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Wadjet Eye Games, the studio that made Technobabylon and Unavowed (two excellent modern point-and-click adventure games that I very much enjoyed) has just released Old Skies - another point-and-click adventure, now featuring time travel. Let's dive in! I'm playing as a woman named Fia, the year is 2068, and I have a night off. Point-and-clicks in the modern era have some nice updates over their predecessors, and this one has a cool feature - there's no explicit 'look' command, you instead get a tooltip with a description when mousing over an interactable. Tooltips - an elegant feature of a more civilized age. On the other hand there doesn't seem to be (or I haven't been able to find) a 'highlight interactable objects' button so we'll see if that gets me stuck later. I get the handsome man at the bar to chat with me, buy him a drink, say some cryptic stuff about possibly not existing because I work for a time travel organization, it's going great... I work for an organization called ChronoZen. Fia and the guy she's just bought a drink for toast to being real! And then... the guy vanishes from existence as some purple wave effect passes through the bar. Fia simply says 'Blast it' and finishes her drink, as though this is merely an irritating thing to have happened rather than the way you or I might react to watching someone vaporize in front of us. I get the sense that we have a time travel problem. A big one. Yeah that's definitely a problem. Though I was apparently warned not to check my 'Personic' (Facebook) profile after a chrono-shift, I figure what the hell. This is apparently who I am in this particular timeline. Except Fia the Time Travel agent is not this, and appears to be immune to whatever is happening. Did I replace the Fia in this timeline or are there two of us? The news says nothing about timeshifts and appears to just be reporting on current events. My personal messages, which appear to be ChronoZen slack chats, are more enlightening. Fia is bored with time off so I go back to the company and ask if they have any open assignments. I get sent to April 14, 2024, East Village, to show some sort of 'Time Tourist' around. I suspect he's not accustomed to time travel. We're stopped by a locked door, apparently the higher ups do a poor job of scouting our landing zones. I get the client to boost me over the wall and find a combination lock, so the multitool we carry won't do the trick. The solution is a fun one - I contact Nozzo from HQ and he looks up the combination using historical records and the lock's serial number. How it's not one of those locks that you can reset the combination to. I have such mixed feelings about this. Our tourist, Joe, is making this trip... because he wants to eat at the diner he loved as a teenager. That's really heartwarming and I don't think I can fault someone for wanting to do that. On the other hand I think I can surmise a big reason why there are so many chrono-shifts in the future. Sure let's use time travel and all the risks that entails so you can have a meal. Another innovation - screen transitions don't take you from screen X to screen Y. They take you to this 'travel area' where you can choose any screen in the zone, meaning you never have to just walk through a couple screens to get to the one you want. They also took a moment to have character conversations here. All the dialogue so far is voice-acted and the acting is solid! Joe has a hell of a moment when he sees the restaurant again, he reveals that he's been diagnosed with Skimien syndrome and has about half a year to live - and also that 'right now' he's a 19-year old student with his whole life ahead of him. Man I think this game is likely to get to me. Well, I got him his meal, and everything was fine until Joe decided - most likely pre-planned - to skip the tour, rip off his tracker bracelet and head off on his own. Seems like the sort of thing that can screw up a timeline. Good think Nozzo has a contingency plan for this! The, ah, 'contingency plan' is.... severe. I end up at Joe's dorm room in and figure out what the deal probably is. It's about a girl! Younger Joe is with a pretty girl (Lisa) on his laptop background and emails between them indicate that they're flirting... but it appears that older Joe logged into this computer and sent this gem of an e-mail.... He even sent it from Lisa's account, that jerk. He's trying to change Lisa's past, seems like it could be a plot to prevent Lisa from doing things that would lead to her breaking up with younger Joe? Whatever Joe is trying to do, it's already been sent and the timeline's already been altered. Oh. Oh I'm wrong about his motivation. The historical record. Five years in the future from our current year, Adjunct Professor Lisa died in a Chemical explosion. I think Joe's trying to save her by preventing her from becoming a Chemistry Professor. So now I'm all like 'Aw, that's sweet, I get it...' but the CHARACTERS are all 'But he's rich, and it's legal for us to just save her because her Timeline Impact is low, he could have just paid us to do that.' And now I'm as confused as they are. But I'm much less confused about what's going on with the fluctuating timelines - if we're willing to save people's lives because rich people will pay for it then of course everything is going to shift all the time! We're being extremely cavalier about the timeline here! We are not at all worried about the Butterfly Effect, no sir. 'How stable is a historical timeline' is a deeply philosophical question. We have no way to test this, so how someone believes time-travel can affect a timeline reflects a lot about a person's beliefs about the nature of history, reality, and how those can be shaped. Personally I'm of the view that even minor, seemingly insignificant changes in history will eventually have cascading effects that can significantly alter history in highly unpredictable ways. Even so much as squishing a spider in Ancient Rome will alter the lives of all the bugs that spider would have otherwise eaten, which themselves affect other bugs, which then begin to affect other animals and humans - months later a mosquito that originally didn't exist because it wasn't born in one timeline bites a human and infects them with malaria, and maybe they die before they otherwise would have, or maybe they don't step outside and get run down by a horse and live instead, and now their life and its events starts to change the course of human lives, and eventually major historical events. Bringing this back to the game and it's 'Timeline Impact', CZ seems to believe that what happens to some entire human lives will not significantly affect the timeline - at least to such a degree that they think it's ok to change the lives of 'Low impact' people. Regarding a person's impact on history, I'd argue that it might be possible to reasonably assess how much it might affect a timeline if you kill  someone, because we have some idea of what they will do if they live and could make predictions about what will happen instead if they don't. Even that, in my view, is likely too unpredictable and damaging to risk if you want to preserve your timeline - and while CZ might not agree, this game well might because as we've seen, the timestream in the future is highly unstable. But saving someone from dying , especially someone younger, is actually far more dangerous to a timeline than killing someone, because you have no idea  what they are going to do with the rest of their lives. Hitler's psyche was forged in no small part due to WWI, but consider that the French lost close to 1.5 million dead - any given French soldier might be rated 'Low Impact', but what are the chances that at least one of them was a particular soldier that, had they lived, might have been extremely bitter, rose to power, and governed France with an iron fist, conducted military reforms, and forged a 1935 French army bent on revenge against Germany? Many Einsteins and Stalins have been born that never made it past childhood - and I don't believe that's merely an opinion, given the rate of childhood mortality throughout history I believe that's a statistical certainty . Every child you save is a roll of the dice on whether or not they will eventually become someone great or terrible that has significant influence on events, all of which is to say that while I sympathize with people who might want to prevent someone's death in the past, it should never be done if you want to preserve the present. Back to the game - I've gotten a little stuck on this part. There's an implicit 'hint system' (another nice feature) in that you can call Nozzo and ask for his thoughts, but it's really a hint rather than a clear answer. For the Historical Record I can enter people's first and last names and look them up, but none of the people I've learned the names of - Joseph and Celia Anderson, and Lisa Sandman have moved me past this point. I suspect I need to find Foster's entry - they're the professor that old-Joe sent the email to - but I only have their last name and first initial, R. I found a clue in that email earlier - it mentions Foster's name is 'appropriate' because he's like a 'Virus', but this screen doesn't let me type manually so I can't just try random viruses that start with 'R'. Come on Nozzo, just let me randomly guess it! So I'm going to revisit other areas and see if I missed something. Found the name, just had to talk to a character after finding stuff from the computer. new Back on track, I found Lisa trying to break in - looks like she's seen the email (Joe sent it from her account) and is trying to prevent the professor from seeing it. Lisa, have I got some unsolicited dating advice for you! I help her break into her professor's office and delete the e-mail, thus re-condemning her to death five years down the road. That hits differently than when it's abstracted into a 'for the good of the timeline' argument, but I've done it anyway because it's still a good argument. She thanks me profusely for this and tells me where she hangs out with 'Andy'. I surmise that that's probably where older Joe has gone. Fancy meeting you here... Oh, man. He was indeed trying to save Lisa from the explosion that will kill her. He tried to do it legally, but the board rejected it. Her Timeline Importance was Low.... but Joe himself is rich because he made some huge medical advances. His TI is 'Extremely High'. Joe is a victim of his own success and ended up being too important to legally risk saving Lisa. He believes that it's already done - that Lisa is safe now because of the email. He offers to 'go back quietly', not knowing that when he tore off that bracelet to escape he made it impossible for CZ to return him to our timeline. It's too late for that, Joe. I take the time to explain it all to him. He resigns himself to his fate, comforting himself in the belief that Lisa is safe... and then all that's left to me is to decide whether or not to reinforce or shatter that delusion before pulling the trigger.  It only matters in the seconds between the words and the trigger, but for those few seconds it matters a lot. Returning to my own time, my co-workers are kind enough to help me drink away that experience. Another chrono-shift happens while we're there and in this version my alter-self was part of a 'cluster' (married) and has a son, who has been waiting in the rain for over an hour for me to pick them up from soccer practice. I find this out when my newly-existing husband calls me and is angered to find out that I'm at a bar instead of picking up the kid.  I'm a bad mother now and it really isn't my fault. This indicates that as we chrono-shift, I appear to be replacing whatever version of 'me' existed in these other timelines. CZ employees, their apartments, and this bar are 'chrono-locked', meaning I suppose that they can survive the timeline shifts. A couple seconds after deciding to ignore the kid / husband situation (because why interact with them when the next chrono-shift might just erase them?), another chrono-shift comes along and does exactly that. Family problems go away the moment the family goes away! From the field manual: 'If your knowledge of history does not match this history, tell us right away' is such a great warning. Interestingly, the alter-me is very different now, but the news remains as it was - so major events in the present haven't been changed. So far. Can I stay in the timeline where I get paid to play video games? A few weeks pass. Chrono-shifts have caused a building to appear next to mine, ruining the view. I hope the rent is cheaper. The current version of me was having quite a time. So far the one consistency I've noticed is that I'm always unemployed. A couple news items have changed, so even the major timeline events aren't all that stable. CZ employees get to have some unusual cinematic experiences. Next client: Chloe Sadar, newly retired boxing champion. We're going to 1871 because she wants to ask a famous boxer from this era, Simon Inman, about his retirement.  We're actually stuck behind another locked gate but this time I have a badass client who can handle it. Unless our antics have shifted a great deal of misogyny out of existence in this time period, I very much doubt that the lady here would be sizing up my companion as a fighter and asking her to go toe-to-toe against the guy training here. In 1871. I bet Chloe could kick his ass though. Actually, I take it back - it was more of a thing than I assumed. They don't like Simon much here at the gym, and they don't know where he is now. Why can't people just be helpful by knowing whatever I happen to want to find out? Ah, found Simon by running into him back at the bar! And he's a huge jerk! He's working for a gangster or something and threatening the bartender. Uh... lemme upgrade 'jerk' to 'murderer'. He shot all three of us! What is this, King's Quest? Oh good, Restart activates the "ERP protocol" where Nozzo rewinds our personal timelines enough that this didn't happen and we can try the scene again. Having the reload function be an actual story-acknowledged capability is pretty great. Every game that can invent a plausible excuse should do so. Ah, the game does have 'Hotspot' highlighting, I just didn't happen to hit 'H' earlier. Seems odd that this tutorial didn't happen earlier. This is cleverly done, there's things I can do and new dialog options and I've made the play out a couple different ways but I still get shot in the end. I have the option to shoot Simon myself but I don't want to resort to that yet because then Chloe can't meet him. Oh good job me, I managed to not get shot by Simon this time. Puzzle solved, everyone walks away alive. Chloe is nonplussed to learn that he tried to kill us, though only I remember the time loops. Chloe I swear I worked it out on like attempt number two. Three, tops. She isn't a 'quitter' though, she still wants to ask Simon about his 'retirement'. We track him to his father's home... or, well, where that used to be. Nice house you got there, shame something happened to it. Chloe finally gets to ask Simon her question - sort of. She wants wisdom, to learn from someone else who gave up boxing after being a champion, wants to know what to do with the rest of her life, how to live. I'm surprised Chloe hasn't reconsidered her desire to get life advice from this guy. Sunk cost fallacy? Simon doesn't have answers and now has the gun to his own head, because things haven't been going great for him. I've read the historical record of Simon - according to that he dies 20 years from now of cholera. But since we're here maybe we'll inadvertently provoke him to suicide, thus sort of accidentally killing him right now. At least he's not trying to shoot ME this time. This is pretty close to a worst-case scenario for a time-travel trip to ask someone a question. CZ offering refunds when 'this sort of thing' happens is solid dark humor. Chloe doesn't want a refund, she wants to re-do this and save him, understandably. That's a no-go, apparently 'our past and present selves will melt' if we interact with ourselves directly, but Nozzo proposes that we might be able to go back to the championship fight itself and change his life course at that point. Well, probably can't be worse than getting him killed. 6 months earlier, Chloe (being new to this time travel stuff) slips up when she talks to people she already 'met' six months from now, confusing them. No Chloe he can't remember the future, let me do the talking. Gameplay-wise this has been extremely light on the sort of 'get item, use item on thing' puzzles - most of moving the plot forward consists of either talking to the right people or finding new information via historical records. Speaking of history, we learn that the reason Simon's house isn't going to be there in six months is because of something they're referring to as 'the Gridiron project'. Turns out that's a real thing - the original plan for the streets of New York City would end up destroying numerous homes. Simon's house isn't 'on' 83rd street in the sense that it's adjacent to that road, it's literally located ON where the street is planned to be. " The maps are replete with houses that are directly in the way of where streets were scheduled to run, and lots that would be bisected, trisected, or completely obliterated by the streets and avenues of the new grid. " We aren't able to convince Brian or Simon to not fight, and all we know is that something  happens after the fight that leads Simon into a life of crime. Oh cool, apparently we can still use the time tunnel between now and six months from now whenever we want for the next few hours, so we can go back and forth to see what we've changed. Intervening in a second timeline will surely improve things. Chloe is asking the right questions about time travel! Found the asshole that turned Simon's life around for the worse - his Uncle, Eddie, runs the Breakdown Boys gang. After the championship fight (which I suspect he may have rigged in Simon's favor) he started teaching Simon the family business. He's an asshole but he has a remarkable ability to throw cleavers accurately. Not that that ever happened to me (in the eventual timeline). He's also a huge jerk, no sympathy at all for Simon's suicide. But what also happened the night of the fight was that Simon's sister Paula died in the woods near the house. Fia surmises that that's the main cause of Simon's eventual suicide. She was attacked by a rabid tree in the woods. We manage to save Paula's life and get her back to the house. Nozzo isn't sure if this has saved Simon or not. Surely we didn't mess up the letters in his name? We didn't go back before he was born... or did we? He lives! We stopped his suicide! He stands up to his Uncle! He stands up to his Uncle! Did I mention that Uncle Eddie is good with a cleaver? DAMNIT EDDIE WE JUST SAVED HIM AND HIS SELF ESTEEM Ok, so now I'm trying to save Simon from Eddie. I find out that Eddie did indeed rig the fight. I confront Ida, the gym manager with this, and Brian, Simon's opponent, overhears it all and he admits that he took the fall. You know how the road to Hell is paved with good intentions? That's a good summary of how the 'interact with both timelines' thing is going. Now Simon's dead six months earlier and I got our client, Chloe, killed as well. I'm feeling like I'm not good at this job. But we have the advantage that time travel affords us. Finally, I arrive in time to save them, weapon in hand before Eddie does the deed. I have the option to stun him or vaporize him... Now, normally I'm against altering the timeline more than we absolutely need to - but Eddie is a straight up murderous asshole that keeps killing Simon in multiple situations and times. I think it would be nice for Simon to at least live to the ripe old age of 36. Eddie deserved it. And that only leaves the Championship fight that originally put Inman's name in the paper and inspired a young Chloe to become a professional boxer - but now Simon's not going to fight tonight. Ida is at the bar desperately looking for a replacement... There's only one trained fighter in this bar, lady. When I return to my time, Chloe isn't there - Nozzo says she was tired after all this and went home before I got here, but I wonder if that's the truth. Was young Chloe inspired by the woman in the paper that shared her name the same way she was inspired by Simon? I'll see if the news has anything. I'm married with children again. Relief! Chloe Sadar is still a retired boxing champion. She managed to not paradox herself out of existence. Duffy (my co-worker / mentor) is feeling down tonight, apparently the version of him in this timeline is already dead. He tells us not to check on our Personic profiles but that temptation is strong - how could you not? That's a conversation killer. Hey buddy, it's your funeral. Next client! Art Curator Imani Cameron has a painting with no signature, but it has a date - August 1923. She's confident due to her art expertise that it was painted by someone under the pseudonym 'Pie Sycamore', who is now a famous artist after their paintings were discovered in a warehouse, but historians have been unable to determine who the person actually was. She wants to verify that the painting was done by this artist. Her only information about where to possibly find this painting is a photo of a different Pie Sycamore painting she found of this shop. The shopkeeper is pretty unhelpful but eventually reveals he does have it in his office. I will throw every dialogue option I have at the problem until something works! Imani is thrilled and enthralled to be able to see this masterpiece in person. Shopkeep thinks it looks like some crayons melted and Imani is displeased with him. Please don't needlessly wreck the timeline, I'm sure we'll get to that without trying to. We trace the painting to someone named Jackson Grant's house where we find another. Imani starts complaining about a strange smell when we arrive, but nobody else smells anything. Eventually she identifies Grant himself as the source of the smell and all her politeness goes out the window. Imani, maybe just quietly excuse yourself? She leaves and Nozzo calls, saying that Imani has 'Precursor syndrome'. Maybe she's related to Grant and that's bad for the timeline? He tells me to get Imani and go back to the landing point, I think we're aborting this one. Precursor syndrome - interacting with blood relatives before you were born causes your mind to recoil from it because it's so dangerous, and manifests itself as smells, tastes, nausea - anything that triggers a fight or flight response. Not sure how humans acquired this particular 'instinct'. Maybe it started showing up when we fucked up time itself. I convince Imani to go back to her time - CZ has rules on this. I'm going to stay and continue the mission without her. Unfortunately a couple passer-by actually see her enter a time portal when Imani leaves. Damn it, if only there were a locked gate at our landing zone this wouldn't happen. Ah, they're not random - the woman is Grant's daughter Elizabeth, the one who bought the paintings. And they're very drunk. Much of the adventure consists of trying to follow the two drunkards around and get them to reveal painting info. You'd be