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Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair |OT| Tropical Bees
- Thread starter Camjo-Z
- Start date
OP
OP
I'm not saying I can beat it without taking a hit (I think my best run left me with 3 bees at the end), but having watched some 0 bee runs there definitely isn't any part where you're required to take damage to get past an obstacle.
Yeah there are some insane looking no-bee runs out there already. I watched one many times to help me complete the Lair myself. Mind you, they still get hit sometimes in these runs since you can get hit once anyway before Laylee flies away.
this game is definitely a top game of the year for me, super fun, could easily be a Nintendo release
The game is currently $19.99 at Best Buy.
I'm trying to figure out if I should get it on Xbox One X or PS4 Pro.
Any thoughts?
I'm trying to figure out if I should get it on Xbox One X or PS4 Pro.
Any thoughts?
Xbox one X runs at 4K (dynamic, which seems to go down only when entering a level) while the PS4 Pro version has no Pro enhancements (when asked about it they said "we do plan to look at it again but unfortunately we don't yet know if there's anything we can do"). And they all perform flawlesss
Finished the game today. Never bothered getting all the tonics (or actually using any of them at all, never saw the need) but got all the bees and coins. Absolutely loved it, the level design and soundtrack in this game was as good as I expected it to be, a nice challenge curve, some awesome alternate designs for the levels and the overworld itself was such an awesome implementation of both some down time, and some fun little puzzles.
Special mention to the Impossible Lair itself, as this is perhaps my favourite level in a game this entire year. Its challenging yet just a couple of replays made it much easier to clear with taking less and less hits. The boss fights are actually pretty easy so that was nice. Only bit of the level that I didn't enjoy as much were some of the rope climb bits with the buzzsaw things on either side, but that's just a tiny bit of the level. Well worth it, so glad I grabbed this game :)
Special mention to the Impossible Lair itself, as this is perhaps my favourite level in a game this entire year. Its challenging yet just a couple of replays made it much easier to clear with taking less and less hits. The boss fights are actually pretty easy so that was nice. Only bit of the level that I didn't enjoy as much were some of the rope climb bits with the buzzsaw things on either side, but that's just a tiny bit of the level. Well worth it, so glad I grabbed this game :)
Yeah this was really good. I had some issues with some of the level design but for the most part it was solid, and the movement for Yooka & Laylee was excellent. I might straight up like it better than the way DK and Diddy/Trixie controls but I haven't played Tropical Freeze in a while to compare. The biggest surprise for me was the overworld, this was actually really well done including how you activate alternate versions of levels. It kind of makes me want to see Playtonic take on a Zelda-like next. My biggest criticisms are QoL stuff, not being able to just restart from the last checkpoint is very annoying, as well as the fact you can't just immediately exit the game, you have to wait for the intro movie again or alt-tab and close it out (on PC). On replays of beaten levels it's also kind of a bummer that they don't register you collecting a new TWIT coin unless you complete the entire level again.
As for the Lair criticisms, I thought it was challenging and very satisfying for a final level, but I did have all bees before doing my first real attempt. I don't really think much would've been lost from the experience if they added a new starting point half-way or something else for players that were struggling. And frankly I'm surprised they didn't considering they give you the skip option after dying too much during normal levels.
As for the Lair criticisms, I thought it was challenging and very satisfying for a final level, but I did have all bees before doing my first real attempt. I don't really think much would've been lost from the experience if they added a new starting point half-way or something else for players that were struggling. And frankly I'm surprised they didn't considering they give you the skip option after dying too much during normal levels.
I'm about 35/40 levels in, but I don't think I'm going to do the Impossible Lair. I think I'll just finish up the stages I haven't done yet and consider it done until they patch in some kind of checkpoint system.
The game is really good, it's too bad about the final stage.
The game is really good, it's too bad about the final stage.
Just chiming in again after many more tries to say the Impossible Lair in its current form is top tier toilet trash. Infuriating hit boxes and just completely ruins the entire game up until this point. Desperately needs checkpoints. Im so close to deleting this game im raging so fking bad. Yeah yeah i know some of you have already beat it. Too many games to play that dont stick up their middle finger at you at the last possible thing to do in the game after being 100% complete opposite for the other 99% of the game up until this point. Seriously, its a test of patience more than skill.
Just bought this (totally missed the release somehow) and must say I'm loving it! The gameplay and levels are challenging, but fair. The music and sound effects are excellent. Yooka and Laylee are at the top of my game mascots now since Ratchet and Clank seem to have dropped off the world.
