Weaken, which it missed with.

-GAMEFREEZE BUG: Right after Reed says there's a shortcut and Sandalwood arrives, the event breaks and everyone just stands there forever. I cannot proceed past this point.

More Stuff

-Poison doesn't apply when you use Precise Strike. You have to use poison and then do a regular attack. Bug?

-Caemlyn has thousands of potions of healing? I think it might actually be impossible to DPS him with Reed. Is the only way out of that fight to take out Sandalwood?

-That backtrack down the mountain is really long

-It's a little weird that Hunter and Scout fade out like ghosts after the talk underwater

-I was not prepared for the Flint and Fire-Eyes bit. This is surreal and awesome. Literally every detail of this sequence is amazing.

-The armor Mourning-Cloth sells is not equippable, although the weapons and accessories are. Bug.

-The call backs to chapter 1 are great, especially re: the game's themes and how everything feels different with Caemlyn telling the story.

- FWIW, the theme of letting go of your past makes sense now. It didn't fit until the turning point on the edge of the waterfall, but now it's clear that Reed's attachment to the very particular way things used to be has turned toxic.

-Was I supposed to find Melody before the finale? She isn't part of the crowd on the peak.

-The soundtrack is still really strong.

-Minor Bug: Hauling up one of the platforms on the peak during the finale temporarily turns the screen to daytime. It's the northeastern-most platform, and I think it only happens if you slip past the group and go all the way to the end.

-Apparently in the finale you *can* run from Dreugh.

-"No monsters here." Torchie, there's an imp standing right in front of me.

-CH 3 felt like it went a little slow in places, and the tone felt like a not-quite-right replica of the tone in CH 1, but narratively I think it needed that. As for the slow part, I think adding some skips ahead on the mountain, upping the fight difficulty / rewards, and decreasing the frequency of enemy spawns (especially on the mountain. dear gods) would make the chapter flow really quickly. I genuinely like it, even if the game is moving away from how perfect everything fit together in CH 1. Honestly, it's a testament to the storytelling that that move got under my skin like it did.

-Progress bug? "We have to take this rope up top to fix the lift." Get the rope, go up top, examine the lift. "The lift is broken and can't be used." I've tried examining every tile, so I think maybe the event is broken?