amazed by how much ammunition she's carrying. Eventually the man reveals that 'Pie Sycamore' is his mother and gives up her address, and here we are. A true artist sacrifices their security deposit when they run out of canvas. Oh that's a fun twist! Pie Sycamore walks in and recognizes me... from fifty years ago. Her real name is Paula Cameron - but her maiden name is Paula Inman. She's Simon's sister who we saved in the last adventure, so her art career came into existence only after that, because in prior timelines she was dead. I, on the contrary, had no idea I was coming back. We suspect that the painting we wanted to confirm may currently be the blank canvas in her studio now. I leave her and let her get to work. In the lobby, I'm talking to Imani when she suddenly cuts off. Nozzo comes in to explain that she's 'paradoxing' - something we changed in the past threatens to erase her from existence (Meaning, of course, that this whole trip was a terrible idea and we should generally just stop messing with time) - the drunk couple are her great-great-grandparents and our interventions have altered their night. They're planning to rob the jewelry store that we originally showed up at, and history currently says that they get shot dead here. You'd think it'd be easy to stop a robbery before it starts. Alas, they're extremely stubborn and it appears my only option is to help the robbery happen without getting them killed. In my defense, the shopkeeper here is a jerk. I help them rob the place and they get out of town with their loot, declaring they'll go straight - but they change their last name to 'Nash' since they have to hide their identity now. Back to the future! We've confirmed that it's a Pie Sycamore painting... only we inadvertently changed it. Paula painted me that night instead of her daughter. There's no Personic profile for me now. It appears I don't exist in the current timeline, or there wasn't a version of me. Imani Cameron is now Imani Nash. Fia and ChronoZen personnel are 'chrono-locked' which renders them immune to the effects of shifting timelines but our clients don't have that luxury - CZ's waiver must be one hell of a legal document. Oh shit. Tragedy strikes - Duffy didn't turn on his protective chronosuit when returning from his last mission. Fia can't believe this, he's a ten-year veteran. Nozzo says that because the death was due to the timestream itself it's irreversible, so no easy time-travel fix here. Fia spends some time back at the art gallery processing this. But after that it's back to work, with Duffy gone she's the only one in New York handling clients. And the next client is Benjamin Pasamon. Like CZ, he's very cavalier about the change he wants to make in the past. Back in 2043, he was late to an investment pitch for his company, and someone else filled in for him and got a major investor to buy in. That investor assumed the substitute was the person in charge of the company, one thing led to another, and then she WAS in charge, and grew the company into a large and successful business. The dialog lets me warn him that we could easily undo all that but he's as unconcerned as CZ is about the risk, he wants me to make sure that he's at that meeting and the person who got the deal is not so he can be properly recognized and shape the company the way he wants. Seems like a pretty obvious path to disappointment to me, but here at CZ the customer is always right! It's a solo mission this time because the client isn't allowed to directly interact with their younger self. I'm delighted, the company starts off with this 'Drone Delivery Salad' pitch. This is Madison, the woman Benjamin wants to screw over. All Hail the Coconut Drone! This game just released and they are very active about updates / hotfixes, I think I've updated the game almost every time I've launched it. We've already inadvertently changed things - Young Benjamin is quite taken with this guy, Sam. In the normal timeline, Sam was hired as a temp for the company. I ended up taking his place and leaving him on a bench outside (but that's fine, the temp agency was conducting corporate espionage and poor Sam was going to do 10 years in jail for it, so I didn't feel bad about saving him from that). But now instead of interacting with Sam as a temp worker, he's just a guy that Benjamin met.. Seems like Ben is quite taken with Sam. This is part of a very clever word puzzle - Benjamin developed a gel that explodes when you say three key words (he wants to market this instead of salad stuff). I can help Madison with her speech and change some of the words she says, but the keywords themselves don't fit - but phonetically some of the keywords are audible within the word options that I have for Madison's speech. Can we just add a bit about 'Green Flavor Explosion' please? And... it all works, more or less. Madison is covered in salad dressing and has to miss the presentation, Benjamin Pasamon becomes CEO of Pasamon Industries - but it doesn't sound like the business did too well after that - but hey, that's on him. I head home, job well done. I like how our CZ office is incredibly unassuming, just another business on the street. The other businesses on this street are constantly changing due to the Chrono-Shifts. Actually, I was wrong about Pasamon Industries - it's actually doing great! But as a weapons manufacturer instead of a maker of great appliances... So Benjamin got what he wanted, but his efforts today are directed at killing people. Fia now refuses to check her Personic profile after Duffy's death, which makes me sad, I was enjoying those. Fia has started to be a regular at the art gallery - she keeps going back there to talk to Imani and look at the paintings, including the one of herself. Nozzo calls all of a sudden with a hot client, so it's back to work. OH, oh, this is so good! The new client... is Madison! She's bitching about how she has to work for Benjamin at his company! Well Madison let's just go change the past for you... Oh that's bad, Nozzo screwed up. I originally returned to my time 50 minutes before the presentations started, so Nozzo should have sent me back after I left, and I'd have that interval to try to get Benjamin out of the presentation and Madison back in. But I run into Madison with a clean suit, just as the temp I'm about to replace - and who's ID I'm currently using - is walking towards the building. Which means I arrived just before I did the last time , and very soon my past self will be walking through that door. I solved the puzzle of getting through this door quickly so I hope that doesn't mean I have a very short amount of time for this now. In the end, Madison and Ben give the presentation together. The company today is still called Leaves and they end up as co-CEOs. They're inability to compromise with each other ultimately results in declining profits and the company today has been bought out. The game's over-arching narrative is about the difficulty of trying to live when everything can change for no discernable reason. Fia has been going to the art gallery between missions, talking with Imani, looking at the paintings. Imani tries to empathize, and says that it's not so different from just being human - after all, anyone could get hit by a truck tomorrow, and lose their whole world. On the bright side Fia, if not for CZ you wouldn't currently exist. Fia disagrees and tries to explain... but another chrono-shift hits. Imani is someone else, or perhaps never existed at all, but she's gone along with Pie Sycamore's paintings. Aw hell. Imani stopped existing and the art sucks. She rushes back to CZ for another client... focus on the job, focus on the job. The next job is... Leaves! Again! This is the office manager, now SHE wants to change something. Sure. Why not. What does it matter anyway? Tomorrow the Janitor will show up to become head of R&D All right, just have to avoid my other two selves and it will be fine! Some earlier moments of confusion from the other characters are revealed to me instances where they saw 'me' in one room and then immediately walked into another room and saw a different 'me'. Easy enough, we get Madison to fall asleep, Benjamin goes out on a date, and neither of them are around for the big Presentation so Cassie gives it - she's in charge now, the company is Cassanetics, and NOW it has a high timeline ranking so we're not allowed to mess with it anymore. I guess Cassie was really the best option for the company after all. I go back and Nozzo kind of.. freaks out? And immediately sends me back here again? Nozzo I was joking about the Janitor, what the hell are we doing back here? Oh, well we have fucked ourselves. Both Madison and Benjamin have some residual memories of THEIR timelines and they are not happy with us for changing them. They've barged into CZ and killed Nozzo (or rather, will kill him in about a minute). Nozzo's own ERP is activating but he can't find a way to stop them, so he sent me back again to try to figure something out. A little sabotage in the past changes this recording's outcome for the better for Nozzo. So, Cassie's timeline stands for now, and Madison and Benjamin will be going to jail for attempted murder. Nozzo reminisces about the early days of time travel, when things were apparently 'really bad'. The version of reality where people routinely stop existing is the 'under control' one. Next client: Hanna Tanaka. She found her friend, murdered, over sixty years ago - on 9/11, as it happens. Now she wants to stop it from happening. Not 9/11 of course, that's a timeline ranking nightmare - just her friend's murder. Tomorrow is a bad day. This should  be very easy. We've arrived on September 10th, so really all we should have to do is find her friend and make sure she's elsewhere when the murder would have otherwise happened. Ah, ok, it appears that she's been intentionally targeted her for murder - so this guy Nick Chord is actively hunting her, and us just moving her somewhere else won't necessarily do the trick. What a lovely morning show segment this must have been. Unfortunately Chord's timeline ranking is 'Medium', so we can't just kill him. Remember kids - if you don't want the future to screw with you, do something impactful today, like kill people. But we CAN go to where he lives, punch his lights out, and tie him up! I approve of this plan. Unfortunately according to Nozzo, the murder still happens despite what we just did. I end up putting him to sleep with some drugs I found in his apartment. Many years later this guy would confess to hundreds of murders, including Hannah's friend Yvonne's, but that's really the only evidence we have that he did it - and knocking him out for the next 12 hours hasn't stopped the murder. It looks like someone else killed Yvonne and we don't know who. Oh, someone really really hates Yvonne. Nick Chord DID kill her, and we have stopped that. But now his confession changed - since Nick is indisposed, someone else got hired to do it. New plan: Just focus on protecting Yvonne. I'm noticing that Skimien Syndrome keeps popping up - multiple characters in my era have died of it, and the first client, Joe Anderson, was going to die of it had I not shot him. Nobody has actually talked about it, but purely on the basis of it being a new thing I'm speculating that it could be an illness related to all the chrono-shifts humanity is experiencing. Surely that can't be good for us? Time fluctuation might be a slow killer like lead poisoning. Yvonne's answering machine indicates that she was invited by another woman to a very nice dinner at a restaurant at the top of WTC1. That woman turns out to be 'Em' Nash, I presume the younger version of the art curator who, in this timeline, is not an art curator. Yvonne isn't here and apparently either walked out or stood her up, so she's making a move on me now, which is a bit awkward for me. Hello I know what you'll look like if you make it to 70 years old. Turns out she also works in the WTC, a few floors down, so I think we can see why she's not curating art in 2062. So we've learned that Yvonne was cheating on her husband, and turns out the husband Dion knows about it and he's done with her. Still no idea why there are hitmen after her, Dion's an artist who seems to be dealing with this via dumping Yvonne and painting. Ah, motive! Imani's young self is working for a company that is involved with the mob! Yvonne is a reporter, and The Mob Does Not Like That. Our client, the 'hero detective', is more involved in this than she let on. She's on the list of people Winera laundered money to. She was on the take! Hannah knew WHY Yvonne was killed all this time and lied to us. Nozzo orders the mission scrubbed. He orders us both back to return home. Hanna does not take this well and decides to try something risky to get away from me. I recommend against ever doing this. Yes Hannah ended up in jail. Well this is a mess, we don't want to leave a time-traveler here, but we also don't want to try a jailbreak. Nozzo solves the problem by putting a field around Hannah that will turn her words to gibberish except for a few authorized phrases so she can't try to stop 9/11 or affect anything else. We're going to leave Hanna here to serve her sentence, then travel back and pick her up when she's released. Hanna I had to vaporize a client who went walkabout, you're getting off lightly. We're back in New York two months later. The city has changed in the interim. Unfortunately, Hanna isn't here.... and worse, the officer she punched doesn't remember being punched. Like it never happened - and maybe it didn't. Yvonne is alive! Looks like Nozzo's speech field wasn't enough to stop Hanna from doing something. And Hanna managed to get her younger self killed in the process, thus paradoxing herself. So she's not around now. This is arguably a form of suicide. Looks like it wasn't something Hanna actually did, maybe something we inadvertently changed? Nick's confession is different now too, now it looks like Hanna herself was told by the mob to kill Imani Nash, but Nash killed her instead, possibly in self defense. I got stuck for a bit on this section, and part of that is because Nozzo uncharacteristically didn't know what to do either. It's interesting - one of Nozzo's dialogue options is essentially a 'give me a hint' button, but I've used it quite a bit if I'm generally unsure of what to do next. I'm much more willing to use it than I would be if there were simply an actual 'hint button' as some games have - I refuse to touch those unless I am well and truly stuck, having tried a lot of random things and feel entirely out of options. But give me the context of it's asking an in-game coworker for advice and I'm all ears. Progress! In November it's now Imani Nash in jail for killing Hanna. At least Imani didn't die in the towers. In a slightly frustrating turn of events, I think the solution now is to go back to Imani Nash in September and basically change the course of her night so she's not in her office when Hanna tries to kill her - which is something I wanted to do when I first learned she was going to be attacked, but the game wouldn't let me do it until I had gotten to this point in the plot. I get Imani out of the office but the mob really wants her dead, we get shot by someone else near her place. I have never personally had to fend off the mob but this seems like a lot of assassins for one target. And now we come face to face with the shooter - it's Hanna. The young, corrupt one. I'm discovering that my own clients want to kill me at statistically unlikely rates. Hanna saves me from Hanna, who technically suffers a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Not sure how she got out of jail though. By my count I think we're about 50-50 in terms of actually helping our clients. There's more than one way to resolve a paradox. Ever since we tied up Nick, young Hanna became the killer instead, and that led her life down a dark path. Old bribe-taking Hanna was able to escape that life and still become a detective, but for young killer Hanna, there was no turning back. Old Hanna is in time-flux, shifting and changing, able to walk out of prison and nobody noticed her. And she does not want to fully become what she is becoming. To anyone reading this, do not employ ChronoZen, it's a bad idea. But I don't let her kill herself in the past, she's done enough damage to the timeline for one day. Besides, even if the future looks bleak for Hanna now, there's always tomorrow, where she may well not exist at all. Well, if nothing's stable anyway, maybe I'll change the future again. For me. I... uh... convince Imani to sleep in the next day and not go into work. Back to the future, the paintings are still not Pie Sycamore's... But Imani is back as art curator! She's gone from being dead to merely having poor taste in art. Back for now. For a few moments. Until the next chrono-shift, maybe. And she's gone again. This time in a fire in 2029. Fia has had it. This time, Fia wants to change the past and bring Imani back again. For herself. Nozzo won't go for it (and Fia can't do it on her own). The warehouse fire is tied to Joe Anderson (client 1's DO NOT INTERVENE life), it's off limits. Sorry, Imani. I can't even be mad at Joe since I already vaporized him. Focus on the job. Next client! Nathan Knox, son of Otix Knox, who's an author Fia's never heard of but is apparently famous in the current timeline. He has a high timeline ranking so we can't interfere with his life, but he disappeared 70 years ago on July 4, 1993, and his son just wants to know what happened to him. Oh sir don't worry I'm sure we will simply discover what happened and won't ruin you or your family's life. We were supposed to find Otis via his last known photo at this book signing, then discreetly follow him around to see what happens to him, no contact. Only I go to the bookstore and it's closed, there's no signing on July 4th. Nozzo decides to try searching for him at his house. There's no signing but I still have this photo of it? No luck at his house, so we investigate the photograph in this article - it's a photo of a book signing that we know didn't actually take place. Nozzo figures out that it was taken by Adam Cole.... who also 'just happens' to be the guy that Knox's wife re-marries. We don't think it's a coincidence. Nozzo starts getting defensive about the integrity of the historical archive when we arrive at Adam's addres and at first it looks like it's not inhabited, but inside we find a computer and evidence that the photo was manipulated. Nozzo is extremely releived for that to be the case. That's some damn fine photoshop work for 1993. Something else is going on here. The 'Trivia' on the computer has a Time-Travel related answer - 'PFEs' are the bracelets we wear to protect ourselves from paradoxes and other bad time travel effects. Why does the pre-time-travel computer have time travel jargon on it? Cole also had a key to Knox's house, so he's real high on the creepy stalker scale. And he has a cobbled-together quansonic device in the basement. There's another time-traveler involved here! We try to get more about Adam Cole from the client but he's having none of he, doesn't want us to bring up his stepfather's past. He walks out, threatening to sue. If your stepfather had something to do with your father's disappearance, don't you want to know? So normally we'd abort if the client bailed, but CZ is essentially the whole regulatory agency for time travel and can't let unauthorized time travelers go mucking about. Imagine, what if someone were to irresponsibly mess up the timeline? I eventually find Knox on the beach. He looks like someone I know. Attempts to research Adam Cole hit a wall, but discussing Otis and Marla with people reveals that around when he published his first book, Otis changed - went from being a mean drunk to not drinking at all and being a good husband practically overnight. Given that there's another time traveler involved we decide to go there and see what happened. 1977 - Knox was a total jerk. Otis Knox is also totally dead. In 1977. Modern Otis is not the real Otis Knox! Modern Otis is..... ! The third option is the correct one. Duffy killed Otis Knox, and took his place. Later he'll change his identity to Adam Cole's. He's both, and he did it all to be with Marla. The body we found that went through the timesteam and got all messed up that was assumed was Duff was actually Otis' body. Duffy then wrote successful books to make Otis' timeline ranking 'high' to protect himself. Duffy murdered a man who arguably deserved it to get himself fifteen years of stability, a family, something to hold on to. Your plan was really creative but you had to resort to plagiarism for the books? And now Duffy won't let go of what he's got. I'm taking him back to the future when he does something to me, or did something, and I die. Apologies don't cut it when you've literally killed me. Clever - Duffy poisoned me just over half an hour before I actually died, and the ERP only rewinds you about 30 minutes at most. So I'm still pointed, and the antidote is in the future. Duffy says the only way for me to survive is to run back to CZ - by which point he will make himself scarce and escape, to eventually resurface as Adam Cole. The clock is ticking! At the landing point, Fia decides she wants to catch Duffy no matter what. The medicine needs quansonic particles, but Duffy's makeshift time machine has those. If I can cure myself without returning to the future, then Duffy can still be caught, and now I'm mad at him for sort of murdering me. This antidote is not a trivial thing to make. LET'S DO THIS GOT MY BLOOD INFUSED IT WITH TIME PARTICLES ADDED INCREDIBLE CHEMICALS STOLEN FROM A DEAD MAN JAM IT INTO A TREE BABY WAIT 15 YEARS AND EAT A LEAF I feel better now. Time to deal with Duffy... He's not wrong but I'm still mad about being elaborately murdered. Fia has a choice to make. What would you do? Home again. Now we're playing as Nozzo, the next day. Would absolutely play a sequel as just Nozzo. He enters to find the jump system already engaged. Fia got here before him. She went to 2029... the warehouse fire that needs to happen, the one that kills Imani in the current timeline. He has to prevent her from stopping it. Timeline rankings and all that. Nozzo sends himself back. He finds her. She saved Imani without stopping the fire, but she's badly hurt... and Fia says we've done this before. She always dies when Nozzo tries to save her. Fia's ready to give up, nothing works. Nothing except turning off the PFE and letting the rewinds stop. Imani lives. The paintings survive. Fia is still gone. But not in the way I assumed. Fia faked her death that night, and spent the rest of her life with Imani. Frank Nozzo knew it at the time and let her go. In the end, she did the same thing Duffy did, and found something she could hold on to. And yeah, you better believe that I chose to let Duffy go earlier. Couldn't blame him - or Fia - for making that choice. I very much enjoyed it, it was well written. It leaves a lot unresolved in terms of what happens with CZ and the timestream and focuses much more on the human experience of living in such ephemeral circumstances. Also, how does ChronoZen actually keep the money it makes when many of its clients probably never existed?