I'm sad.
I've tried the Impossible Lair 5 times, my best mark it's at 55% with 48 bees. I know I can beat it on a few more tries because it's not "that" impossible, but it feels really weird that they locked the ending behind such a high wall. It's not fair after spending almost 20 hours looking for every coin, bee and tonic.
This is a good example on how to fuck it up with just one bad decision. I mean, why not make the Impossible Lair with checkpoints and the the "real" Imposible Lair without checkpoints for a nice extra sequence/bonus/whatever? It's so dumb!!
I've tried the Impossible Lair 5 times, my best mark it's at 55% with 48 bees. I know I can beat it on a few more tries because it's not "that" impossible, but it feels really weird that they locked the ending behind such a high wall. It's not fair after spending almost 20 hours looking for every coin, bee and tonic.
This is a good example on how to fuck it up with just one bad decision. I mean, why not make the Impossible Lair with checkpoints and the the "real" Imposible Lair without checkpoints for a nice extra sequence/bonus/whatever? It's so dumb!!
How are others feeling about the likelihood now of an update to adjust the final stage? I know that there was that tweet a little while ago that they were listening to feedback, but I've seen nothing on the topic since from Playtonic. I find it hard to judge wear to expect from them generally for post-launch support, but I'm increasingly losing hope here.
I assume a patch with checkpoints will still happen. Personally I'd never use the option, it only took me a couple of tries to clear the final level myself and loved it. That said with the level being around 20 minutes and clearly causing people problems it'd be wise to patch it, I mean as long as they make it a toggle option (so that I get to retain the current difficulty) I really don't see the problem. I'd only be annoyed if they replaced the level with an easier version as the only option.
Just gonna echo this request for help.
Can't find the entrance to the Right shortcut path at all. Any help would be appreciated
You have to throw a water bomb on the plant there and use it to jump there. There's a waterbomb on the right (that iirc you need to throw a water bomb that you get down?)
This is above chapter 4
I'm absolutely playing this for the time today thanks to the Epic freebie. I almost bought it multiple times in the past and just never pulled the trigger. Pretty excited for it!
You have to throw a water bomb on the plant there and use it to jump there. There's a waterbomb on the right (that iirc you need to throw a water bomb that you get down?)
This is above chapter 4
Thanks.
Got to the final major obstacle in the impossible lair the row of buzzsaws that comes down to attempt to crush you and the baddies on the second to last converyor belt with no bees or laylee choked and jumped a split second too early, hit the stupid thing, and now i gotta sit here feeling like Gaming's Larry David as i look at my 99% complete on the world map.
Man this game is good, but..... I really just want to play the overworld. It has really great Jak1 vibes and I find myself having to force myself to play the levels, which are good, but just not as interesting to me. I feel like there's just a bit too much sidescrolling content relative to overworld content but maybe it's just me.
Well, it is a platformer first and foremost, the balance was always gonna be in sidescrollings favour.
I mean, wasnt the first game not a side scroller but still a platformer?
It was, but that one was an intentional homage to collectathons like banjo Kazooie, while this one deliberately moved to ape the Donkey Kong Country games.
I think the overworld part was mainly a way to retain yooka's origins but in any case the focus this time around was always going to be more focused on the 2D side of things.
I've been chipping away at this game through the week and am a little over the halfway point, with half the bees collected. I seriously considered just bashing my head against the Impossible Lair right from the start, but I thought better of it and decided to save that for a later run so I could settle into the game's physics and get a handle on the mechanics first. It took a few levels for that to click, but part of it was deciding whether I felt more comfortable playing this with the stick or the D-pad. On the surface this looked more like a stick-friendly platformer, as I've found to be the case with games like the Retro DKCs that are more about big sweeping movements over wide spaces and rapid aerial adjustments rather than precise landings, but in the end I found the D-pad more comfortable.
I'm having a fantastic time with it so far and I'm glad other platforming enthusiasts around here pushed this game, particularly on account of the length of its standard levels, which feels perfect: long enough to allow some variability between going fast or slow depending on whether you're carefully exploring or blasting through on a replay, roomy enough for the stage mechanics to be properly developed. A number of things about YLIL come off as better iterations of what I've seen some other games try in recent memory: the stage transformations are like what the flip-sides in Yoshi's Crafted World were initially going for before they were stripped back down for the final product, and the overworld reminds me distinctly of Mario+Rabbids (not least due to the music and visual design) but with more satisfying interactions that aren't just block-pushing filler.
