Special: An Anticlimactic Conclusion to Chip's Challenge

 Chip's Challenge is one of those games that starts off easy and quickly becomes very challenging, although the levels don't always follow a consistent difficulty curve. The last level, Special, is both surprisingly easy and difficult in all the wrong ways, making it a poor conclusion to an otherwise excellent game.

There are two distinct phases to the level- before and after you go through the portal. For more information, as well as a map of the level, go to the page for "Special" on the Bit Busters Wiki.

You begin in a room with four doors to the east, north, south and west, locked with yellow, red, blue and green keys. The yellow key is a few paces away, and behind the yellow door lies a path of ice; stepping on ice causes Chip to slide forward until he reaches a free space, hits a wall(in which case he bounces off) or hits a corner(in which he turns 90 degrees). At the end of the path is a blue key, at which point you slide back to the central room. The blue door leads to the red key, the red door leads to the green key and the green door leads to a teleporter. The entire sequence takes about 30 seconds(out of the 999-second time limit) if you know what you're doing and involves no risk of dying, so all you can do is collect the keys and look at the scenery.

Once you go through the teleporter, you will find yourself in the southwest corner of the room, near the intersection of the yellow and blue doors' ice paths, and the tricky part begins. You must push blocks to build a path across the water and ice paths, which requires two blocks per crossing, but many of the blocks have fire hidden under them. If Chip tries to push those "fire blocks", which are indistinguishable from the safe ones, the block will move one tile forward and Chip will step into the fire on the tile where the block used to be, killing him and forcing you to start the level over. The first area is easy enough, since the only fire block is adjacent to the wall, and thus cannot be moved to make a bridge, but finding the safe ones is a matter of luck; regardless of whether Chip goes north or east, the next area has two fire blocks and two safe blocks. This is not the only level with fire blocks, but it is one in which the challenge is almost solely derived from those hazards.

So where does Chip need to go? The answer is rather unclear, as if you go to any of the other three corners(which require four blocks to reach from the only access point), you will find a hint under one of the blocks saying that those locations would be "too obvious." Instead, you must go north then east(or east then north), then go north again, cross the red door's ice path and push a block just to the northwest of the red door. You then see a brief ending, which congratulates Chip for completing Melinda's trial.

Not only is the level entirely luck-based, but the Lynx version trivializes it with one simple change. With the press of a button, Chip can "slap" a block, causing it to move forward while he does not step into the place it once occupied, meaning that Chip is able to test which blocks are safe.

In short, Special is a rather disappointing conclusion to Chip's Challenge that eschews the more complex puzzle solving shown in prior levels in favor of a simple block-pushing puzzle. Many of the other late-game puzzles are more challenging, enjoyable and worthy of being the grand finale to Chip's Challenge than Special is, so it's a shame that they weren't chosen instead.