Black Mesa is a 2020 remake of the original Half Life, which I enjoyed so much that I'm pretty sure I completed it at least three separate times. Forgive me if this one waxes hard on the nostalgia but I expect it'll dredge up some decades-old memories. Also I believe this may be the first FPS I've written a blog post for - I should probably go back through the old posts and add tags for their genre, come to think of it. Just from the title screen I can already tell that this is very different The start game option actually lets you start at the beginning of any campaign chapter that you so choose, I suppose for anyone that just wants to play a specific part of the game, but of course we will begin at the beginning. Our hero, Gordon Freeman, begins on a tram headed to work while a voiceover plays. Other than departing from the train station in the intro screen (I don't remember that) many of the scenes that I recall are here - the train sequence was a clever way to preview what was up ahead in your adventure. We will be seeing black helicopters again, I assure you. And the scene just before you get off hints that workplace safety may not be at the level it needs to be at this facility. You see this as the voiceover talks about what you should do in case of radiation exposure. Arriving at work, they've spruced up the office quite a bit. It's fancy but I'm not sure why the top secret Anomalous Materials Lab needs such a cool waiting room. But they've kept one of the best original features - the wall path lines. This was an excellent and unobtrusive way to find your way around without needing a game map. And, well, I've ruined someone's lunch. I was just wandering around and found the break room, turns out you can turn on the microwave and nuke the food inside into oblivion - the other scientists in the room regretfully remark that it was 'You know who's lunch'. I have no idea if this was in Half Life but I'm delighted either way. And finally we come to the thing that will let Gordon survive the cataclysmic events to come, the H.E.V. hazard suit. Gordon Freeman will never again wear anything else. The game starts up a musical sequence right when you put it on, and the volume is loud enough that you can't hear what the suit's saying for its startup sequence, which is a shame because its should really be the main thing you're listening to and not the music here. I like the Hazard Suit as a plot device - it was a nice way to explain why Gordon wouldn't just die when shot by bullets, for example, and also why you have a HUD displaying your vitals. The voiced dialogue lines from the NPCs in this area are mostly word-for-word what I remember from the original game (except for the ruined microwave lunch), but the voice acting has all been re-done so I'm getting some uncanny valley vibes - I've heard all the words but not the one who spoke them. We meet Eli the scientist, one of the few characters to make it to future games. As he's talking a nearby science cabinet explodes and he rushes over to deal with it. Some facilities would delay the experiment when this happens but at Black Mesa the show must go on! Leaving other people to deal with the various problems that crop up, I get to the test chamber and the scientists there declare me to be a highly trained professional (I do have a PhD from MIT, after all), and they let me in so I can use my expertise to push a button followed by pushing a cart a few feet. I tried refusing to push the cart to see if they'd get mad but waiting too long actually results in your death. Cart goes in, disaster comes out, you can't explain that! Being involved in a resonance cascade either teleports you around a bit or gives you trippy visions. Now that the cascade has wrecked the facility, I start making my way back out to where Eli and the other scientist are. They're relieved to see me and give me an objective - get to the surface and notify people so they can send help. I forgot about this but during this conversation the first monster, a headcrab, fortuitously materializes in one of the nearby enclosed containers, thus rendering it harmless. The not-Eli scientist just goes over and stares at it and starts making the occasional random comment about the crab such as 'What an interesting anterior!' Here's a spot where I think the remake could have taken a moment to have the scientists maybe react a bit more to the interdimensional intrusion of the first extraterrestrial life form the world has ever seen. He also calls it a "cute" little fellow, which is not a description I'd apply to headcrabs. In this remake they've added a lot of minor cosmetic details, like computer terminals and beakers and debris that make Black Mesa feel a bit more lived-in than the original. On my way out I've found this toolbox with a discarded wrench, for example. Maybe I should take it... nah, who'd use a tool as a weapon? I make my way past fires and an errant laser and take an elevator back up - I have to pass my first couple foes unarmed and just avoid them when I reach a surviving security guard. These guards were awesome because they'd help you in a fight, and for some reason they appear to have moved the crowbar because you find it just after the laser hallway in the original, but I'm just past that point and I'm still unarmed, so things are proceeding differently. On the plus side there appear to be these flares lying around which are new, you can grab them and throw them at enemies and set them on fire - and the headcrab zombies are extremely flammable! I got this one, save your ammo. My god, there's a headcrab in the microwave! You know exactly how this went down. The microwave didn't survive either. There are LOT more zombies in this area than I remember, but my friendly guard guy is a rapid-fire zombie killing machine - they were helpful in the original game but not kill 20 zombies helpful. Maybe I should give him the suit. We reach the front desk and he settles in there to try to radio for help, so I'm back on my own. It's just me and flares for a bit but they work extremely well. The headcrabs / zombies from Half Life were an example of its brilliant enemy design. Just the headcrabs by themselves were scary because they'd just be crawling along the floor when they'd leap directly for your face, both allowing you enough time to avoid them by sidestepping and scaring the everloving shit out of you the first time it happens. Then the zombies aren't just a discrete enemy - they're scientists who have had their head munched by a headcrab that are now controlling them, and if you kill that zombie by hitting it in the body it will fall and leave the still-living headcrab alive to crawl around and jump at you, so the best way to deal with them is to shoot them in the head(crab) in the first place which kills both the zombie and the headcrab. So it occurs to me that this change with the flares may be a mistake - even though I've now encountered lots of zombies I haven't had the headcrab part drop off and attack because Officer Friendly is a murderous headshot machine, and burning them with flares also kills the headcrab, so your initial zombie encounter doesn't really showcase one of the cooler things about them. Ah, found it! Oh look, a tool I can use as a weapon. Holy moly, they turned up speed on this crowbar - hitting with this thing is about as fast as mining in Minecraft. Surely it wasn't this fast in the original game? It's actually so fast that you can walk right up to a zombie and beat it to death before it has a chance to attack you, and it one-shots headcrabs so you can just kill them as they jump at you. I think they've made this puppy a bit too powerful. Can I... can I beat this game with just the crowbar now? Surely not, right? I do want to compare how all the new weapons feel to the original, so I suppose I shouldn't, but I'll at least try killing every enemy with it and let you know how it goes. Crowbar vs. Headcrab: Super Effective (Enemy dead with no damage done to me) Crowbar vs. Zombie: Super Effective In Half Life there are frequent unbreakable glass panes, which let you see into offices that you don't need to spend time exploring or give you little vignettes to watch where a headcrab takes over a scientist so you see how that works without being able to intervene. This game makes the inexplicable decision to also have these unbreakable glass panes but they're not entirely unbreakable, they're just mostly unbreakable - you can actually make a sizeable hole in them but at some point I guess it 'hardens up' and you can't continue to expand the hole any bigger! Once the hole gets big enough the structural integrity is improved. My armory has expanded and I have obtained a pistol, which feels similar to the original. It has an alt-fire mode where you can shoot it faster for additional accuracy, I think that was also in the original as well. I've also run across some new foes! Another very clever enemy design, the ceiling barnacle just lies in wait and tries to draw you upward if you are unwary enough to walk into their hanging tongues, which is another pretty frightening experience once it happens, moreso than just doing damage to a player right away. The second in which you are lifted from the ground and hear the sound of yourself being retracted gives you just enough time to look up and blast the thing before it hurts you if you're quick, and it makes for a great 'Oh shit!' moment in the game. You can also feed them objects which they'll pull up and then drop when they realize it's not food. Crowbar vs. Barnacle: Effective (Enemy dies but hit me once) I very much like the new design of the houndeye - these guys run around and emit a sonic shock pulse but other than that they're a pretty standard close-range enemy. The glowing teal stripes give it an otherworldly feel. Crowbar vs. Houndeye: Effective I am pleased to report that I have found explosives in the form of grenades. I'll grant that I may not have the best track record with explosives but nevertheless having them is always a joy. This scientist, who is ostensibly intelligent, unlocked the security room so I could have them. As you would expect from a modern remake this is unquestionably a much better looking game. I don't remember if this is a variant of the puzzle from the original but this this iteration I need to go through a freezer room and to do that I needed to find some hot water valves to raise the temperature enough to open the door. Looks misty and cold in there. On the other side, one of these gangly alien electricity-shooting dudes. In later Half Life games we'll learn that they're tragically slaves of the Combine, but in this one they're just another monster that's trying to murder you. Lightning first, ask questions later. Crowbar vs. Gangly Alien Electricity-shooting dude: Super Effective One thing they didn't do when modernizing the game was change it to the modern era - they leave it set in the original 'modern' of when the Half Life was released, so the computer monitors here are still bulky CRTs, and other artifacts of the time can be found lying around. Such as this VHS cassette and player. Yes the crowbar is getting a bit messy. Also a rotary phone! What's going on with the keyboard? Half Life featured an unusual movement you had to perform on occasion called the 'jump-crouch', which you had to perform in order to reach any sort of constrained space that was not on the floor, such as this one. Gordon Freeman does not merely 'climb in' to such obstacles. This was a maneuver that entailed the unusual combination of first jumping with spacebar followed quickly by ctrl to crouch (And I don't think just holding ctrl and hitting space to crouch-jump would work), and among Half Life's many excellent innovations, it was completely unnecessary - thankfully it was not often required in a frantic situation. I'm happy to report that Black Mesa has done away with that "feature" and now simply jumping at the bloody air duct above will get you into it. One of the other things that was great about Half Life is that the enemies would battle each other, even some aliens seems to hate other aliens, such as this Headcrab vs. Tentacle Dog battle that you walk in on. The headcrabs don't stand much of a chance against things with no head. How exactly did they evolve anyway? Of course, once the battle is over, the survivors come after you. Did that thing always spit a whole shotgun blast worth of acid? Yikes! There's a nice variety to the game - you're not constantly in combat, it's a mix of puzzle solving, battles and the occasional parkour section. I think I cut my teeth on FPS parkour in this room, I was much worse at it then than now. The game is also pretty forgiving, I fell near the end here and it only set me back a few crates. Though the original game had a quicksave / quick load feature (as does this one, same hotkeys) so you could always just save between jumps if you needed to. Because of this Half Life was not a difficult game, you can save / reload at any point so it's easy to retry anything that gives you trouble. So there I was, wandering forward, thinking things were a bit too easy, when I saw a houndeye spawn in the room ahead of me. I rushed in, hoping to crowbar it to death before it could hit me (and I did!), but then additional houndeyes popped in, there were explosive barrels, pandemonium ensued. It was violent, chaotic, over in seconds, and hurt like hell. I should have died and am only alive because I had something like 80 suit armor. The player damage system is a relic of an older era of FPS games when you maintained your health / armor by obtaining pickups. These come in the form of health kits and suit batteries that you can find lying around as well as medical / suit charger stations that are attached to the walls, so taking a lot of damage in one encounter can hurt your chances in the next because it can take awhile to find enough pickups to charge your armor back to full. I found another guard helper, he asked me for assistance with his friend that just had a headcrab attack him. I believe if you don't successfully save him here you can't get into this area (he unlocks the door after being saved) and obtain one of my favorite weapons in the game. Glad I could help. After that he turns into another enemy murder machine buddy so I find it hard to believe that one zombie would have taken him down. This sign at the beginning was not exaggerating. In any case: Hello beautiful, I have missed you. The shotgun in Half Life is damn good. I suspect it was this shotgun in particular that kindled my love for the weapon (in games). For many enemies it's a one-shot kill out to medium ranges, and if that doesn't do the trick its alt-fire shoots two shells at once for twice the damage and it fires relatively quickly. The shotgun just gets the job done and makes the job fun. I think they have added some dialogue in certain parts, the guard now following me around is making comments about the route we're taking, and near this water/electricity-filled room he mentions that he'll wait outside while I check out the vent in the back, thus providing a hint about how to proceed forward. This is a room that players are understandably reluctant to enter, but you must. One clever things the original developers did was to often show you a foe before you have to face it yourself. I'd forgotten about the Auto Turrets which are very quick on the draw, you first encounter one along with a poor scientist being chased by some headcrabs into its field of fire. Turrets don't discriminate between the sinners and the saints. Crowbar vs. Automatic Machinegun Turret: More effective than you might assume. There's a switch nearby to turn it off but you can just pummel it to death in exchange for a few bullet holes. I was briefly up to having two guards following me around, and the pair of them cleared out an entire office cubicle area of zombies followed by gangly electroids. They were doing so well I figured I didn't really need to help them out with a measly ceiling barnacle. I was wrong and one of the boys in blue became dinner while his friend turned his back on the incompetent fool that walked into a tongue. The other guard foolishly walked into a turret's line of fire shortly thereafter. Easy come, easy go - this is about how well the guard AI worked in the original, to be fair. Finding a large walk-in freezer, I save a scientist who assumed it'd be safe to hide here, and was sadly wrong. She laments that there's nowhere safe from these horrors. I find myself wishing I could do more for these survivors, I guess in Half Life's era just having neutral / friendly NPCs running around was innovative, but I'd love to be able to bring them to nearby safe rooms or take other measures to help ensure their survival rather than just smacking whatever nasty happens to be nearby and then walking onward, leaving them to fend for themselves. You already see several instances of nasties killing poor scientists on the way here so surely you're leaving many of these people to die by moving on. Crowbar vs. Tentacle Dog: Super effective! I guess we need a big old freezer for the food, but I'm a little disconcerted that there just seems to be a huge slab of meat hung up in here. It just seems out of place in the top-secret Black Mesa research facility. We're gonna need a butcher with a security clearance. Actually, it occurs to me that it doesn't seem like this freezer actually connects to, say, a kitchen or cafeteria - the entrance to it just leads to an office hallway. So if you work in one of those offices, every so often you're gonna see the cook and a team of helpers lugging a whole ass frozen cow past your office to wherever the kitchen is in the morning to defrost it for lunch. Oh, hey, I did find the cafeteria. It is actually fairly close so there's only two or three offices you need to pass by with the whole cow. Bet there isn't much competition for those offices. Cafeteria menu looks decent, reasonable prices here. Could use a salad bar. I think I'll pass on the questionable drinks. In an odd similarity to the Crimson Diamond, most of the time you're wandering around in the game to no music, just the sound of your footsteps and ambient noise. It gives the experience an eerie quality since there's no music to occupy the soundspace - until there is, and then you know that since there's music then something's about to go down. I sort of take for granted that in most games there's an ever-present music track, and I definitely feel its absence if it isn't there. I found a free-standing auto turret that you can disable by crowbar, explosives, or by gently pushing them over onto their side, and I think you could do this in Half Life but here I'm definitely able to pick them up and carry them around while they're still live and they'll shoot enemies for you, giving you plausible deniability. I didn't shoot that alien. Speaking of plausible deniability, several of the scientists / guards have mentioned that they heard the military was on their way to save us. They're half right. Ah, the military. It's 20 years later and I still don't know why they want to kill everyone in Black Mesa . But maybe that's all right, Gordon Freeman isn't really in a position to know that, is he? Someone somewhere made a decision that all this had to be covered up with extreme prejudice, and that apparently entails the violent deaths of absolutely everyone in the facility. There's no final confrontation with the man who gave the order who feels the need to insist tell you it was all necessary. There are no tape recorders left lying around with various bits and pieces of people taking the time to record a discussion about the weird goop in the janitor's closet. No ghosts re-enacting their deaths with an unlikely amount of exposition about what's going on around them. I'm just a guy in a hazmat suit and all I know is that the military came in here and shot one of us, I have no idea why, I am not going to find out why while I am trapped in here , and isn't that really the more likely scenario? Speaking of the military guys, I remember that these foes in particular were hailed as a leap forward in enemy AI at the time, so in the next fight with three of them I took a moment to not kill them and watch them do their thing. They don't seem to particularly react to being shot at but they do intentionally pop in and out of cover while engaging you, and they'll talk to each other and announce to their squad (and you, helpfully) when they're throwing grenades - that definitely felt like a step up in an era when most FPS foes simply moved toward you or stood wherever they happened to be in the open and shot at you. They are by no means all that smart but it makes for a fun fight. Crowbar vs. 3 Soldiers armed with submachineguns: Somewhat effective, they shot me up a bit. The soldiers all carry a submachinegun which is a perfectly serviceable workhorse weapon that shares its ammo with the pistol, but my personal joy is it's alt-fire which is the underbarrel grenade launcher. Sadly I haven't found any ammo for that yet. I'm having a blast fighting the soldiers, they really are fun. One more elevator upward and Gordon Freeman finally reaches the surface for the first time... only to be driven right back underground as he emerges into some military portion of the facility. It doesn't pay to stay here too long, I ran for it. Back in the complex, you run into another scientist who gives you the new plan: He believes that the team in the Lambda complex is our only hope against the catastrophe. Gordon's new mission is to make it there and find what's left of them. If you missed the shotgun earlier there's another on the computer terminal here. Also, I didn't comment on the grenade earlier since I didn't use them when I first got them, but I've tried them now and they're pretty bad. They fly in an oddly slow, unintuitive arc, and the explosion is small with a significant delay meaning you need to be pretty precise with them and they're best against non-moving targets like turrets. This is probably how the grenades originally were, I don't recall them ever being a particularly impressive option. I've found a tunnel with a rail cart, and this is the first part of the game that I don't recall. Have I forgotten this entirely or has this been added in the remake? It's relatively short so it may well have just slipped my mind. I squished a few monsters which has always been mandatory if you get in a moving vehicle in an FPS. That brings us to this room. Who do I report radiation exposures to again? I really should have paid more attention to the train announcer. Just beyond lies something I will never, ever forget. The Claws. More frightening than their appearance is the incessant sound of them smashing the walls. Crowbar vs. Claws: No. I don't know if these are the appendages of some huge unseen monster or if they're three blind snake buddies having fun, but in my first playthrough I think I died here more than anywhere else because I had no idea what to do. I caught on quickly enough that I couldn't kill them and that they were blind so making sound was what was causing them to attack me and I had to sneak around them (which is terrifying when it's the first time you're doing something like that in a game, Half Life really scared a younger me). What I didn't realize was that you had to create sound somewhere you weren't in order to distract them so you could move them away from the doors you have to get through - and here's where those grenades suddenly become incredibly useful. The claws are fortuitously situated in a jet propulsion test chamber, so you need to circumvent them to get into other areas of the facility to turn on power and giant cooling fan so that you can switch on the engine and cook the bastards. Many of the rooms here are open and huge and give quite a sense of scale to the facility. After riding the air current up and out of the fan chamber, my luck turns for the worse when the elevator I was riding broke and dumped me in the radioactive goop, forcing me to climb out covered in the green stuff. I am really gonna have to figure out who the radiation guy is. Along the way we find a new toy - remote detonation packs. Between the short throwing distance and full control over the timing of the detonation, they'll generally blow up the thing you want blown up. Unfortunately the room will require cleaning. Now that we've turned on all the things, all it takes to be rid of the Claws is hitting the 'on' button. It smells all the sweeter because you earned it. Back on track to get to the Lamba complex, we traverse more pipes and sludge pools. There's even a glowing green radioactive waterfall... you know, we're making a LOT of toxic waste here at Black Mesa, a really excessive amount. I suppose a couple extra barrels of toxic waste isn't really making the problem worse. This can't be good for the planet, and that's before we caused an interdimensional incident. Speaking of which, we've run into the nastiest thing that's come over to our side so far - I think they're called Gargants. They're incredibly tough and require a lot of explosives to kill, and the military squad that's fighting it doesn't stand a chance. I'll grant that the original game did not have him make an entrance that looked this good. Crowbar vs. Gargant: No. I might have the firepower to kill it myself but since I don't have to I'm running by while he slaughters the soldiers. I picked up a revolver, it's the closest thing in the game so far to a long-range sniper weapon because it's alt-fire is to.... aim down the sights, which you can't do with any other weapon. It fires slow and hits real hard. To proceed forward I need to turn the power on here, again. Which company makes a five-foot wide power meter? This isn't even a large room! And I'm glad I didn't try to kill the Gargant earlier because you can kill it with a machine once the machine works. Good thing he chased me into the static discharge room. I hope on another railway cart after this and I meet a guard who tells me that the team in the Lambda complex needs me to launch a rocket so they can use the satellite in it to fix all this. Sure, why not? Tell them I'm on it! The railway cart needs some help to get through the flooded and blocked tunnels ahead, so we forge onward through them alternately riding the cart and hopping off to clear the way. I've got a shotgun-related present for whatever is lurking up ahead. This game (and the original) certainly are fond of electrified water, I think this is the third or fourth time I've needed