If I have one issue with YLIL so far, it's that its secret design takes a pervasive keys-before-locks approach that puts you in an awful lot of situations where you say: oh, I guess I shouldn't have smashed that crate or bopped that enemy; guess I'll have to catch this on the replay—but you don't get a chance to realize this until it has already happened. Quite often, you can't go fast and hunt for secrets because there aren't many second chances at TWIT coins from doubling back to an earlier obstacle. Likewise, every now and then you're given a bomb to carry and unless there is a very obvious cage with the glowing green symbol on it, it takes a bit of guesswork to know when it's appropriate to spend it.
To be fair, I minded this less as the game wore on, as I steadily learnt how to read it, and now I'm able to grab all five coins on the first run through a level more often than not. As with secret-hunting in a lot of other games, a big part of doing it consistently is just picking up the designers' visual language for signalling the optional content.
I haven't been using any of the tonics that make the game easier at the cost of deducting from your cash flow, but when replaying for secrets, I do like trying out the FX filters and some of the variants that make the game more challenging, like the one that gives every enemy googly eyes but makes them take two hits. Performance on my Switch isn't as crisp as I was led to believe, however. Docked, there's some noticeable choppiness from time to time, and undocked, the FX filters really punish the frame rate. Otherwise I'd load up on them far more often than I've been doing.
I'm having a fantastic time with it so far and I'm glad other platforming enthusiasts around here pushed this game, particularly on account of the length of its standard levels, which feels perfect: long enough to allow some variability between going fast or slow depending on whether you're carefully exploring or blasting through on a replay, roomy enough for the stage mechanics to be properly developed. A number of things about YLIL come off as better iterations of what I've seen some other games try in recent memory: the stage transformations are like what the flip-sides in Yoshi's Crafted World were initially going for before they were stripped back down for the final product, and the overworld reminds me distinctly of Mario+Rabbids (not least due to the music and visual design) but with more satisfying interactions that aren't just block-pushing filler.
If I have one issue with YLIL so far, it's that its secret design takes a pervasive keys-before-locks approach that puts you in an awful lot of situations where you say: oh, I guess I shouldn't have smashed that crate or bopped that enemy; guess I'll have to catch this on the replay—but you don't get a chance to realize this until it has already happened. Quite often, you can't go fast and hunt for secrets because there aren't many second chances at TWIT coins from doubling back to an earlier obstacle. Likewise, every now and then you're given a bomb to carry and unless there is a very obvious cage with the glowing green symbol on it, it takes a bit of guesswork to know when it's appropriate to spend it.
To be fair, I minded this less as the game wore on, as I steadily learnt how to read it, and now I'm able to grab all five coins on the first run through a level more often than not. As with secret-hunting in a lot of other games, a big part of doing it consistently is just picking up the designers' visual language for signalling the optional content.
I haven't been using any of the tonics that make the game easier at the cost of deducting from your cash flow, but when replaying for secrets, I do like trying out the FX filters and some of the variants that make the game more challenging, like the one that gives every enemy googly eyes but makes them take two hits. Performance on my Switch isn't as crisp as I was led to believe, however. Docked, there's some noticeable choppiness from time to time, and undocked, the FX filters really punish the frame rate. Otherwise I'd load up on them far more often than I've been doing.
Managed to get all bees and tried the impossible lair for the first time. You guys weren't kidding, it is hard as concrete. Managed to beat 25 % of the level on my first serious try. Do potions work in this level? I died a lot because I couldn't whirl not as good as before and I assume it is because of the lack of potions.
Tonics don't work, no.
Nothing new that I've seen. :(
I've been playing this the last week and a half and man, what a turn-around for Playtonic. Really love the level design and music, creative twists to each level, controls and looks great, just the right amount of challenge. One of the best 2D platformers in a while. The comments about the Impossible Lair here are making me nervous, but I'll give it a good college try once I get there.
I recently started playing this game on my base PS4 and every once in a while the music skips very intensely, dropping out 3-4 times in a row for 2-3 seconds. It happens every 10-15 mins or so.
I tried getting a video capture from my PS4 to demonstrate but the video capture just skips both video and audio when this problem happens, so it appears to just jump ahead abruptly. What the...?
Anybody else experience this? Is this normal for the game?
I tried getting a video capture from my PS4 to demonstrate but the video capture just skips both video and audio when this problem happens, so it appears to just jump ahead abruptly. What the...?
