Game 38: Earth Must Die

Despite the title this is not going to be a manifesto of doom, sadly.

Earth Must Die is a modern adventure game that I've been sucked into due to the presence of Alex Horne (of Taskmaster fame) along with a lot of other British comedic talent as the voice actors.

We begin on a heavily damaged spaceship. I'm playing as VValak, a blue-skinned Tyrythian and the third son of the current Shepard (Emperor) of all Tyrythians.

Dad is in bad shape and also can't remember my name.

I'm escorted by Milky, my nurse-bot - I guess I haven't outgrown that yet, it keeps offering me milk.

Father wants me to call in my brothers so he can pass his title on to one of them before he dies.

When my brothers arrive, I do my best to convince them that each of them is the rightful heir despite them being twins.

Tyrythian reproduction is a strange subject.

VValak is one cold soul - my attempts at manipulation pay off and the brothers start fighting for the right to rule.

The battle leaves both of them dead.

With no other choice left to him, Father calls VValak over and hands him power - and VValak rules the Ascendancy for the next 388 years before the story continues.

Thanks to 'Milkipedia' I can access information about the ascendancy as well as my 'to do' list.

Milkipedia actually already has a good number of entries on the Ascendancy and prior Shepherds, including one who kept trying to use scrambled eggs to build things, so as listless and evil as VValak is he's probably not the worst person to be in charge of the empire.

VValak realizes that the Ascendancy is short of Fabriconium, which leads him to need to scan additional planets, which puts him up against the rules of the empire, leading him to the Underwriters who won't give permission to do it because it wouldn't be compatible with the fake history they're writing.

The easy path is ruined by the need for the plot.

A little blackmail (and putting down one quick rebellion led by my actually-not dead father) later and all is well for the planet scanning.

Or not. Since the 'planet scanning' button doesn't work.

The solution is to use a 'micro-world' to fix it - an entire civilization created for the purposes of fixing the button, the size of a syringe.

Unfortunately the world in question has developed 'Capitalism' instead of it's intended purpose, so in order to scan planets we have to fix the planet scanning button which means we need to fix the micro-world by shrinking down into it and ending Capitalism so they can fulfill their intended purpose.

Guess that job falls to me.

One of the interesting choices for this game is that I don't have an inventory nor do I directly interact with objects - any interaction tends to be 'Send Milky to deal with it' and pre-requisites for puzzles tend to take the form of information either gleaned from Milkipedia or from conversations. As a result I haven't gotten stuck on anything so far and it's been a smooth sailing experience, with some good comedy along the way.

If sex-related humor is your thing then this game is for you

The micro-world has been building a tower and needs just the right last little micro-person to fit into it (also they'll be locked into painful suffering, sorry kid).

That problem fixed, we can finally scan for planets!

Ah-ha! We have found Earth!

Unfortunately it appears that this is a far-future Earth, with it's own galactic empire ruled by Emperor Gargantua. The initial scouting attempt goes poorly, and now Earth has also found us.

In a remarkably short time the Terranoid Empire takes over the Ascendancy.

After six months of Terranoid rule VValdak has had enough - he finds his father at a dive bar and together they come up with a plan to free the Ascendency so VValdak can go back to being the tyrant he wants to be.

Daddy has a plan - apparently Terranoids all have a chip in them to prevent rebellions, because if the Terranoid Emperor Gargantua doesn't do his regular broadcast from Earth, a Human with this chip will die.

Seems like a pretty big vulnerability

So all we've gotta do to stop the broadcast is get a ship and a very dangerous bomb and use it to destroy Earth, and bam - no more Terranoids.

To get started on that we need to do three things - find a way through the planetary defense grid off this planet, get a Tremblo-Bomb, and finally uh...

Is there maybe a better time and place for this particular task?

There are a couple elements of these puzzles that I find unintuitive - one is that I need to view Milkipedia pages which are relevant to the puzzle to unlock the right options to complete the puzzle. Unfortunately I can't just look through all of Milkipedia ahead of time, I need to view the page while I'm in the midst of the puzzle even if I'd read it before.

The other is that where I stand to position objects can be very important - I got stuck on the defense grid puzzle for a bit because I didn't correctly position the speaker to annoy the tree.

Also my pilot died of old age, can't get much done in life if you only live 8 hours.

Unfortunately I'm actually going to quit playing this one before I finish, because I've started to run into game-breaking bugs with reloading my save game. The first time it happened a character animation broke and I couldn't progress past the puzzle and had to reload from a chapter point, and now today I've loaded my game twice and there's no speech sound anymore. I do hate to leave a game unfinished but sadly this one just hasn't lived up to my hopes so I'm going to move on for now - I may return if these bugs get fixed in the future.