to deal with it. It is beautiful and deadly, and this time you need to go swimming. Crowbar vs. Tentacle Dog revisited: I don't know how I killed the Tentacle Dog back in the freezer without taking damage, because I tried it again and it went terribly - the damn thing has a whirlwind melee attack that throws you far away from it and at close range you can eat multiple hits from its acid attack, there's a good chance you'll die trying it. Maybe freezer dog was sluggish from the cold. Correct me if I'm wrong but I think that if you died in Half Life by default you would start at the beginning of whatever section you loaded into. Black Mesa goes one better and puts in invisible checkpoints where you will respawn if you die, and because of this I'm not quicksaving / quickloading nearly as much as in the original. For example.... I climbed up a long latter to find the above laser traps which activate turrets if triggered. Edging carefully forward to get a better view of what I was up against I managed to walk into the first laser, causing me to panic as the turrets started up so I ran out to knock one over and thus let two others shoot me up, so I increased panicking and ran back to the ladder but didn't grab it and fell to my death. Thankfully I respawned near the bottom of the ladder to simply try again and will try not to embarrass myself this time. I have located the rocket! Putting your next task on the safety sign is pretty clever. Missile is prepped and ready to go, we ride onward. I think the soldiers have figured out my identity and I think I'm getting on their nerves. That's just mean. But not for long. I am saddened to report that the rail cart, our faithful companion, has met a violent, fiery end at the hands of a squad of soldiers armed with a rocket launcher. I wrought a terrible, righteous vengeance upon them for this injustice! Making my way outside, I catch two soldiers in conversation.... about me, and how terrible I am for having killed so many Marines. I didn't want to kill you guys! You shot first! And you're still killing the scientists here! This is the rocket launch pad, so I fight my way through the marines and get into the control chamber. Some of them are still on the launch pad when this beauty takes to the skies. Lamba, we have liftoff! Back underground, some of these old basements are flooded... and some aquatic wildlife has found it's way in. These alien shark things utterly terrified me the first time through, if there was one in a body of water, getting in the water with it was the absolute last resort for me. I'd spend half an hour looking for a way around it and, failing that, would try to briefly hop in to lure them up near the surface and then hop back out and try to kill them from dry land. The stuff of nightmares. Crowbar vs. Terrifying Alien Shark: I really expected this to go badly and it sure did in Half Life, but Black Mesa's super crowbar can cause them to rapidly go through their 'This hurts!' animation and you can actually beat one to death without taking damage if you're lucky and don't get chomped. Shortly after encountering them I find the crossbow, which is an actual silenced sniper-type weapon that also handily works underwater, unlike the guns. Its alt-fire employs a scope so you can much more easily hit distant targets. The military has had enough of sending regular soldiers after Freeman so they've called in the specialists - assassins! These required more screenshot attempts than any other foe. These lithe red-eyed figures are very fast, they jump around and hide and love to pop out behind you and tap you with a pair of silenced pistols. Crowbar vs. Assassin: Hit and miss, sometimes you can run up and catch one and they die fast, other times they'll get away jump up to a platform somewhere and continue shooting while you continue chasing them. I was still collecting data on that by chasing one of them into a room when someone hit me on the back of the head and Gordon Freeman is out cold. I've been captured by the military! The two marines start dragging me to an interrogation, but on the way they decide that they'd rather just kill me and be done with it (Oh sure, you'll follow orders to massacre a bunch of scientists but when it comes to handling a prisoner you'll just do whatever feels natural? Great discipline guys.) They're going to pay for that lack of discipline because their method of execution is to throw Freeman into the garbage chute, and we wake up at the bottom of the trash compactor. Thanks HEV suit, that was a long fall. Borrowing the design from Star Wars the walls start closing in, and we have to frantically climb up a mountain of crates to escape in time. I did not require assistance from C3PO. The soldiers were at least smart enough to take my arsenal so I'm weaponless.... for about a minute. Don't leave crowbars anywhere near this guy. Fortunately I don't need heavy weaponry for this next part, which is light on enemies and big on swimming in raw sewage. Gordon Freeman, MIT PhD, regrets his life choices. You wouldn't believe the wonderful variety of things they do to raw sewage here, sending it through rotary grinders, up and down conveyer belts, and inexplicably shooting flamethrowers at the surface of the watery sludge as it goes by. You'd think that a man with a crowbar and a PhD might be inclined to try to get through the waste treatment plant by forcibly opening doors via the crowbar, but crowbars are for hitting alien life forms and U.S. Military personnel, not to be used to jimmy open locked doors, and so we must swim through this shit whenever possible. Half-Life's level design is excellent. There's no in-game map and despite that I very rarely get lost or can't find the way forward - I felt like I was completely lost wandering around the waste treatment facility and at one point I did retrace my steps, but despite the size and how complex it felt I somehow wandered forward successfully. This is a good sign. A stinking, sewage-smeared Freeman sloughs his way out of waste treatment and into a biolab complex. What we find here turns the narrative on it's head - I'd been assuming that my little cart-related action spawned the whole interdimensional invasion, but this part of the complex has live aliens - along with specimen containment for them and notes about them. Whoever these guys are they'd already made contact with the aliens and have been studying them, and the Anomalous Materials incident just made whatever connection existed between the worlds go haywire. I don't know what that is but there are controls in here to euthanize it, just in case. This also has me re-evaluating the military attack - I'd been thinking that it would be pretty hasty for some government official to hear about an accident at Black Mesa and immediately respond to it by killing everyone, but if there were already known aliens here and someone decided ahead of time that if there were ever a major containment breach then the policy should be to burn it all to the ground? That's a lot more plausible, though it doesn't make me any less mad at the military here. The military here have their hands full - they're fighting me again plus the aliens wandering around. There are also working containment measures in place which you can activate that will kill everything in the next room. That device on the ceiling is about to blow away a couple alien soldiers and the men they're fighting. Found a new weapon, and it's live... I mean, actually live... I forgot up until this moment that Half Life features some extraterrestrial armament. I tried it the Big Red Bug out on a half-zombie which it took quite awhile to kill, and then it bit ME. Crowbar vs. Treacherous Big Red Bug: They're annoyingly hard to hit. You can throw out a bunch at once, they seem like a useful thing to throw out in larger fights and then get away from. The Biolab also has a room with a habitat set up of the alien world, I think it's called Xen. Please consider donating to your local Habitat for Headcrabs This is an interesting room because you have the option to flood the room with poison gas and kill the headcrabs wandering around in there, but if you do that the room seals off and you can't actually go into it and get some juice from the HEV charger inside. It's better for you and the flora to actually go in and kill the crabs yourself and preserve the rest of it, which feels a bit like a metaphor. In one of my favorite scenes in the game, you walk along a corridor when suddenly an orange beam blasts through the wall in front of you. You hear a conversation between the gleeful guard that fired it and the scientist cautioning against using it because if it's unpredictability and the potential for an 'overcharge', and then the room they're in explodes and you walk in to find the Linearity Cannon along with a pair of smoking boots. This is a wonderful way to warn you not to charge it too long. To get out of the biolab you have to find someone with retinal access (and I guess the retinal scanners have to have their subject alive, there's plenty of dead scientists with intact heads around here). I eventually find a group of three survivors and they're all too happy to be rescued, I'd like to get all three out but since they all have access I really just need one. There used to be four but 'Peters' tried to get past the surgery machine. They are currently stuck behind a surgery machine gone haywire, so the first part of our escape involves turning that off. Even the non-haywire version looks horrifically unsafe. Once the scientists let you out, you get outside which is such a wonderful contrast with the dark interiors of the facility. Unfortunately the military are out here in force, and you have to fight / run past a lot of them. Used in sufficient numbers those red bugs are actually pretty great, I just unleashed a whole swarm of them and they bit a whole squad to death, and I only had to run for my life from my own weapon for a few seconds! Guess this answers where the complex gets its power from. Uh-oh. This looks like a job for the Linearity Cannon. Crowbar vs. Helicopter: Come down here and fight me you coward! I suppose there must be a debate when you re-make a game as to what, if anything, you're going to change. Some change is inevitable - for one thing, the graphics in this game are better, and so far there's been minor things that have been different such as the super crowbar and the location where you find it, but by and large I think every other weapon is a pretty faithful recreation (which is largely to the good as most of these weapons were well designed and fun to use), and I think most of the levels are the same layout as well. Overall that's a good thing, because the original Half Life is an excellent game. Within excellent games there are still low points, missteps, and things you hope that a remake might do better... such as the minefield, which could have.. no, should have been removed. Do not attempt this, under any circumstances, ever. Gordon Freeman must clear a way though these buried explosives BY THROWING GRENADES AND SHOOTING THEM. It's silly as hell, not particularly fun, not remotely what you'd do to clear a minefield, and while you're trying to carefully traipse your way through it a seemingly endless supply of headcrabs burrow out of the soil to "enhance" the experience. Why IS there a minefield here anyway? It's just out here in the desert in front of a maintenance tunnel entrance, of which there are dozens, and placing a minefield around it makes it pretty damn useless as a maintenance tunnel entrance! If there are any changes to this part it's that the mines don't hurt you much, if I recall in the original accidentally setting one off hurt a lot, and it's a miserable section to get through. This time though I'm not sparing on the explosives and even though I hit a couple they don't hurt as much, so onward we go. Traversing a sheer cliff face I find a laser-guided rocket launcher, and the game is kind enough to immediately send another helicopter after you so you can try it out. 10 / 10 would recommend It's even good enough to take out a tank, which I encountered shortly afterwards. Thanks for not coming after me before I could kill you. And then the explosions stop, because there's too much of them. Normally you can just shoot these blue laser-tripped claymores and move on, but this building is haphazardly packed to the brim with things that go boom, and if one goes boom they all do and you go up with it. This leads to a tense 'don't fuck up' section, much better than the minefield. Time to tread lightly. It gets pretty elaborate. What madman set all these up? Some disgruntled soldier who just wanted to see the ammo warehouse explode? This is a few more claymores than you strictly need. Your reward for navigating that mess is the alien Bee gun! Just put it on your arm Gordon it'll be fine The bee gun may have been my favorite weapon in Half Life, both because it has homing ammunition and because it generates additional ammo. I think this version may be changed from the original because the bees certainly fly in less-wonky ways and I suspect the ammo regenerates faster, but the bee homing doesn't seem as aggressive so it may be a worse weapon now. Still good for shooting around corners. I think there are some changes to this area, I suspect I've fought more tanks by now than there were in the original game. Actually I'm not sure there were any tanks in the original, I do recall an APC or two. The military is dropping in reinforcements with VTOL aircraft and the Xen-ites (Xenons? Xenonauts?) are dimension-hopping in force, it's an all-out war on the ground here. Alien soldiers with bee-guns of their own have appeared. It may LOOK like I'm fighting with the humans against alien beasts but those people will turn on me in a moment. Crowbar vs. Alien Bee Gun Soldier: It hurt but he dropped first. Also I've now had the game crash on me a couple times in this area. Newer game != more stable game. The Xen / Human battles are fun to watch and there's a lot of them, I'm starting to feel like a war correspondent. A pack of gangly electro aliens attack a VTOL while it refuels. An M1 offers support to a squad advancing up the street. At the end of this street, we've reached our destination - the Lambda complex. Or at least the parking garage for it. Xen's influence is growing (literally) here. Pushing deeper inside, it looks like the dimensional incursion hasn't spread everywhere - the central reactor area still appears pristine and it looks like the military hasn't done too much damage here either. I'm just happy to be here, folks. It's not all smooth sailing within the complex, of course. There's a whole warehouse chock full of assassins waiting for me. It's taken me so long to get here I suspect they're glad to see me until things don't go their way. I meet a scientist that tells me I should get to the teleportation chamber. Great idea, really could have used teleportation before now. One of the scientists here is a weapons researcher, and he hands over his project - a Muon (or Gluon, I didn't catch it) gun. He says he can't bring himself to use it on a living thing, but the living things that teleport in have no problem using their weaponry on him. His own invention avenged him. This thing is extremely powerful and the only reason not to use it on everything all the time is the ammo consumption. I'll need to restart the nuclear reactor here, get the coolant pumps and such going, just the sort of thing you want just one person doing while fighting aliens, it's fine. The Gluon gun produces a lovely disintegration effect. Yes, I do have to swim into the tunnel marked 'No Access, Radiation Hazard'. No, a regular door was not an option. No, I haven't found the radiation report guy. Yes, I got the reactor turned on. NO, I don't think it's supposed to look like that! YES, IF I SURVIVE THIS I WILL GET CANCER Ok, I'm slightly singed but it'll buff out. I've reached the teleportation chamber, which thanks to a thick door and some autoturrets has held out against all odds. And boy are they glad to see me. Apparently there's a powerful entity in the world beyond that they believe is controlling all this, and our only hope is to send someone through to go kill it. They've been watching my progress and getting things ready for me, obviously since they couldn't possibly invade an alien world without a state-of-the art hazardous materials suit.... WHICH THEY ALREADY HAVE. They already have an HEV suit here just ready to go! In fact, they have absolutely everything they need to have attempted this long before I got there! A fully stocked armory, a guard better trained in the use of weapons than MIT PhD over here, and a long-jump module for the HEV suit! I didn't even have one of those! What the hell were you guys waiting for? Were you holding out for a goddamn crowbar? If so, you're in luck, because I think it's the only thing I'm bringing to this party! Fine. I'm here, I came all this way, why let someone else steal the glory. Hey, anyone else want to put on that suit and help save humanity? No takers? Nobody else wanted to jump in the big science machine. Floating alien brain guys attack the teleportation device as it powers up, to no avail. Crowbar, I think we're not in New Mexico anymore. Xen is where the remake really shines. The original Xen in Half Life is pretty damn ugly and the section is relatively brief. This Xen is absolutely gorgeous. I think they may have thrown away the original's entire Xen level (which is fine, it was just ok) and re-done it. It's definitely longer. Xen has old threats - there are houndeyes running around and I'm sure we'll see more aliens soon - and new ones, such as this ceiling electrode which zaps you if you get close. Crowbar vs. Electrode: Ow ow ow do not recommend. I'm not the first person they sent here in an HEV suit - there's actually several dead HEV users here. This explains why nobody back in Lambda wanted to take that last suit and try their luck - those brave enough to do it already did it. I even found an HEV zombie, nice touch. The Lambda team set up a forward base where they were studying Xen and it's creatures, it's a pretty extensive mini-building.  Looks like they found a way to use the yellow crystals that grow here as a power source. I'm really enjoying Xen, and one thing I've been pondering along the way is whether I'd recommend people play this or the original Half Life or this if they've played neither. The two games felt nearly identical up until the open battles before the Lambda complex, but it's Xen that has solidified my thoughts on the matter - unless you are committed to experiencing Half Life in it's original form (and go for it if you are, it's still a great game), I think Black Mesa is the way to go, because this is the version of Xen that I want people to experience. This amazing cave is not in Half Life. I'm using the bee-gun wherever possible as there's very little spare ammo here. Crowbar vs. Angry Tentacle: Death I suspect the devs agree with me that the explosive-tripwire-warehouse was a good section, because whoever set that up made their way over to Xen and just kept the party rolling. Maybe the G-man is doing it, I haven't seen him in awhile and who knows what he does for fun. I've run into a bigger, badder version of the Houndeye. This one's attack doesn't actually damage you, it unleashes a pressure wave that sends you flying - since Xen which is a series of floating islands that'll kill you if you get sent off the edge but if you are positioned up against a wall you'll be fine. Crowbar vs. Alpha Houndeye: Fine if you don't get thrown into the void. Overall they've turned down the encounters a bit, making for a more relaxed experience as we come to the end of our adventure. There actually is a fair bit of ammo of all types on the HEV suits and supply crates and I figured out that these blue pools / electric rocks will refill your health and armor. These appear to last forever so health / armor is less of a desperate situation than on Earth. And then up ahead it looks like we've just about reached our objective - only one imposing island remains between me and the tower that I assume is my goal. Freeman is really kicking himself for not bringing a camera. That chonky island in the foreground conceals another surprise - alien technology. I got a whole alien teleportation device repaired and all fired up in just minutes - just the sort of thing you hope for when you're getting that diploma from MIT. We've come a long way from pushing a cart holding a rock. Through the portal I found myself gazing at the glorious sunrise over Xen. Or sunset. Or maybe the sun just remains in that spot, this place is weird. Every so often in Xen, the Lambda team has been teleporting a canister full of ammo to me - you can hear it come in because it makes a familiar electric crackle sound, the same one that enemies use when they're teleporting in near your position. Only this time, it's very loud, and the lightning is very close, and I suffer instantaneous death when the resupply container materializes right where I happen to be standing. Nice resupply Lambda team, way to telefrag the last hope humanity has. Mankind is fortunate that I quick saved. Oh no. Oh hell no. I genuinely think I repressed this memory You know that the Gonad Beast must have been quite the topic at the Black Mesa development meetings. I suspect that they grabbed the creature animator who was 'always a little off', locked them in a closet, and told them to do their thing. Crowbar vs. Scrotus: I can never un-see this so you must also suffer Did I say that Xen was relaxing? Not after the Testicular Terror showed up! Alternately fighting and running away from this guy involves a really long (sorry) sequence of events. Finishing him off leaves a mess behind. An exhausted and none-too-clean Gordon Freeman stumbles onward to a much more ominous looking part of Xen. Please tell me that's not an alien waste treatment facility God damnit. Yes, I did have to wade through it. Yes, I regret my life choices. Something unexpected is going on here - there are alien guards forcing the gangly electro-guys to work. Unlike Half Life, in this game we now actually get to see that they're enslaved. The slaves actually don't hate me but the food here sucks. I'm starting to feel some empathy for the poor guys when a band of those floating brain aliens attack, and one of their powers is to directly control these guys and force them to help attack me. Sadly killed some of the slaves in self defense, which didn't make me feel great when I found this guy crying afterwards. Sorry man... er, electro-guy Crowbar vs. Floating Brain Alien: They're every bit as cowardly as helicopters. I skipped out on the surviving slaves - I need to save humanity, after all - and started heading up the river of sludge when I stumbled into a Gargant. I started running from it, and immediately ran into a second one... and then another... and another. I think a found a nest of the damn things, there were more that twice as many here than in the entire original game. This is the part where you run. Remember way back when I saw a couple floating islands and thought I was near the end? I was very wrong. They added a LOT of Xen - all this would easily qualify as it's own DLC or possibly even a sequel in its own right. The Lambda guys appear to have a good fix on my position because they teleport in a supply capsule right ahead of me every so often now, and it's become my only source of ammunition - I stopped finding the HEV suits long ago, we're now venturing where no human has ever tread. I ended up sabotaging and wrecking this sludge pipe station. Took a casual swim in the soldier-growth vats. Disintegrated a horde of the floating brain-aliens that attacked me at this power plant. Finally managed to snap a decent picture of aforementioned brain aliens. And currently I'm on an extended self-guided tour of the Mysterious Green Box Shipping Facility The slaves have all ignored me unless they get directly controlled by floating brain guys, and when that happens they revert to pacifism if I kill the alien mind controller, so happily I haven't killed any others since the first unfortunate incident. I am utterly and completely lost at this point, I haven't seen the sky in a long time and if this were an open world game I doubt I'd ever find where I'm supposed to go. Thankfully there is only one way forward from each part, so there's only one right track to follow... but I still feel as through I'm hopelessly lost on an alien planet. It's been awhile since Lambda sent a capsule my way. I hope they're still all right. It'd be nice if they ever sent a note along with the ammo. This is actually an elevator I've wrecked so much machinery at this point that I'm going to cause an alien insurance industry crisis. In Half Life 2 the gangly electro guys look at Freeman with a sense of reverence, and that didn't make a whole lot of sense from the original Half Life where all you did was kill them, but by now there's over a hundred alien slaves that have seen me disintegrate their overseers. Raise your gangly electric fists to the sky my brothers, so we may all be free. My wandering ends when I find a teleporter to the Eye of Sauron. Getting here required one hell of a detour. The eye is itself another teleporter, and that brings me to the final confrontation. Face to face with a singularly powerful being that's already enslaved this world and is trying to enslave ours. A Big Ugly Baby This is a very flashy fight while not being too difficult - Lambda sends more capsules and for the first part there are armor crystals / health regen pools to use. While I'd never, ever hit a baby with a crowbar, I did use it to smash some of the power crystals that you have to destroy during the fight. Ok I confess I did really want to crowbar the baby The battle ends with the BUB not quite dead, I got teleported away and I'm left looking at the tower again wondering if the monster will survive after all - a question which receives a rapid, unequivocal answer. Radiation guy is going to be very unhappy with me And.. that was pretty much my workday. I did my job pushing a cart, all hell broke loose, and I spent the entire rest of my day trying to sort out the mess. I skipped lunch, I'm pretty sure the radiation guy I need to talk to is dead, and I hereby submit my resignation from Black Mesa Corp. It's not all bad though. They say you close one door and another opens. I met a nice man on the train and he offered me a job!