Anybody else experience this? Is this normal for the game?
No, not normal at all - I played through the game on PS4 without anything like this. It may be worth deleting and re-installing the game, to see if that helps.
After several tries, I made it through 60% of the impossible layer. I don't really understand, you can skip parts of the chapters but not this super long level. I would be more grateful for a unlockable checkpoint for that level instead of bees. The game took a sudden turn and feels like dark souls now. My girlfriend immediately said that this level isn't worth it and I can understand her. But a part of me wants to beat it!
Deleted and reinstalled the game and nope, same issue! What's weird is that only the music cuts out. The sound effects keep playing just fine.
It was honestly the complete opposite for me, I was always wanting to play the levels to the point I might have actually preferred a more traditional world map style which goes from level to level. To each their own though
Just watched the completionist video about that game and I personally found his bit on the impossible lair very amusing. To get the last tonic you have to beat the impossible lair on a fresh save with 0 bees. Holy shit, I would never try that. The impossible lair was hard enough with all bees. He took over 300 tries and 80 hours of playtime. That is sick.
I mean, the whole point of that tonic is for it to be speedrunner type super challenge and it isn't needed for 100% trophies/achievements
Good god I just beat the impossible lair. That level, my god. It's not stormy ascent hard, but it's up there. I had a blast playing it tho, so I can't really complain.
Idk, Stormy Ascent at least has checkpoints and isn't a half hour long =/
Stormy Ascent Gold/Plat relic run though... though that's technically an optional challenge while Impossible Lair is the entire point of this game. Then again, stuff like this doesn't come across all that hard for me so it only took me around 2 tries to clear the lair (with a full compliment of bees mind you). I just love silly challenges like this in platformers, guess I'm a glutton for punishment!
All right, we need to have a talk about this. And some of you aren't going to like it.
Last night I thought it would be fun to stream my entire progression through the Impossible Lair from my first attempt to the last. I didn't know how long it would take or whether it could be done in one session. I hadn't touched the Lair since wiping at 3% at the very start of the game, and went in this time with the full 48-bee shield, totally blind apart from knowing in advance that (a) it's long with no checkpoints and (b) there are boss fights at the quarter markers, since I had heard that all over this thread.
You can check my VOD of the whole progression if you are bored or curious. The clear attempt begins at around the 1h58m mark in the video (timestamp), if you want to see just how sloppy I am, making all sorts of mistakes that I didn't have trouble with on earlier runs and having to make up for lost bees by playing better everywhere else. But the real substance here, I'd say, is not the clear, but how it compares to just how badly I'm doing at the start, barely scraping by the first quarter.
If you count the attempt at the very start of the game as #1, I cleared the Lair on attempt #8 with 1 bee remaining—so, not as proficiently as some of the better players in this thread, but in one sitting, and within what I thought was a very reasonable amount of time. Obviously it would be a different story if I bashed my head against this on 0 bees without learning the rest of the game first, as back when I started YLIL it took me a few levels to settle into the physics at all. But the difficulty seems very balanced, and the time I expended on the Lair is less than what I took on any of the "final exam" stages in 3D Mario (all of which are comparatively short in total running time, apart from Captain Toad's Mummy-Me Maze Forever), including the relatively easy one in Odyssey, and about as long as I took to learn DKCTF's 2-K Bopopolis when I first saw it in 2014. The Lair is long, but with a shield north of 40 bees, extremely well balanced and generous.
You are likely to take hits, but have ample opportunity to learn from them and improve quickly from run to run. To be fair, I can see how it might come as a shock to players who go in not knowing that it's a gauntlet level at all, and I had the benefit of hearing about the Lair by reputation and fully expecting 20-30 minutes. That's a psychological salve not everyone will have going in. At the same time, I think the game's structure is pretty self-explanatory from the start, and with a maximum buffer of 48 bees, the length of the Lair should not come as a major surprise.
*
I have to say: I now feel as though my attitude towards no-checkpoint gauntlet levels has been completely vindicated. Completely. I strongly recommend that Playtonic make no changes, and will honestly be disappointed if they capitulate to the checkpoint whining. The structure of this game is amazing and unique, and they should make no further compromises just to please those who feel entitled to see the end credits roll in every game and blame the designers otherwise.
