There are cheats in the options menu to enable hold pieces and make the game easier, if that helps! But I agree, the game expects a base level of competence. I'll try to think of other ways to make it more accessible!
Thank you for suggesting the Hold function, I was able to have a lot of fun with that! It certainly makes it feel more like a traditional Tetris game. I did come to realize that with the 1 turn combo forgiveness, it made the game perhaps excessively easy after a while, but it was very nice to get my bearings and make progress with it. I was able to actually turn my focus to trying to get 5x3 cakes and such!
When I don't use the hold cheat, now, I'm able to clear the Marathon: Normal practice consistently but the best I've done on Marathon: Hard is 120 lines. It feels like I must be missing something fundamental because I'm barely making any incremental improvements at all after many attempts on it.
If I could get some early insight that would be put in the downstacking tutorial, I'd really appreciate it...
Glad you had fun with the hold function! You're right, the game is not balanced for it and it makes things easier than intended - but if it makes it more fun, then go for it! I won't tell 🙊
I'm imagining the tutorial will be a few set downstacking scenarios, clear 5 lines with these pieces
Someone in the Turbo Fat Discord suggested I add some parts of the How To Play wiki to the downstacking tutorial, specifically the "Cursed Shapes" section: https://github.com/Poobslag/turbofat/wiki/how-to-play#cursed-shapes