There doesn't seem to be much of a story involved so I have no compunctions about playing Mortal Glory 2 without having tried the original Mortal Glory - from screenshots they could easily be mistaken for each other so I get the sense that MG2 is more or less the same game but (I assume) has more content and improvements. I originally picked this up for the Switch on a whim but I found that I was enjoying it enough to be frustrated that I was trying to play it on a controller when it felt like a mouse was the intended interface, so I have re-bought it on PC and will be playing it for the blog. In this game you control a leader who can buy some additional companions and equipment to try to survive a series of tactical battles against similar groups to ultimately make it to the end of a run. If you either lose a boss battle or lose two regular battles then you have lost the run and must start over with a new leader. Our adventure begins with a Minotaur named 'Mutha' who has dreams of beating everyone else to a pulp, forming the Bruisers of Obliteration 'team'. Which is currently a 'team' of one. You can re-roll stats at the start here so I did that until Mutha was irresponsibly strong and unspeakably stupid. This is one bad Mutha The battle interface is basic and serviceable - you fight arena battles against opposing characters who so far as I can tell are build from the same character / skill / equipment options that you have access to. The first battle is 1v1 and, being the first battle, it's easy. I immediately have a problem with Mutha and no, it's not that she can't count, it's that she only has 1 agility which leads her to have just one action point per turn and can't move far at all. In this first battle that turns out not to be a problem as the enemy used a tentacle-skill to pull me in close to them, doing damage. Right next to Mutha the Minotaur is the wrong place to be, and the fight ended shortly thereafter. Between battles you get to advance up this scenario map with battles, events, and shops. At the first shop I have a decent amount of gold and the characters that I can buy there (you purchase your additional party members beyond your leader) are on a 35% discount. That sounds like a good deal to me so I sell everything I've got - including some of Mutha's early equipment - to be able to afford two of them and have a 3-man party right off the bat. Say hello to Mutha, Skruuk and Thombi. Actually a 1-Minotaur, 1-Tengu, 1-Gnome party. Fortunately Mutha's starting equipment included 'Bouncy shoes' which gives her the ability to leap three spaces (on a cooldown) without ending her turn, so once the enemy wanders close enough she can jump / minotaur charge / beat someone up despite her otherwise glacial movement. Without those mobility skills she'd be dead meat to any wizard / archer that stands off and hits her with ranged attacks, but with them she's real solid in a fight. That's a very good thing because my discount companions... not so much. Skruuk doesn't do much damage and has a heal that doesn't heal much, and Thombi doesn't hit much harder but rarely survives a battle, at 12 HP he's extremely fragile. Good thing for him you automatically heal / revive after a battle - I can just imagine Mutha: 'Damnit, Skrunk, pick up the Gnome. Again.' Give the man your blood Skruuk, we need the money. There are two things that drew me into this game, and one of them is the combat system. The arenas themselves are littered with obstacles and sometimes barrels filled with various substances, a lot of skills can create terrain effects such as acid clouds or fire, and there's a knockback mechanic where you can push characters around. Mutha singlehandedly wrecked the enemy here by leaping in front of a pair of them and pummeling the poor Elf in front, knocking them repeatedly into the Tengu behind them. This left the Elf dead and the Tengu nearly so. Using an enemy as your weapon is one of the great joys in life. For that battle the already-powerful Mutha gets an amazing weapon. Now she's really tear things up. Prepare to be clubbed to Death Now, unfortunately for the Discount Duo I find that the game rewards XP based on how much each party member contributes to the battle. That's not ideal when Mutha is dishing out serious pain while Skruuk is plinking away and Thombi is dead, again. Mutha hits level 4 while Thombi views level 2 as an aspiration. As we advance the battles are going to get harder and I don't think Mutha can do this alone, I need the others to start contributing more but that's made more difficult when they can't level up! Or maybe we'll just ditch them at some point - looks like you can hire higher-level characters at the shop. If you're rolling in gold, that is. Osaki is not within reach of my wallet... but that devil girl on the other hand... Izenia, welcome to the party! She brings some ranged magic attacks to the fight and rounds out the group. A Minotaur, a Tengu, a Gnome and a Fiendling walk into a bar... As soon as Izenia joins up we have to face the first boss, a floating monstrosity that bleeds clouds of acid, Gorloth. You know what'd be great against something with big eyes and no hands? Pocket-sand. I made a minor mistake by killing the boss' companion which let it heal almost to full by eating their friend's corpse (dude!), but Mutha just beat it down a second time and we're on to the second map. Some of the shops don't sell additional characters, they sell potions that can increase your stats as well as the usual assortment of equipment and skill books. With enough gold you could easily rule the world. The second thing that drew me into this game was the customization of your party. You can change party members, as well as their skill set and equipment - and the equipment are not just a set of stats. The gladius in the above shop is an excellent find - it grants 36 HP and a Crippling Throw skill that hobbles the enemy, and thus gives Thombi both much-needed durability and a better function in battle - he can use the skill to target an enemy and slow them down enough to try to keep them out of the fight while Mutha is wrecking shop. Characters don't have pre-set classes and I don't think there's any equipment or skill restrictions on anything, so what you make of your characters is entirely up to you and the skill books / equipment you obtain. If you're party is strong enough you can reap additional rewards by activating optional challenges for a battle. These challenges are varied and their level of added difficulty has a wide range - I've seen 'Enemies get smarter' which didn't do anything I could discern, and I've seen 'Enemies get two additional party members' which is a huge difficulty spike that I declined to attempt. The enemy getting a randomly cloned unit is perfectly fine as long as it's not Mutha, so we'll do this one. Goddamn it! Here's how the Bruisers of Obliteration are shaping up at this point, midway through Map number 2: Everyone's finally got a full set of skills and equipment. Mutha is still doing what she does best and Bruising / Obliterating the enemy with straightforward charges and melee attacks - we've improved her by adding some agility so she now has 3 AP every turn. AP is important because it's your movement AND your attack, so at 1 AP she could only move 1 space OR attack which was very limiting - at 3 plus her movement skills she's mobile enough so I've been pumping her vitality up because if she drops (Which did happen once) we'll have trouble finishing off the opposition. Also she randomly became 'enlightened' from an event which gave her a lot of extra magic points despite still being dumber than a rock so I might swap out one of her skills for something that costs MP. Skruuk is wearing a lot of MP-adding items and I've loaded him up with healing skills, he's currently acting as the party's cleric. He's doing.... all right with it, we haven't lost a battle yet but he alone can't keep up with the damage the enemy can dish out. Thombi has improved quite a bit and now has some good survivability / utility on the battlefield, he can swap places with an enemy and then cripple them and take a melee or short-ranged foe out of the battle for a couple turns, as well as having a couple AOE damage abilities that can cause bleeding so he can help soften up an enemy group. Finally Izenia is a ranged damage dealer, she has a spell that will do 20% of the target's HP in damage to help with killing bosses and a tome that regenerates her MP every turn - by default in this game there's no MP regeneration, you go into battle with what you have and you don't get any more as it gets used up so you really have to think about your ability MP costs for a fight. So far it's all working well enough but I'm really afraid that if Mutha goes down early or catches a bad status effect we could lose, this group is very reliant on her for doing the damage needed to win. There's a couple places in Mortal Glory 2 where I think the user interface could be improved somewhat. The first is in the way it does movement - instead of popping up an area you can click on to move a character to that place, you instead click on arrows on the lower right to move the character one space in that direction each time. This is perplexing because targeting a character or area of effect skill works as you would expect - you simply click on the target or space you want to hit. This has resulted in a couple of mistakes on my part because due to equipment swaps the number of spaces a character can move continually changes, and Skruuk is currently ambling around with 2 action points and I keep forgetting he has to stop after moving 1 space if I want to use an ability. Instead I inadvertently use both of them on movement and that's the end of his turn. The other is that the enemy / ally indicator circles just don't feel visible enough, at first I was confused about which units were my party and it took me a second to even notice them. I would prefer if the health bars were different colors or something to that effect. The red circles blend in with all the blood or hide behind objects. Also the numpad does not trigger the movement arrows. This pit in the arena is wonderful, shortly after this was taken Mutha moved up and used a tentacle pull skill to tug the enemy healer right down into the pit. Of course the enemies can do that right back, and in the next battle with a pit it was Mutha who ended up in the pit. Thankfully Thombi and Izenia now put out enough damage that they were able to wrap things up. Skruuk though... Skruuk just isn't working out. In the shop prior to the boss I have the opportunity to hire other characters, and it's time to say goodbye to our aspirational Tengu friend. Skruuk is forcibly retired and he can pay me for the privilege. Skruuk is being forced out to make room for the newest member of the Bruisers of Obliteration: Heisoa the Undine. She's expensive but I've been raking in the gold on this map. Already coming in at three levels higher than my best character, she's clearly going to help more than Skruuk ever could. She's the total package - she can actually dish out more damage in melee than Mutha (though is slightly less tough), good movement, an area heal and the ability to clear terrain effects she moves through (most of which are bad). She'll be right up on the front lines with Mutha. Thombi now has a neat trick where he can hit an enemy with a small attack and continue his turn, and the poison inflicted lets him do double damage with his main attack. Izenia picked up a Giant's heart that limits the total amount of damage she can take from any attack to 33% of her maximum HP, so I actually removed all her items that increased HP to intentionally make it low and she's got a book that regenerates 14 HP per turn, with the max damage from any attack being 11 HP. As long as she doesn't get ganged up on she should be pretty survivable with that setup, though I had to give up MP regeneration for it. Not to be outdone, Mutha found a club that lets her use some of that big MP supply to cast 'Mirror Image' which makes three 1-HP copies of her - they die easy but if they don't get killed they hit pretty hard, they just don't have Mutha's equipment. The next boss is Thunk, an armor golem. Less HP than I'd expect from an 'Armor Golem', but it hits hard. Thunk is the leader of the... uh.... 'Lovers of Indulgence'. I'm not quite sure what indulgences the Armor Golem is into, but you do you. I guess his indulgence is pounding Gnomes because he kills Thombi in two hits. Izenia thankfully cracks Thunk just afterward with spells while Mutha and Heisoa beat up his two helpers, and we're on to the final map! I got a bookie event where I was allowed to bet gold on my own team to win the next fight. Unfortunately I think the event is bugged - having confidence in my team I bet the full amount, and the bookie went and paid for an additional enemy to be added to the enemy team. That's fine, but then after I still won the fight I didn't get the money. I like the event but if I ever see this bookie again he's not making it out alive. Happily the developer (this appears to be a solo-dev project - nice job man!) has a feedback / bug reporting form linked right from the main menu so I reported it. Update: The developer took the time to respond to me personally on Redbeak's discord and he clarified that the event is not bugged, but it's not necessarily intended to give you gold - instead it adds to the total value of the loot you get from the battle. I very much appreciate the response and it shows that the dev takes care of their games, but if a bookie walks up to Mutha and explains that her winnings consist of a fancy hat and less money than she gave the bookie, that bookie isn't walking away. Or maybe they can, given that Mutha's wisdom is still 1. One of the final stage battles is absolutely wild and it's a great example of why this is fun. It starts off as a 4v4 - most enemy groups are now fully equipped parties of four like mine, but I've been doing well so I accepted a challenge of having one of my units cloned as an enemy. Yes it cloned Mutha. Again. One of the enemies has an item that spawns an additional ten barrels into the arena, and another has some chaos hurricane power that blows everything in random directions. This quickly turns the arena into a burning, smoke-filled catastrophe with tornadoes added just for fun. Mutha and Heisoa run up the left side and kill the enemy Fiendling. One of the other enemies teleports next to Thombi and smacks him, but Thombi takes the hit and responds with his dagger / poison strike combo and drops the teleporter right away. Izenia moves up to hit the enemy Illithid and almost kills him, but the Evil Mutha and Undine pair rush in and bludgeon poor Izenia to death - her giant heart / low HP thing still leaves her vulnerable to getting ganged up on. The battle is now 3v3. I like how the spectators change as you progress, we have a king watching the fights now. I assumed that the fire would finish off the Illithid but I'm wrong - he heals and sticks around so Heisoa has to finish him off. The other two go after Thombi who throws shards that cause bleeding just before succumbing to the flames. Mutha charges after the enemy and is trading blows with the Undine when Evil Mutha uses their mirror image spell, creating three additional Evil Mutha illusions, and all of a sudden it's cows, cows everywhere. After Mutha takes a beating from her clones Heisoa appears to help and swipes the illusions away with a whirlwind melee attack. Mutha, enraged, summons her own mirror images. Total Cows in this battle: 9 It ends with three illusions of Mutha beating Evil Mutha to death in the corner. Such is our Mortal Glory. Oh hey, I just noticed that you can tell what the shops are going to sell by the little sub-icons that appear on them on the map. The lower shop here sells characters, and I'm pretty loaded. Thombi has been doing better but still isn't amazing, and I've found a really nice summoning skill along with other gear that would make for a good summoner... I'll head here and see if I can find someone to use it. Unfortunately there's not a magic-oriented character in the bunch. I could replace Mutha with Wangus here but that just feels wrong, it's her story! After being briefly tempted to just stick Thombi in a summoner's dress and roll with it, I note that there's one last chance to get a character right before the final boss. We forge onward as we are. Before I reach that final shop I find two pieces of equipment that gives Thombi an entirely different role - a Ghost Root automatically gives him 'sneaking' at the start of each turn so he can't be targeted directly if he doesn't attack, and a Telekinetic Cowl knocks back adjacent figures five spaces at the end of his turn. With this combination he can wander around impervious to direct attacks and blow enemies every which way. Thombi's been with us since the beginning and I'd hate to just ditch him on the eve of the final battle, so he stays and we buy out the shop of all its stat improvement potions instead. Thombi bravely sneaks forward and hopes an enemy is unwary enough to move close to the pit. The day is at hand. We have reached the final battle. Mutha is just happy to be here. As the hour of battle arrives the crowd gathers. Bookies take bets and excited murmurs run through the throng - this promises to be a hell of a match. The anticipation of the announcer is palpable as his magically-enhanced In this corner, make some noise for our challengers, the Bruisers of Obliteration! Don't be fooled by that lithe frame folks - the blue beauty entering now is Heisoa, but every time this announcer sees her walking out she's covered in red. Just behind her you might catch a glimpse of the Master of Toxins and Wind, Thombi! Was he really there just now? Who can tell? But striding into the arena there's no mistaking the magnificent magician Izenia - I'd keep those cheers coming because her magic can reach the cheap seats and she's got plenty to spare! And finally, their leader -The brutal bull-headed bitch Muthaaaaaaa! This team is undefeated folks, but have they finally met their match? Give it up for our reigning champions, the Tribunal of Despair!!! How about a little more sportsmanship my dude? Boasting strength so unbelievable we have to replace his club after every match, it's the Prince of Pummeling, Threeeeeze! You know him, you love it - the walking beard carrying a huge knife almost as big as he is, the Dwarven Devastator Daaaalwiiiin! One he was the Grand Wizard's failed experiment, but today he's here for your entertainment! The Sorcerer in Shadow - Shinjuuuuuu! But towering over them all, I dare not speak his true name for fear of my soul, the High Demon known only to us as..... The Emperor! I've seen him shrug off blows that would kill ten strong men! Can Mutha really stand up to this fiend from the depths? We're about to find out, because This. Battle. Starts. Now! I'm pretty sure this Demon boss was a spectator earlier, scoping out my strats. The Champs go with their tried and true play, summoning flies and snakes to soften up the newcomers, but the Obliterators are having none of it! Izenia streaks across the arena - that girl can RUN - her fingers are crackling and what a shot! Dalwin takes it right to the beard! She must have pissed him right off because he tries to chase her down, she's ducked behind a pillar and Dalwin's axe cleaves a burning oil barrel in two, they're both engulfed in flames! You can almost smell the beard. What the hell... what IS that? By the Gods it's Mutha but I've never seen her move that fast! That glow on her neck - she's got a damn Time Amulet, where the hell did the Obliterators find one of those? Dalwin better watch OOOOOHH HE NEVER SAW IT COMING! Mutha's got Dalwin and she's swinging him by the hair into Jinsu! Jinsu hadn't even uttered his first spell and now there's a very angry Minotaur trying shove a dead dwarf down his throat! I can see Emperor - he's sneering at his teammates! You know how the Emperor feels about incompetence, and if Jinsu survives this he'll probably wish he hadn't! The High Demon just strides past the mayhem, what's he doi- Oh! He found Thombi! The Emperor just picks up and slams the sneaky little Gnome against a pillar - Thombi's on the ground! One good stomp from the Demon and it'll be over for him - but Emperor screams as Heisoa slashes him in the back! Thombi's scrambling away and Emperor turns to find a whole swarm of Heisoas coming after him! Izenia's just walking out of that inferno wreathed in flame, and I think those flames are actually healing her somehow, they're burning away her wounds! The champions on are on the ropes here folks! Emperor summons a minor demon to even the odds but Mutha's already crushed Shinju and she's charged over to help the Heisoas corner the big guy. Emperor shrugs off multiple hits but they're starting to add up. Threeze is going after Izenia with that club but he's limping - Thombi slashed his leg with a thrown cutting disc and Izenia's planted her feet, she's calling down arcane hell, I can't even see through the smoke! Hope you didn't bet on the Champions because those odds are getting pretty long. It's clearing up - Theeze and the minor demon are down! The Emperor's alone! Obliterators have dropped everyone else, and they're all still up Our newcomers have really proved themselves today, Emperor is gonna need to... are you SEEING this?! I can't believe what I'm seeing! The High Demon, the Champion, Emperor is... running for his life! Go ahead. You'll only die tired. The Bruisers aren't giving him a moment to rest, Mutha and Heisoa are darting in to strike, there's a bolt from Izenia, Emperor looks woozy and runs around the corner.... into Thombi! The Gnome's hands are glowing a furious purple and he's jumped up and grabbed the big Demon by the horns - what kind of spell is that? GOOD LORD I HOPE NONE OF YOU BROUGHT CHILDREN TODAY BECAUSE THAT WILL SCAR THEM FOR LIFE! Thombi struck the final blow and finished off the greatest Champion this arena has ever seen and he's laughing, the crowd is berserk, they've won! Mutha has led the Bruisers of Obliteration to a flawless victory! Mutha becomes a leader of Champions. She has become immensely strong, incredibly tough, and remains as dumb as a rock. Heisoa proved every bit as good as I hoped for, carrying the team on one or two fights where Mutha either went down or was stunned. Izenia was a glass cannon even with the unusual item setup - if she got ganged up on or pushed around she'd go down quick, but if that didn't happen she had long-term durability and her spells dropped many a foe along the way. Thombi may have been the misfit of the team, a mediocrity among excellence - but he did what he was able to and there are fights I wouldn't have won without him. I love that he struck the final blow and had his moment. Unlocks for future runs! Mutha, Heisoa, Izenia and Thombi enjoyed the honor of triumph, a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeters, musicians and strange animals from all over the kingdom, together with carts laden with treasure and magical artifacts. The champions rode in a triumphal chariot preceded by noblemen and women on fine steeds. Skruuk was granted the honor of standing behind Mutha, holding the golden crown above her head and whispering in her ear a warning: All glory is fleeting.