Part of the problem is that the main game actually trains you to be sloppy. It never tracks deaths and dispenses entirely with the lives system without adjusting the design to compensate, so in the main game I found, very often, that if I lost Laylee shortly after a checkpoint—and scrambling to get Laylee back is by far the leading cause of death in this game—there was actually no reason not to just take a death right there and respawn with Laylee. I didn't go out of my way to exploit that deliberately, but it was difficult to ignore that the game is full of situations where taking a death is optimal.
What I'm saying is that the main game disguises how many hits or falls you normally take in the course of a level. And if you do pay attention to that sort of thing, you would know that the Impossible Lair is actually a very gentle step up mechanically. None of the obstacles are harder than what the main game already throws at you, and the Lair never even requires any mastery of the advanced mechanics that you need for the full 200/200 medal collection (notably, the undocumented roll -> roll -> jump input sequence where the secondary roll gives you extra horizontal coverage). It wasn't until I beat the Lair and watched a speed run video that I even knew about techniques like ground pound -> forward launch, although I might have triggered that accidentally here and there.
This is one of the most interesting concepts I've seen for structuring an endgame to make progression/collection in the rest of the game come off as substantial and free. (The point of reference for opening up the finale from the start, of course, is BotW, and the inspiration here is conspicuous.) The Lair is absolutely up to the task, and the bee-shield system makes it fundamentally more learnable than your typical gauntlet level because you have every opportunity to process the mistakes you are making along the way, instead of wondering what went wrong. That's the very opposite of trial-and-error and having to work all the way back to whatever killed you. You get to see up to 48 different fixable mistakes on every run, read what went wrong, and make as many adjustments as you can remember when you go back for more. (That's on top of the usual safety net you already get from losing and fetching Laylee—though as I said, throughout the whole game, that is as likely as not to kill you.)
*
Okay, they can make one change.
I did watch the Completionist video afterwards, and was surprised that the standard 48-bee run took Jirard 21 attempts (to my 8) when he is frankly a more experienced and prolific player who has cleared all kinds of achievements I would never attempt. In a way, that's encouraging: it tells me that the pipe dream of a 0-bee run is perhaps more tractable than it looks. If I didn't have so much else to play, I'd probably take a crack at it.
But it is a legitimate problem that—as the video says—the final tonic requires you to make a 0-bee run on what your file logs as attempt #1, requiring you to sit through the whole opening sequence and tutorial. There is no functional difference between a 0-bee run on attempt #1 and a 0-bee run on attempt #100; either way you haven't finished Chapter 1 of the game, and we all know that anyone attempting this challenge will have to replay the level incessantly anyway.
This is one change that I'd happily see in a patch. Nothing else. Definitely no checkpoints. If you don't think you're up to the task—and if you're at 48/48 bees and 200/200 medals, I'd say you're seriously underestimating your own ability to tackle this—nobody's forcing you to take on the Lair. It's not the game's fault—not when it gives you so many opportunities to learn and improve on every run.
After all the complaints here I was astonished that the Lair was that fair, that low on bullshit. There are a few things that will definitely hit you the first time you see them, like the tiny alterations to the boss pattern in every encounter, but all of these can be grasped and worked around if you are paying attention, and I just don't see the problem with that. My experience with the Lair was downright relaxed.
Last night I thought it would be fun to stream my entire progression through the Impossible Lair from my first attempt to the last. I didn't know how long it would take or whether it could be done in one session. I hadn't touched the Lair since wiping at 3% at the very start of the game, and went in this time with the full 48-bee shield, totally blind apart from knowing in advance that (a) it's long with no checkpoints and (b) there are boss fights at the quarter markers, since I had heard that all over this thread.
You can check my VOD of the whole progression if you are bored or curious. The clear attempt begins at around the 1h58m mark in the video (timestamp), if you want to see just how sloppy I am, making all sorts of mistakes that I didn't have trouble with on earlier runs and having to make up for lost bees by playing better everywhere else. But the real substance here, I'd say, is not the clear, but how it compares to just how badly I'm doing at the start, barely scraping by the first quarter.
If you count the attempt at the very start of the game as #1, I cleared the Lair on attempt #8 with 1 bee remaining—so, not as proficiently as some of the better players in this thread, but in one sitting, and within what I thought was a very reasonable amount of time. Obviously it would be a different story if I bashed my head against this on 0 bees without learning the rest of the game first, as back when I started YLIL it took me a few levels to settle into the physics at all. But the difficulty seems very balanced, and the time I expended on the Lair is less than what I took on any of the "final exam" stages in 3D Mario (all of which are comparatively short in total running time, apart from Captain Toad's Mummy-Me Maze Forever), including the relatively easy one in Odyssey, and about as long as I took to learn DKCTF's 2-K Bopopolis when I first saw it in 2014. The Lair is long, but with a shield north of 40 bees, extremely well balanced and generous.