Now there's a graphics format I've not seen in a long, long time. Nancy Maple, our heroine, is straight-up red. The Enhanced Graphics Adapter, or EGA, allowed an application to select 16 colors from a palette of 64 options. The technology came out in 1984 and for around 5 years it was the best we had available. Just because it was the best at the time doesn't make it good, and even though this game looks like it's a relic from the late 80's, The Crimson Diamond actually released last year in 2024. So this look was entirely by choice. I'm not opposed to older games or games that choose to emulate older styles for their artistic merit, but EGA, man... I'm not sitting back here pining for those days. The story thus far is that Nancy Maple works for a newsroom in Canada and some fisherman up north in Ontario caught a fish that had a huge diamond in it. Sensing a story, Nancy convinced her editor to send her up here on a train to investigate further. She immediately loses her luggage on the train after falling asleep during the ride. Unfortunately when we arrive we meet a man named Jack who tells us that the Crimson lodge where we were planning on staying has closed, but since the train left we have nowhere else to go. He gives Kimi, myself and Albert (who was the only person he intended to pick up) a ride to the lodge but says that Kimi and I are headed back to the train station in the morning. I suspect events will not play out that way. The Crimson Diamond is a text parser game in the vein of some of the old Sierra Kings Quest or Police Quest games - you can use the mouse to walk around but to interact with things you have to type in commands like 'Talk to Jack' and 'Look in closet' (also not something I'm pining for!). The game is not being subtle about what I should do next. So we're off the train and in the town of Crimson (thus the 'Crimson' part of diamond may refer to the location it was discovered rather than its color as I assumed) and I'm staying at a lodge. Let's go around and meet folks and re-kindle those decades-old memories of how to navigate a game by typing through it. The text parser is pretty standard, I'll admit I was hoping for something a little more free-form but this game is seeking to emulate the entire era pretty closely - basic commands like 'look', 'search' and 'take' work but most commands you think up simply don't work. There are a couple canned 'Can't do this' responses to things like 'Yell' - ladies, apparently, 'do not raise their voices'. I found an mostly-legible map of the lodge. In a nod to more modern games however, this one has a notebook which effectively tracks your next tasks and keeps tabs of what you've done so far, which probably means I won't need to keep my own notes to the side for this game. A welcome change from the days of yore where you were in trouble if you couldn't remember what you were supposed to do next. I walk around the lodge and meet some of the people staying here. I could be rifling through a bunch of empty rooms and trying to take anything not nailed down, but for now I'm choosing to be a courteous houseguest and not steal everything yet - there will be time enough for that later, I'm sure. Nathan Cardinal seems to be the indigenous sort. A couple locations prompted me about 'heading voices in the next room' and I've figured out that I can either 'listen at door' or 'eavesdrop', leading to a couple scenes like this: Nancy is ecstatic to be listening in on someone else's conversation. There's definitely more going on here than meets the eye, these two are discussing someone's recent death and how they might profit from it, but I'm not sure who died. Way to introduce yourself to another human being Nessa, what a bitch! To my delight I found a bathroom and discovered that I could remove my clothing in order to take a shower. Seems like a reasonable course of action after a long train ride. To my horror I discovered that that showering immediately gets you murdered by a psycho. Yes this scene does have the music from the Hitchcock movie. I'm simultaneously happy that you can die in this game and I won't be trying to avoid it because it's a fun scene, so Nancy may be in for a bad time in this playthrough. Also I'm happy to report that there are autosaves. It IS pretty strange that someone would just murder me, I've basically just said 'Hi' to a few people and right now the guy that brought us here from the train station, Jack, says he plans to take myself and Kimi (a woman I met on the train) back to the train station tomorrow as the lodge has been shut down and currently isn't officially servicing customers and there's nowhere else to stay. Wouldn't it make more sense to just let me leave? In any case, I've gone around the lodge and met folks, here's our cast so far: Evan Richards is the owner of the Crimson lodge. He's not happy about the diamond discovery because he likes things quiet and now everyone is showing up here. He had just recently shut down the lodge as a business. Nathan Cardinal appears to be was polite enough but I'm not sure what his deal is except that he's Evan's friend. Albert Respa is a minerologist (Nancy is one too) who claims to be sent here from Antwerp to investigate the diamond discovery. He arrived on the train with myself and Kimi and feels like a posh aristocrat. Kimi Kishiro is a woman who sat next to me on the train and wanted to come here to watch birds, so far she's been pining to see cormorants. Nessa Crabbe is Evan's older sister and a greedy bitch. Ok, I don't know if she's really greedy, but definitely a bitch. Corvus Shaw is a lawyer working with Nessa who believes there are diamonds on the property and wants to ensure she 'gets her share'. Jack is possibly a former / current employee of the lodge? He arrived at the train station to pick up Albert and ended up giving both Kimi and me a ride when he realized that we were basically stranded there for the night. And finally there's Margot, a glamorous woman who's at least 10-20 years younger than Evan but still his girlfriend. I ain't sayin' she's a diamond digger... The guests gather for dinner and Nathan relates a story about how the land here used to belong to various tribes but the government annexed it 50 years ago for promises that weren't honored. The only item I've acquired so far are a couple Jordan almonds I stole from Nessa's candy bowl. The game does not have a high opinion of this treat and keeps referring to them derisively. I try to give some to Jack and he reveals an interesting fact about Evan being allergic to nuts.... I listen in on a conversation with Nessa and she reveals an unfortunate habit of hers. Note to self: Get her drunk ASAP. My efforts to start raiding the house for objects are frustrated by some in-game restrictions - I can get a saucepan from the kitchen for instance, but Nancy declares that she will only use it in the kitchen and returns it when I leave the room. This makes me less inclined to try and raid every room for stuff (and I'm honestly grateful that it seems I'm less likely to end up in object hell from carrying too many things around). After dinner I knew from an earlier eavesdropped conversation that Evan and Nathan were going to talk about something in the Study. I tried to listen in on them but I couldn't hear them through the door, and when I opened it they stopped talking. Later on they left the study so I realize that I can miss a conversation if I'm not careful, so I've reloaded an earlier save and have scoured the house to find more items, I got a hint from 'ask Evan about listening' that a drinking glass could help me here. Searching the house definitely made me dislike using the text interface, it's a process of walking next to an object, typing 'O cupboard' to open it, then 'S cupboard' to actually look inside it, and then repeating that for every searchable thing in a room. My efforts yielded some adhesive tape, a mug, and the drinking glass that I needed. My efforts let me learn that Evan has agreed to give this land back to Nathan's people upon his death, that's nice of him. They're concerned that the discovery of diamonds could complicate that. There's plenty of intrigue already, I've successfully eavesdropped on several conversations now. Corvus says that he and Nessa may do something drastic if they can't find the will. And Jack and Margot are doing... something private together, but it doesn't quite sound like an affair. In the morning, when I'm about to be driven by Jack back to the train station, I overhear Evan offering to pay off Albert to abandon his search and not look for diamonds on the property. Albert doesn't go for it. Jack drives Kimi and me back to the train station to find that the rail bridge into town has been blown up - looks like we're stuck here after all! Nancy returns to the lodge and declares that she needs to find tools that were lost with her luggage so she can start working on what she came here to do - conduct her own survey of the area to look for diamonds. While searching for those, I find a telegraph fragment that Jack and Evan were discussing - someone wired them about the demolition of the bridge. They're not happy about it. Death number 2! Fell down a waterfall. Death number 3 - even without the waterfall present turns out I can't swim. At all. It took me awhile to find a pick, which turns out to be an ice pick that was stuck in a block of ice. Nice going guys, real catch-22 there. Collecting samples wasn't too bad, though every rock in the area I wanted to collect from was populated by people who didn't want me collecting any. (Well, I AM a minerologist - guess it's my job to stare at rocks!) Albert I get, he was working on a rock and didn't want me also working on it, but Kimi was protecting an entire cliff of cormorants from being disturbed. I got rid of Kimi by tricking her into chasing a non-existent duck. And the Jordan almonds made short work of Albert as the little snack had him running for the kitchen for some more food. While he was gone someone stole his field kit - guess I'm the only minerologist in town until he gets another one from Belgium! I got the samples and was able to scratch some minerals and conclude that I might have found diamonds but I need better materials to test them to be sure. Still, not bad for a day's work! Back at the lodge, there's a whole box of flypaper missing and it uses Arsenic. Margot has not been feeling well today, so I wonder.... Ah well, dinnertime! Margot doesn't make it down so after dinner Jack has me bring a bowl up to her. I eavesdrop as Nessa brings her a pitcher of water and find out that Nessa remembers Margot from a place called Skagway, and apparently she was a wanted criminal at the time. Nessa threatens to expose her. Margot is having none of it and threatens Nessa right back. After that there's a commotion as someone smashes a curio cabinet and Nessa notices that her ruby brooch is missing. Nancy is very excited to solve these crimes even though it entails helping Nessa. But do I have to help Nessa here? Bitch can find her own brooch! Moments later I've stolen Margot's powder makeup tin, combined with the adhesive tape I stole earlier I'm ready to find and catch the thief who's going around stealing things. The ways to obtain people's fingerprints are varied and interesting, some people will just let you take them voluntarily just by asking. Others (Kimi) are reluctant so you have to resort to ulterior means, such as putting ice in their hot tea to cool it down and then offering to refill their tea and then pouring soot on it so you can see and extract their prints from the cup and then refilling the tea and giving them back the mug but forgetting to clean the soot off so you make their hands dirty anyways sorry Kimi. Jack is baking thumbprint cookies and doesn't want his hands soiled, so I have to take a raw cookie and do something with it to get his. For Evan I just have to play Billiards very badly so I can pilfer the cue ball that he touched. I'm currently still stuck on how to get a fingerprint off a raw cookie. For basically everything else I had to get someone to touch something but even though there's a print on this I can't just apply soot and pull the print from tape to get it, the game is implying that I need to find some way to make an impression of it. Jack's done making cookies so I wish he'd just volunteer his damn prints! You are NOT busy, you're just sitting there drinking out of a cup! I want to mention that the text parser in this game leaves something to be desired - inexplicably to me it disallows the use of the word 'use', which is really a nice catch-all for deciding you want to try to use an item on something or someone. And when it comes to checking out objects there's three separate verbs that all do different things - 'look', 'search', and 'examine', and often one of the three does nothing so I'm not sure why you wouldn't want to just consolidate them into one or two options. You can't repeat commands so each attempt needs to be typed out (albeit thankfully with shortcuts, but even so, 'l cupboard', 's cupboard' gets pretty tedious.) While trying to figure it out though I stumbled on something - I ended up dissolving some salt and water in a saucepan (Yes I'm trying lots of things on this damn cookie) and I found that not all the salt dissolved, it left behind some minerals that aren't salt. I don't think this is related to the fingerprint stuff but I'll be curious to follow up on this. Aha! Finally solved the cookie thing. I was tempted to look it up or try the game's hint book (Asking people about the raw cookie got me nowhere - the game has a nice feature where if you ask people about items sometimes they'll tell you where it is or how to use it), but I'm glad I didn't because I stumbled on the mineral discovery. This did not work but I was on the right track. I ended up with a frozen wax-filled cookie and just needed to safely extract the wax, and I really didn't expect 'Eat cookie' to work here but it did.... surely there are other ways to solve this bit of the puzzle? No solution is more delicious than mine! Mmm, frozen wax cookie..... Having obtained all the fingerprints, I compare them to the ones taken from the crime scenes and find that Margot is the culprit. I confront her and she admits to taking the brooch to get at Nessa and the silver steins to protect them from her. And then... Margot dies! Right in front of me! She's not handling this well. Murder! Murder most foul! I suspect the flypaper and arsenic are at work here... Jack and Evan take her body down to the root cellar while Evan mourns. I decide to conduct an autopsy - I'm not just a minerologist, I'm also a police detective. Now wishing I knew what the symptoms of arsenic poisoning were. For uh... for the game, of course. Overhearing Nessa, it sounds like she's not surprised that Margot died and the timing is apparently 'inconvenient'. She's the only one I know of that brought Margot water. Ah yep, she definitely poisoned Margot. Like... we're done here right guys? We got her? Nancy's a little slow on the uptake. That's one way to look at a murder discussion I suppose. Meanwhile, I caught Jack and Nathan grabbing stones off the bank of the river and hiding them in the smokehouse - I think these are the minerals that I accidentally discovered earlier. So the river is depositing... something... and they don't want people to know about it. You definitely want to save frequently, at one point in this chapter I wandered into the dining room which instantly ended it. Reloaded game, I know there's more to do here! I feel like you can potentially go through this game and discover very little and I'm sure I've missed a couple conversations by now. Also, finally found that the 'spacebar' key DOES repeat your last command. Wish I'd known that much earlier! Turns out Margot had a special little 'medicine' kit that dispensed arsenic. Jack and Margot's fingerprints are on this, this is what I heard them using earlier. While there's no 'safe' dose of arsenic I suspect Margot was using this 'safely' and then Nessa's dose put her into lethal territory. Also, I ended up losing my rope because I tied it around this tree and apparently 'used too many knots' and I can't possibly get it back. There it shall stay, forever. Jack returns to the lodge after reporting Margot's death with a new guy in tow, Ranger Murdoch - Jack says he should investigate Margot's death as a 'cover' to why he's really here. I talk to Jack about Margot's kit and the conversation I overheard with Nessa, plus the jam jar of arsenic I found that Nessa tossed in the river. Jack admits to using the kit but didn't intentionally overdose Margot, and we've got a strong case against Nessa. So strong that I confront Nessa with the evidence. Admit it, murderer! That... was a mistake. Corvus overheard the conversation and he's not opposed to an additional murder to cover their tracks. At least kill me in an original way, I've done this before! At dinner, before I get a chance to tell the ranger about a murder, I get concerned about where Evan is. I go to where I saw him by the river and it looks like he was dragged away. Nathan also didn't make it to dinner. Hmm.... This time there's a shoeprint besides signs of an altercation, so now I need to find everyone's shoe size. Also maybe I can tell the ranger about the murder? How was that not a more pressing issue than wandering around outside trying to find a guy that didn't show up for dinner? I've now encountered the Ranger twice and he's off to somewhere else in the house right away before I can type 'Tell Ranger About Murder'. On the plus sign this seems like a very plausible reason for Evan to be missing. I finally catch up with the ranger and tell him everything about Margot and Murdoch promises he'll 'Look into it'. Thanks Ranger, you've been a big help. Our Ranger is not feeling the urgency that the moment requires. He's uninterested in theories about Evan being dragged off and shrugs, saying the guy's drunk and probably just wandered off. On the plus side Nathan has been looking for Evan and he and Jack are more receptive to my investigation of his disappearance. After carefully considering the evidence from a raspberry jam cookie and some Jordon almonds I conclude that Evan has clearly been taken to the old Garnet mines. Yes, that's a sentence that now exists, thanks Crimson Diamond. Definitely the first game I've played where Jordon almonds are heavily featured. Nathan and Jack grab the Ranger and get ready to head to the mines. Before I attempt to convince them to let me tag along, first I have the opportunity to explore the house... and boy do I discover some things! For one, I found Nessa's stolen brooch! Margot mentioned it was in this closet just before she died but I couldn't find it then. This very much annoyed me because I specifically searched all these hats right after Margot's death and didn't find it at the time. Albert was storing things that a 'minerologist' doesn't normally need, like bullets and dynamite, plus he had a telegram for 'Karl L.' in his trash saying 'Good job in Crimson'. I think Albert blew up the bridge. Also Albert warned me to stay away from Kimi before he left. If Albert is some sort of agent or spy then I suspect that Kimi might be a rival spy, and this spy stuff might be the real reason Ranger Murdoch is here too - I caught him rifling through Albert's belongings. Seems like everyone's got some ulterior motive going on, with the possible exception of Evan. It occurs to me that it might have been Albert that blew up the bridge, though I'm not sure why. And he probably stole my luggage on the train so that I wouldn't catch on to his BS minerology cover! Nancy is appalled at the notion of blowing up her beloved rocks. In keeping with it's EGA predecessors, Crimson Diamond has no music for most of its scenes, so you're walking around in silence. And you know what? I really miss having music when I'm playing a game. The silence gives it an eerie quality. Unfortunately Albert / Karl stole the nicer car so we have to ride in Nathan's car and it's... something. It's almost as a big as a riding mower. I relate everything I found out about Albert / Karl and his likely plan to blow up the Soo Locks and Ranger Murdoch decides to take Nathan to go head out to deal with that after dropping Jack and I off to find Evan at the mines. The mine entrance has collapsed, possibly on purpose. I start trying to futz around with dynamite to blow it open when I see in my inventory that the ruby brooch has been scratched by something else in my pocket I love this as a clue, I just happened to look at the brooch. I find that the sample I took from the river as well as some fragments from the salt that didn't dissolve can indeed scratch the Ruby and are thus likely diamonds. Ok, back to trying to blow stuff up. Oddly, the game pops up a disclaimer specifically for this part. You should pretty much treat all media this way for everything. Yeah I'm good, I assure you I'm not ending up in the Darwin awards for trying to repeat something I saw in an EGA text parser game. Within the game, however... Sorry Nancy the death scenes are just fun to watch. My efforts yield a Nancy-sized hole in the rubble and I squeeze in, leaving Jack behind. Just inside the garnet mines, I make the discovery of a lifetime (yes I know Evan is in trouble but I'm sure he'll be patient and wait until I've tested the stuff I found in this cave). A red crystal that Nancy initially assumed is a garnet is actually much harder. It is indeed a Crimson Diamond! It's slightly redder than a human being! After making the discovery of a lifetime I immediately ended that life by accidentally wandering off a cliff for Death number 5 - it's dark down here! This place is dangerous! Death 6. I found Evan! He's still alive. Nessa and Corvus have him tied up and are trying to get him to sign the will they wrote for him. Nessa promises to kill him quickly if he signs and let him starve here if he doesn't... geez Nessa, that's some real dark shit. The legal term for this is 'Under Duress'. I am able to distract Corvus and he winds up outside of the room behind a rockslide. Now to deal with Nessa. Personally I'm very prepared to inflict violence upon her but that's not in Nancy's nature. She walks her own path. The path is to seize a hostage, and the hostage is a lamp. One thing leads to another and Nessa ends up hanging off the edge of a cliff. These mines really are obscenely dangerous. At this point I embrace the better angels of Nancy's nature and pull Nessa back up rather than stomp those old fingers. I want to tie Nessa up at that point but Nancy simply expresses regret that there may be an item back at the lodge that would be suitable (Hey Nancy how about the damn rope you couldn't untie from the tree?!?), and Nessa escapes. I rescue Evan and we sit tight until Jack and the Ranger come rescue us. They dig Corvus out of the rubble and arrest him but Nessa is nowhere to be found. Back at the train station the Ranger reveals that he works for a different law enforcement agency. Great cover, man. Thanks to my detective work they caught Albert / Karl red handed trying to destroy Canadian infrastructure before he did any more damage. They caught that German bastard! So other than Nessa escaping at the end I think things went pretty well. There's a bedtime wrap-up questionnaire for you to decide what you think was going on with everyone, and then you get a nice chat with your remaining companions in the morning. Nathan comes clean about their efforts to hide diamonds when confronted. Respect. And then finally on the train ride home you get the option to reveal what you missed via Nancy's introspection as well as some hints as to how to find out if you were to replay the game. The goddamn almonds are somehow MORE important than I already thought? You get one last choice at the end - do you reveal that there are diamonds in Crimson? There certainly are, but Nathan, Jack and Evan all like the quiet life - they don't want Crimson to be put on the map, and they're the only people who live there right now. On the other hand, someone's bound to figure this out eventually and get the credit. Damnit, Nancy wants to be a reporter, so let's get the truth out there! Let the chips fall where they may! The resulting government buyout of the land and strip mining of Crimson pretty much ruins the lives of all the remaining characters, so after all that it more or less ended up the way it would have if Nessa had won. Oops. At least I contributed to the war effort! My final thought on the game is that while I'm not a fan of the choice to make a game that resembles a more technologically limited era, it's still well made and well written and is thus still a good game. Overall I enjoyed it but I'll be happily moving onto something that doesn't require me to type everything I want to do.

Even before I started this blog, a friend of mine has repeatedly recommended this game to me, and judging by the reviews on Steam many people share his opinion. Let's hop in and see what musical mayhem awaits us. Yo, name's Faux. I'm here in lockup, the police got me good and I've been kickin' back here a week or so when this guy, Tryce, he gets outta his cell and the good Samaritan lets yer boy Faux out too. Wait up. You ain't listenin' to me right. This story, it's gotta be told right. You? You need to put this on first. Groovin'? Let's do this. We're not gonna go into how I got locked up my man it's embarrasin' and not the point of this story. I'm not much to look at, some might call me low-poly, but it's not about the amount of polys you got, it's about how you use them. Some might say my head is disporportionately small but what do they know? We bust out and start wanderin' around the place lookin' for a way out, but on that way out we gotta leave a little somethin, a little calling card here and there. Tyce has this crew, da Bomb Rush Cyberfunk - BRC, and I pick up on the logo real quick. I'm an artiste, you see. Like Banksy but not so much of a little bitch. I put my own spin on the Crew. You like? I owe Tyce for bustin' me out. Some might say we oughta be spendin' our time escapin' instead of paintin'. To that I say - yeah maybe they did catch up with us right after I tagged that. I got no idea if they're natural. But hey, I'm not just an artiste. I also put up a fight like you wouldn't believe. Irene here had four guards and I get a little wild taking care of business, I may have spray painted Irene, all four guards, and the wall twice more in the course of extricating myself from the situation but in the end Irene flew the coop. I thought we were home free, I really did. I took a second to tell Tyce I trusted him and I'd be joining his crew if we got out alive. And then this guy had something to say about that. Real retro guy. Who plays vinyl these days? Tyce and I just laughed the guy off and jumped off the building, practically scot free - but this guy's got a hell of an arm. And those records are real sharp. And he took my goddamn head off. Clean. Yeah me? I didn't believe it neither. But then again you can't believe much with no head. But Tyce? You better fuckin' believe in Tyce, because that guy had a solution. We just met today and that guy sprung for a brand-new head for yours truly. What a guy! And he even wants to get my original head back! I assume (besides the detachment thing) it will be fine after falling off a building. But wait till you see the new me. Do I really need that old thing? I hear you, 'Faux what about your brain', my parents said I never even used the thing! Ok, so, you may have surmised that I'm not Faux. But I've got Faux's body! So I'm mostly Faux. Tyce told me about the former Faux so I got his history, anyway. I go by 'Red' now. On account of the color. Not 'Four Eyes'. The ladies love it. Oh, and this chick is part of the crew, Bel - she showed me around the Bomb Rush Cyberfunk and asked me to show off some moves, I'm a natural ever since I booted up. I'm not just an artiste, I'm also a pro skater. What, YOU can't grind a vertical power pole? Skill issue, bra, After showing my stuff, Tyce wants me in the crew. He wants to take BRC All City, which woulda been easy if I were all Faux, but I've just got the body for it. First thing Tyce wants to do is get the Faux's head back. Bel says it's sketch, like, heads don't tend to be good after a couple hours. But Tyce, he says the record guy DJ Cyber, he's got thing for heads, maybe he nabbed it and stashed it. Baby those pants are NOT in my future. He got his own crew, Futurism, and they just put the smack-down on another crew, the Franks. I figure if we also smack-down the Franks then they'll just have low self-esteem but Tyce says that'll get them under our thumb instead of the Futurism thumbs. Barricading streets ain't cool but hoops on the barricades are fly. We head over to Versum Hill to shake things up and see if we can get the Franks out for a little face to face. Or a face to multiple faces - how many folks you got sewn into you there bud? Lemme spell this out for you - you want the street cred to talk to a crew, you need Rep. You want Rep, you gotta tag over their marks on the streets. You tag enough on the streets, you get the attention of the Fun Police. Or as some call them, the police. But they've got nothin' on a skating Cyberhead like me. If I paid taxes I'd be real mad at how they got thrown down the drain on this blue crew. After a little scuffle I meet up with the guy that keeps the Franks together. I'm talkin' in the literal. My guy you should not want anyone to call you that please buy a shirt. Apparently Tryce had the Flesh Prince sew my head on my body and I am not down for a Red I am your Father scene here. Tyce throws down: Crew battle! We win, Flesh P. gots ta give up where DJ Cyber's crashin'. We lose and we gotta serve their crew, all of us. Don't seem like fair stakes but it's not like that'll happen with Red in the mix. Crew battle is all about showing your moves. But who says who's better? Can't be from either crew, no - you need the people who've seen some shit. Let me introduce you to the Supreme Court of the Streets - the Oldheads. This ain't no midlife crisis son. Time to throw down - Tyce and Bel just sit back and let your Cyber-boy Red steal the show. I got some practice tagging the Frank's turf so I know my way around. In the end it isn't even close. No split decision here. Was there ever any doubt? Flesh Prince thinks it's bullshit and he's about to wuss out on the stakes when that's moot because DJ Cyber himself shows up. Motherfucker boosted that from CIS DJ shocks us by showing he ain't all bad - he's not down with the Flesh Prince trying to defy the Court and ends up handing their territory to the B! R! C! as punishment! Shit man, I'll take that. Tyce gets a big head about it though and starts throwing accusations about heads, and Cyber is suddenly less down to be cool. Hold me back Ms. Cotton Candy, hold me back! His hot goons hold down Tyce and Bel and I end up in the back of Ghost in the Shell bot and DC Cyber says a bunch of wierd shit about simulating brains and robots and then it all went black. Like... all of it. Where am I? Cyber shows up and when he was tallking about being one of the Big 3 I figured yo', metaphor man, and he's like naw. Androids do dream and the DJ likes to watch. I come to and the DJ won't give us no head... but he says if we can go All City before Futurism does, we can make him give it up. I'll make you eat your records too, DJ. That's all I wanted anyway, the head's just a bonus. Tyce starts talkin' about the last guy that went all city, Felix. He was part of the Big 3 with Faux and DJ Cyber, but they had to bow down when Felix topped them both. But someone murdered the guy, and Felix is the past. The future is Red. Nobody else is defining what All City actually means so I guess that's my goddamn job. So we gotta start crewing streets and chewing bubble gum and I can't eat gum. Or anythin' else. We're gonna take on the Eclipse, up and comers with some sort of astrology deal. It's ok man I ain't lookin' at their eyes. The Eclipse have some dope-ass tags, they so pretty it's almost a shame to tag over 'em. Almost. Enough tagging and the Eclipse ladies and their shoulders come out to talk. No. Maybe. I'm tryin' to explain the situation to these chicks but they ain't havin' it, claiming I don't understand what it takes to be a woman. None of 'em want to trade bodies so I can try it out. Bel's a different story. She shows up and sets 'em straight! We found this guy, Solace, in a dumpster. He wanted to help but lil' Crashtest wasn't much good at it. And we grindin' and taggin' and the police show again, and this time they weren't messin' around. The longer the barrel, the better! Yo taxpayers, all this gear and they're dogshit at hitting a moving target. The one time they DID land me, bounce-baby - Metal head over here. Also, another Metal head with the fuzz! Escher gives up on shooting me and points out a flaw in my head-related aspirations. Bitch I got NO time to think about what I'm gonna DO if I get that head back, we gotta get back to taking Eclipse the fuck down! Same deal as the Franks, Supreme Court of Olds pops in and runs the show, and we're poppin' moves like there's no tomorrow. Eclipse was in it until I pulled this shit. If you thought that vertical grind up a pole was hot baby feast your eyes! Magnets - how do they work? Eclipse goes down and the BRC goes up and yer boy Red taps out and sees things... Weird things.... What if city but also testicles. Yo, maybe going All City is messing me up, gettin' to me. Naw I'm just playing. Let's take down another crew! DOT EXE we comin' for you! Real talk, I dig the tracksuit and pool ball aesthetic. We headed to the Millenium Mall where DOT hones their dance-battles. What up dog? This guy Solace keeps showin' up in cramped places. Says he's afraid of 'em. That's fucked yo. Also police funding is way outta control! They got rocket-powered handcuffs! For a guy with a spray can! Defund the police! The handcuffs have incredibly sophisticated homing and are trivial to escape from. Did I mention that I get to do all this while I got bomb-ass tracks playing all the time? You gotta dig the tunes man! We ditch the cops and get into the Mall. This Vinyl chick is there, she held me back from DJ Cyber earlier but she says that's not her thing anymore. Lady it's a gang not a job. We're working on gettin' DOT EXE riled up when the police show and, man, who is paying for all this?!? It ain't ME shooting up a mall! Yo bro, my brother in Christ, this mech? Not properly sealed against Spray Paint. Swear to God. DOT EXE decides to show up after I dismantle Shooty McMall - I'm pretty sure the Oldies are following me around because they're right there too. The DOTs put up a show but I've been gettin' real good at this. Like, real fuckin' good. That's three boroughs down, two to go. All City here we come! I'm not just an artiste, I'm also a badass dancer, so BRC is breakdancing just to cap off the day when the DOT EXE boss gets capped. Gettin' whacked is whack, yo. I take one glance and hey, it's too much ya got me? Naptime. Do androids dream of electric snakes? Only this time it's more of a nightmare because the gods-damned police show up! In my gods-damned dreams! Oh I'm sorry did I get a little paint on your uniform? You know I'm lucky I got Tyce because I wake up back at BRC HQ. I don't think I've ever actually travelled back here, only woken up here. Cotton Candy Hair followed us, she wants to join the crew - says she has some info about my head. She says my dreams are... memories? AND THEN THE POLICE SHOW UP AGAIN You are a bad sniper. Escher's finally found a range at which he can hit a target and pops me good. Breaks my head... Or rather.... my helmet? Yo..... Yo what the F..... Ok. I been out of it for a while. My crew got my back though, been runnin' around tryin' to find Flesh Prince and they brought him back to say what's what. Ok, maybe I ought to have figured out I had a human head on my own but it's been a busy day. This explains so much, why I have memories of Faux, why I have these dreams.... I used to be... used to be.... Aww you know what? Fuck that. Who gives a shit. We goin' ALL CITY BABY! Ain't nobody got time for this! The next crew got themselves an offshore oil pyramid! Devil Theory moved out there when they got kicked outta the city, word is they're real dangerous. They got dope tags too, enjoy it while it lasts. What's good about the art crashes out on the duds. Swear to god they look like rejects from a Furry Samurai convention. Not as lost as that outfit. Then one of these motherfuckers pulls me into a police ambush! What kind of little bitch ass crew uses the police to do their dirty work? Once we go All City, Devil Theory is getting banished for this. Straight-up exile yo. You can't be a devious little bitch in my city. Nothin' but the truth. When the time comes for Devil Theory to stand up for their territory these chickenshits straight-up call the cops! And the cops respond in force! My dawg you got any notion what a goddamn Attack Helicopter runs on c-bay these days? I just splashed more tax dollars than you'll ever pay in your life. Bonus: I also got a cop to sit around long enough to tag him. Once the Fuzz are flushed, there ain't no boys in blue to keep Devil Theory safe. I told 'em what's what. You know how BRC rolls - the Old Guys roll in, take one look at what Red's puttin' down, and give us the territory. Ain't nobody gonna be heading from Devil Theory in this city again. Then this guy shows and remines us that there are some problems we ain't handled yet. Vinyl's part of the BRC you freak, hands off! I tell Cyber it's time to throw down. 1v1 me u coward. Shockingly he accepted the offer. That spider-ass-tank's got serious ordinance! I chewed up a lot of boom taking him down. Ow. Shrapnel. Ow. Ow. Took awhile to return those records to sender, but he bit off more than he could chew. You ain't gettin' away this time DJ. Cyber takes off the mask, and there I am waitin' on him for an apology... Remember WHAT you freak? Aw hell... My head... I had him... I had him and now I'm out of it again... Swirls. Fans. Tags. A billboard. A Ladder. Faux... and Me. I'm Felix. That's who I was. Ok, I gotta be real - I'm hungry as hell. Figured I didn't need to eat all this time, bein' a cyberhead and all. I gotta get a snack. Vinyl and DJ Cyber conspired to make me remember. I dunno how to feel about all this. Vinyl helped me by betraying me? I can't sort this out. DJ Cyber starts bein' real cool, says he'll stop throwing steel-edged records at me. Thanks man. What was the plan if you'd cut my head off again? DJ piles on and admits he doesn't have Faux's head - the police do. And they're using him. Faux's head + the machine is codenamed Project Algo and they hooked him up to the police network to hunt us down, but Faux went overboard because he wants to be the last Writer in the city - by having the police kill us all because we're 'Armed and Dangerous'. Now, I'm like 'Woah dude, let's go fuckin' ape on the police and shut that shit down', but Tryce, man, that guy sets his sights on somethin' and won't let go. Apparently I'm the only one that thinks that avoiding being murdered might be a higher priority than going All City. Tryce says we gotta go after Futurism next. Hey why not, I'm down! Maybe ignoring the murderous police led by a vengeful disembodied head that knows all about us will be fine! Futurism's home turf Mataan is beautiful at night. You know the drill! Tag the walls until the police show up and keep tagging! At least Futurism ain't the ones that called the cops this time. Done and done. Time to throw down for their turf. That's right. Futurism's the best yet but they got nothin on ol' Felix. Or is it Red? Don't matter, that's five boroughs under the BRC! DJ Cyber wants me to remember everything. Hey, it beats passing out, so I get in the spider tank for some sleepytime. Yo. Name's Felix. And it's all comin' back, floodin' back... I remember what a damn good Artist I was. Fuckin' rare. And I remember Faux... what he did... He pulled the god-damn ladder out from under me! It was a spot everybody was gonna see, real high up on a billboard. I usually work alone - I work best alone - but somebody had to hold the ladder and I chose the wrong guy. Faux, that ambitious little shit. Couldn't make it on his own skills, he sends me off a building, through an industrial fan that cuts my head off, into a gym where, fortunately for me, none other than DJ Cyber and the Flesh Prince were hangin' out. They saved my head while the police got my body. Cyber learns what's what and tries to take out Faux after the prison break, and when Tryce gets ahold of Faux's body the Prince sticks my head on it. Dude, it's sorta not cool telling me I'm a cyberhead but I'm kinda diggin' it now.. I'm Felix AND Red, past and present. And Faux? It's time to deal with him. Yo. Name's Red Felix. But Faux got other plans. Ignoring the murderous police led by a vengeful disembodied head that knows all about us was not fine. Faux himself is in the pilot seat this time, guess he decided to settle things personally. A fair decision given the incompetence of the police force. Unfortunately for Faux, I'm not just an artiste. I'm also a damn good destroyer of taxpayer-funded quasi-military projects. They did not fix the extreme vulnerability to spray-paint. But turns out they did install... other upgrades. It showed back up as a giant mech-snake! I'll admit, good one Faux, you really took me by surpr.... Pop I see Faux toss his own body down towards the city streets. He grabs Solace, that weird crash-test-dummy dude from earlier, says he's going to use that guy's body for himself instead, and stalks off. Not much I can do about it when I'm just a head. Guess the Prince put in some good shit with this cyberhead because I ain't dead yet, and when a renegade police officer shows up with my original body because they're against Faux taking over the department, I'm still kickin'. Do the police just hold on to headless bodies that they find? How many do they have? I'm All Felix, goin' All City, and no Faux. Me and the Crew run down Faux in a real convenient spot. Good thing Faux decided to hang out in this jungle gym for skateboard grinding! And this 'mech may be bigger, it may be badder, and it may contain strangely specific drones that can also ride the rails and try to grind you down, but it still can't handle spray paint. Seriously guys you need to fix this. And once it's arms are gone and the crew pries open the faceplate, I got one last thing to say to Faux. Say Goodbye to Red because I smashed so hard into Faux it shattered. He's out cold, and it's a long fall down to the streets. Serves Faux right for tryin' to off the competition over graffiti. What's All City mean you to anyway, Faux? You gonna walk alone tagging the Five Boroughs because you killed everyone else? That's not what All City is about. It's about standin' on top and stayin' on top by showing the midlife crisis guys that you got the best tags, the best moves, and the best people. And the Bomb Ruch Crew has got it all baby. Even though we All City now, the rest of the crews got our respect, and we're gonna stay on top because we're gonna stay the best for as long as we can. The other crews give us meaning by keeping the competition alive. Except Devil Theory, y'all need to get the fuck out. Today. Goddamn Narcs.