You are likely to take hits, but have ample opportunity to learn from them and improve quickly from run to run. To be fair, I can see how it might come as a shock to players who go in not knowing that it's a gauntlet level at all, and I had the benefit of hearing about the Lair by reputation and fully expecting 20-30 minutes. That's a psychological salve not everyone will have going in. At the same time, I think the game's structure is pretty self-explanatory from the start, and with a maximum buffer of 48 bees, the length of the Lair should not come as a major surprise.
*
I have to say: I now feel as though my attitude towards no-checkpoint gauntlet levels has been completely vindicated. Completely. I strongly recommend that Playtonic make no changes, and will honestly be disappointed if they capitulate to the checkpoint whining. The structure of this game is amazing and unique, and they should make no further compromises just to please those who feel entitled to see the end credits roll in every game and blame the designers otherwise.
Part of the problem is that the main game actually trains you to be sloppy. It never tracks deaths and dispenses entirely with the lives system without adjusting the design to compensate, so in the main game I found, very often, that if I lost Laylee shortly after a checkpoint—and scrambling to get Laylee back is by far the leading cause of death in this game—there was actually no reason not to just take a death right there and respawn with Laylee. I didn't go out of my way to exploit that deliberately, but it was difficult to ignore that the game is full of situations where taking a death is optimal.
What I'm saying is that the main game disguises how many hits or falls you normally take in the course of a level. And if you do pay attention to that sort of thing, you would know that the Impossible Lair is actually a very gentle step up mechanically. None of the obstacles are harder than what the main game already throws at you, and the Lair never even requires any mastery of the advanced mechanics that you need for the full 200/200 medal collection (notably, the undocumented roll -> roll -> jump input sequence where the secondary roll gives you extra horizontal coverage). It wasn't until I beat the Lair and watched a speed run video that I even knew about techniques like ground pound -> forward launch, although I might have triggered that accidentally here and there.
This is one of the most interesting concepts I've seen for structuring an endgame to make progression/collection in the rest of the game come off as substantial and free. (The point of reference for opening up the finale from the start, of course, is BotW, and the inspiration here is conspicuous.) The Lair is absolutely up to the task, and the bee-shield system makes it fundamentally more learnable than your typical gauntlet level because you have every opportunity to process the mistakes you are making along the way, instead of wondering what went wrong. That's the very opposite of trial-and-error and having to work all the way back to whatever killed you. You get to see up to 48 different fixable mistakes on every run, read what went wrong, and make as many adjustments as you can remember when you go back for more. (That's on top of the usual safety net you already get from losing and fetching Laylee—though as I said, throughout the whole game, that is as likely as not to kill you.)
*
Okay, they can make one change.
I did watch the Completionist video afterwards, and was surprised that the standard 48-bee run took Jirard 21 attempts (to my 8) when he is frankly a more experienced and prolific player who has cleared all kinds of achievements I would never attempt. In a way, that's encouraging: it tells me that the pipe dream of a 0-bee run is perhaps more tractable than it looks. If I didn't have so much else to play, I'd probably take a crack at it.
But it is a legitimate problem that—as the video says—the final tonic requires you to make a 0-bee run on what your file logs as attempt #1, requiring you to sit through the whole opening sequence and tutorial. There is no functional difference between a 0-bee run on attempt #1 and a 0-bee run on attempt #100; either way you haven't finished Chapter 1 of the game, and we all know that anyone attempting this challenge will have to replay the level incessantly anyway.
This is one change that I'd happily see in a patch. Nothing else. Definitely no checkpoints. If you don't think you're up to the task—and if you're at 48/48 bees and 200/200 medals, I'd say you're seriously underestimating your own ability to tackle this—nobody's forcing you to take on the Lair. It's not the game's fault—not when it gives you so many opportunities to learn and improve on every run.
After all the complaints here I was astonished that the Lair was that fair, that low on bullshit. There are a few things that will definitely hit you the first time you see them, like the tiny alterations to the boss pattern in every encounter, but all of these can be grasped and worked around if you are paying attention, and I just don't see the problem with that. My experience with the Lair was downright relaxed.
Tldr, the impossible lair level simply isn't fun and nothing can convince me that it is. It's a shitty ending to an otherwise solid game.