We begin with a choice. And that choice.... is a game settings option. You have permission to laugh at me later if I get stuck because I can't find something. To those brave souls who would choose the latter option - I salute you but I see nothing but frustration in the prospect of being unable to locate the clickable thing. Let's get this show on the road! We start straight into a murder scene. I hope I'm neither of these characters, one is dead and one has terrible fashion sense. Cause of death: Pushed off a 10-foot cliff. Looks like I have two 'modes', Exploring and thinking. Exploring lets me click around objects in the scene and inspect them. The scene is on an animation loop which gives it a sense of life, there's a thunderstorm happening in the background and occasionally lightning strikes. I found a contract! You can click on names here to 'obtain' them down below. I have in my inventory a list of names. Also, I found what I presume is the Golden Idol in one of the bags in camp, thanks to my X-ray vision. Solved the Case of the Golden Idol already! This guy has it! Thinking mode takes me to a 'fill in the blank' page on this scene, so we'll work on that. It's odd that one person is here in identities but the scroll will list two people. I can move the words in my inventory around so I can organize them and keep first / last names straight, I suspect this will be very helpful to do all the time. Ooooh the victim isn't dead yet, this scene is right after he was pushed and the Doctor (I found a scalpel on him) is currently in the act of falling off the cliff. The people were easy enough, now I have to fill in the location - I found a map which fills in an area of the Thinking pad and it helpfully shows both the map and the scene terrain which I'll need to compare to the map to figure out which cliff this is. Or I could brute force this by listing all four places but we're not desperate yet. Success! When you fill everything out you can move on. I suspect this entry will be very spoiler heavy and since the entire game is about figuring these things out, if the game appeals to you personally it's probably a good time to pause here and play it . Albert swears it was in self defense! Scene 2: An entirely different guy is also dead. The horse is having a great time running in circles around the house. What, exactly, am I in this game? I don't appear to be a character that's going around and investigating things. I'm more like a wandering spirit that's just checking out dead people and trying to understand things. This guy changed clothes a lot. A whole lot. Cause of Death: Chafing Apparently the Lord Sebastian Cloudsley suffered an hunting accident and fell of his horse and suffered a head wound while hunting. I think that's the idol on the left side of the room. Scene 3! Actually, wait a sec... a hanging green figure has showed up on scenario selection. What are you doing here, this is the scenario selection menu! I wanted to check out burning man! Clicking on him yields a short vignette on the Lord's funeral. Is that Albert on the left there? Now I must investigate the Case of the Woman With No Neck Actually Scene 3! Oh boy, there's a lot going on here! Exactly one person is reacting appropriately to this. And there's a lot to find out! All I know right now is that the last two words are gonna be Spontaneous Combustion. The green-suited fellow in the middle of the scene has the Idol... or an Idol? The jewel is blue, but I think in the prior scene it was Red. He has a note that says: To perform the combustion trick, you must first cast a freezing spell. Are people using this idol to perform magic? Does the jewel change color based on the magic used which is why it's blue, or is there more than one Idol? The Idol's jewel and some magic glyphs on it, along with some sort of little lever. It's not relevant to this scene I think but everyone here except Green Suit is carrying a bladed weapon of some sort. Even the guy on fire has a scorched knife. I suspect that in the future I may need to go back and refer to earlier scenes to get clues about later scenes. Oh there's even more going on, clicking on the right door reveals an additional part of the scene with two people inside the building. These scenes could get pretty complex. This is really well done and I'm having fun piecing together information from clues in the scene. For example, determining the identity of the two guys on the far left: I figure out from the hairbrush the burning guy is holding and the modest attire that they're the two stableboys that work the horses, one of them is carrying a book that says 'Property of the Pear brothers' and I find that their first names are Adam and James. But which one is Adam, which is James? It isn't obvious, but the un-burnt brother is carrying a knife. A knife with a letter on it. Adam looks like he's having a bad time but James is much worse off. There's also a second way to infer the same information - the guy on the right is carrying a newspaper which says today is Monday, the door has a schedule listing 'J' or 'A' on horse grooming for each day of the week, and burning guy is carrying a burnt brush. So there's multiple interesting ways to discover a piece of information. Also... what orders were those, Adam? Did you kill your brother, Adam? Is the Idol message about spontaneous combustion a red herring? The Lawyer is carrying a list of inheritors - this scene takes place just after the dispensation of Lord Edmund Cloudsley's last will and testament. Three are family, and one is Willard Wright, and the lawyer is confused about why Willard here since he's not family. I think Willard Wright is the guy in the green jacket with the Idol. Also Sebastian Cloudsley is 'Testate', which sound like either a very good or a very bad state to be in. Oh! I see what happened here, in the first part of the scene - Peter Battley was in severe debt and all he got was a worthless book instead of a chunk of the inheritance. Furious, he grabbed his two servants and tried to take the Idol by force from Willard, and one of the servants then burst into flames - the Will says that Williard would know what to do with the Idol, so I'm back on board with the theory of it's actually magical and Willard knows how to use it. I got everything right about this on the very first try and That! Feels! So! Damn! Good! Scene 4: Murder at the Cursed Mermaid! Pro tip: Do not include 'Cursed' in the name of your establishment. Upstairs, it's a classic 'victim is locked in the room with the key' murder. Someone wanted RFVEN6L Downstairs we're having a party! With a pretty great music track in the background! I want to know who the dead man is and I see that he's carrying a ring with a ruby. I remember that I saw that last scene so I immediately flip back there - Willard was carrying the same ring, so it's probably him. Cross-scene investigating is already here. Don't feel too bad for Willard, he was into some serious cult stuff! Something is up with this sleazy guy, in the last scene he was 'correctly' labeled as 'David Gorran', but even then he was carrying a piece of paper labeled 'Ash Blair'. This time his thinksheet name is 'Ash Blair' and it's definitely the same guy. Which is the correct name? Or are neither correct and he's hiding his identity? So that means the 'correct' people's names in a scene may not actually be the truth. In any case, Ash Blair appears to be the murderer - clues left about who was playing cards at a given time put him out of the game just before this scene and he had the other room rented upstairs. I didn't find the Idol in this scene but I assume Blair has it. Is this the Case of the Golden Idol or Curse of the Golden Idol? I think the Curse is that if you have it in one scene you're pretty much going to die in the next one. Another mid-scene interlude: A man wearing a red tassel and another red-jeweled ring is investigating Wright's murder. Hey, I'M investigating the murders... is this actually me? Ash Blair managed to survive the Curse by Not Appearing in the Next Scene. We are keeping with the motif of someone dying though! The latest victim is our Lady of No Neck, Rose Cubert. Who would poison her? The Idol is here in the house, locked in a wall safe. Guess Ash Blair managed to stash it here, he's working for Edmund Cloudsley (second from the left). Here's the thinksheet for this one. The identities a a bit easier because I've seen some of the characters in prior scenes, on the right it looks like we're in for a logic puzzle concerning where people sat at the table and where they were located in the house. From the text I suspect Rose was not the intended poisoning target. Never poison someone at a buffet. Ash Blair is a tobacco brand, among this group of servants our mystery guy is going by David Gorran. I might have to break out pen and paper for this scene, I need to figure out things like which servant has been around the longest (they get the bottom room), and I haven't seen any obvious initial clues to even get started with who was sitting where at the dinner table. Ah, a clue with which to find other clues! Time to go back and read everything again! Ah-ha, that plus an additional note led me to decipher an encoded message to reveal the identity of the murderer and the one who engaged their services for the murder: Darkhand Steward. Ada Baker ended up poisoning the wrong person. Edmund got lucky here. All right, next sce-KABOOM Not quite powerful enough to blow their socks off. Just outside the explosion room we find our mystery man David Gorran (Ash Blair), he's apparently up to no good and I think he has either hired some henchmen to help him obtain a corpse or he was trying to do it himself and someone hit him on the head. It's gone badly - he's been knocked out and is slumped over a scarecrow in a coffin, unconscious but still alive. David's a survivor. So far. Oh hey, the Lone Ranger on the right (Walter Keene, Gentleman Robber) is I think the guy that was investigating the murder in the vignette before, his hat has the tassel and he's got a ruby ring. Woah! I found an old occult dude hiding in a trunk! He must have hidden quickly when the gang came in. He has notes for David and a research book detailing what he's been trying to do with the Idol. The Idol can do lots of things! It IS magic! Or.... sufficiently advanced technology.... I think David was off to collect a dead body for him and got suckered into carrying a coffin with a scarecrow in here and the bandits used it to follow him to try to steal the Idol from this guy. Wait.... IS THIS EDMUND? IS EDMUND CLOUDSLEY BALD? Flips scenes. I think he's been wearing a wig the whole time! I'm starting to piece together the story. I think around fifty years ago Sebastian Cloudsley's father found the Idol on an island and murdered his partner and took sole control of it. Sebastian lived out his life researching the artifact but become involved with some sort of cult that wears the Ruby Rings and on his death gave the Idol to them. His son Edmund knew about his father's research and the power of the Idol and had his servant David Gorran murder the cult member Willard Wright and steal the Idol back. Edmund has been researching the Idol but the Ruby Ring cult is still after it - they tried to poison Edmund but ended up killing his wife Rose instead, and now they followed David back to the place where Edmund is experimenting on the Idol and Edmund used it to set an explosive trap for the henchmen. I'm looking forward to the next scene to see who ends up with the Idol after this, two of the robbers are caught in the explosion here but the guy in charge, Walter Keene is still on his feet with a pistol but he's about to be attacked by a dog. Jaws that could trap a bear and a brain that craves manflesh. I've pieced together most of what happened here, just need to get something right. Happily if you get close the game will let you know, I'm just off on someone's name probably. Oh that's odd, completing the story on the left (It was Edmund Cloudsley that needed the body but I'd argue that that meant David needed one too!) finished the scenario, I didn't need to fill in the glyphs on the right. I'm still going to go back and do that because understanding what function they have will probably be helpful in the future. Another vignette! We have David lying about what happened. Perjury! But was Edmund actually killed and David is covering up how it happened or is Edmund faking his own death? All we know is David survived and murder-mutt is doing just fine. Let's see if the next scene can shed some more light on this. Oh hey, it's a nice tranquil forest with a little door on the side of a hill. Oh joy, Hobbits! Ummmmm Not Hobbits! IT'S NOT HOBBITS! It is the Red Ring cult and they love creepy-ass masks. I gotta say I dig the grim reaper with the technicolor stained glass there. I've been thinking about what this game is and I've realized that it's similar to Return of the Obra Dinn , which is a deduction game that I absolutely loved, in that it wants you to determine identities and an understanding of the events that took place. The main difference between the two is that Obra Dinn is one giant puzzle, where in many cases you need to obtain clues from future and past scenes to determine identities and causes of death from later scenes. Case of the Idol's deduction is much more self contained - while I've occasionally gone back to a prior scene to try to ascertain something, so far those have been the exception to the rule of most clues being present within the scene I'm examining. I'd happily recommend either game to someone who enjoys figuring things out, and this one is probably the better introduction to it as Obra Dinn ends up being really massive in the sheer scope of what you need to do and this game is more bite-sized. Oh hey, found a guy. Ominous music plays as I discover a man tied up in the bushes. This guy is next to David Gorran's stuff but he clearly is not David Gorran. I think he's a cult member that Gorran jumped and dressed up as and Gorran is in his suit somewhere inside the cult hideout. I found a note that sheds little light on what happened after the last scene. Walter Keene survived and claims he found Edmund dead from the explosion, but was then driven off by 'A pack of hounds' and David Gorran and was unable to recover the Idol. Another cult member thinks Walter is full of it and kept the Idol for himself. Back to the scene with the two cups - the cult's rituals are unnecessarily complex. There's at least four different rituals that end up being the Princess Bride scene of each guy drinks a cup and hopes it's not the poisoned one. Walter Keene was challenged to this ritual by a David Sinclair who objects to Walter bringing another initiate into the cult (The new guy is shirtless in another room) This is a tough one! Everyone's in masks and have very few possessions to help identify them. And what the fuck is this? Is it even a clue? Oooooh, another note! It's from Walter Keene TO David Gorran! They're in cahoots! Keene has betrayed the cult (he must indeed be lying about the Idol) and revealed the location and time of this meeting to let Gorran sneak in. Gorran then positions himself as the poisoner guy to ensure that Keene survives the ritual, and they get their man Lazarus Herst initiated into the Cult. I think Edmund survived the blast and Walter was subdued by the dog and convinced to join Edmund. Scenario complete, pretty much nailed it (Not sure about Edmund yet). Onward! Interestingly, the next two scenes have simultaneously become available, which hasn't happened before. Perhaps this is a case where clues in the future scene are needed to solve the prior one. Scene 8 is a crowning ceremony at a lighthouse. Maybe the guy or the right is just sleeping. Looks like there's some repeat characters between the scenes and a lot of folks we haven't run into before, but I note that we've got cult masks off in the lighthouse scene so we're about to find out a lot about the Ruby Ring cult. Wow, the lighthouse appears to be where a genuine Miracle has taken place. The cult has rules for Gryphon's ascendency. The rule is that you have to perform a miracle. Then if some other member of the cult can do what you did, then it is merely 'magic' and the ascendent gets put to death. They have a poor track record of this. One guy tried to fly and fell to his death, and three others had their 'miracles' repeated by other cult members. But if you can perform a miracle, and nobody else can repeat it, then the masks come off and you are crowned as Gryphon. The masks have come off. Ah-ha, the three miracles that turned out not to be miracles were all repeated by the same guy - Angus McBain. That's the dead guy, now - they rubbed him out to stop him from repeating the miracle. The miracle, as it happens, involved the Idol being tucked into the large golden staff. I've figured out that that Idol has the power to draw matter into itself and expel it as well, and our miracle worker - Lazarus, the initiate from the prior scene - used it to pull in a bunch of air and then spit it out down the tube like a jet engine, enabling himself to fly around for a bit - or perhaps to jump off the top of the lighthouse and descend slowly. Angus got wind of how this was done and was going to repeat it but he appears to have met an untimely end. Ah, he met his end because he was blackmailing Walter Keene to find out how the miracle was done. Keene gave him only partial information about how to perform the miracle - so when he jumped the Idol didn't do anything and he fell to his death. I didn't end up needing to refer to the next scene and I only had to trial-and-error one identity, so I'm not sure why the next one was already accessible. Scene 9 is at a fancy house and someone's been murdered. Seeing what the people were wearing here would have given me the identify of some in Scene 8. The thinksheet is getting harder - I have to supply more than half of it now and basically figure out the whole story! Also they ramped up the difficulty on names, prior to this almost all names I found in first / last pairs, this time the good inspector helpfully recorded everyone's testimony using their first name only and then referred to everyone involved by their last names only. Great puzzle, awful madlibs. Ok, this is a political plot. The dead guy is Augustus Vallantine, leader of a major political party, and the guy in the eyepatch is the leader of another political party. A newspaper said that the two of them would likely form a coalition and thus one of them would become Prime Minister, but now Augustus is dead and Leopold has been framed for the murder, so no coalition. Who benefits from this? A third New Order party led by none other than Lazarus Herst! Assuming the cult pulls this murder / frame job off, he'll be Prime Minister. I'm pretty sure that's the gist of it but I'm having trouble getting the story correct on this one, I figured out the Butler got drugged at some point too and I'm not sure how that fits in. There's a lot of drugging going on, at least three people here were drugged. Finally! I nearly gave in to using a hint. That one took awhile, the story involved a whole sub-plot about what happened that I whiffed right by in pursuit of the murder. Forward we go, but first an interlude! Looks like Lazarus disposed of Keene once his usefulness ran out and he's showing off what the Idol is capable of. The Idol taketh and the idol giveth away. Getting a fascist vibe from that armband. Flipping back to the scene which had the magical symbols and the spellbook, let's figure out what the things that the Idol can do likely are. I only have an incomplete picture at this point but the Idol can suck in and subsequently expel: Air, matter, gold, and heat. The first of three runes on the Idol are 'Give' and 'Take' (or Suck in / Expel). The second two runes appear to be combinations of things. The recipe for freezing something is 'Take Matter Heat' and setting it on fire (as happened to the poor guy back in Scene 3) is 'Give Matter Heat'. Notably the Idol doesn't just generate the Heat from nothing, it first has to be used to freeze something by taking heat away before it can expel the heat and set something on fire. I'm thinking the Idol is alien technology, not magic. 'Give Matter Heat' gave that guy a real bad day. There's also one other symbol I've seen regarding an apple experiment back in the explosion scene, and I think it may be 'Life'. The reason Edmund wanted a dead body to experiment on was because he tried 'Give Matter Life(?)' on an apple and obtained intriguing results. Next up - fascism! Armbands for everyone! Kids, don't try this in your home country! Mr. David Gorran is back! He's the enforcer in the open-face helmet on the right. He's doing all right for himself in the New Order. Papers, Please! Everyone's carrying their papers now. Best keep that merit score high, citizen. It's been all of three years since the last scene and High Arbiter Lazarus has reshaped society to his liking. It now operates under the four Maxims of Virtue. Holy.... we're done with figuring out people's identities (I guess it wouldn't make much sense with people carrying them now). Instead, I have to figure out fascism - specifically determining the four virtues and what various infractions cost how many demerits. I did not go into this game expecting to do fascism mathematics but here we are. Today's murder mystery is thus murder carried out by the State. The Idol isn't the problem - people are. The virtues sound great though! Beauty, Truth, Moderation, and Diligence! No problem there! Except that Moderation means you can't, for instance, display emotions or you suffer real consequences, and the other virtues have similarly devastating drawbacks. The poor guy being carried out of here is young Gideon Bell, who kept crying during his interrogation. Sorry Gideon, each instance of crying is a Moderation Violation. Lazarus has figured out the 'life' taking / giving power of the Idol and he's using it to steal years from people equal to their demerits in court - of which Gideon managed to rack up 88. 88 years gone and then given by the Idol to a group of children upstairs, I assume for Lazarus to use for himself later. This has taken a dark turn... ok, I know it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows prior to this, but an entire dystopian society is far worse than the occasional stablehand catching fire. Maybe there's a happy ending, let's continue! Uh... is this a scene or a world map? Oh, this is a huge one. To be fair it takes up the space of two scenes on the scene selection menu. There's multiple locations and lots of characters involved and three separate stories to figure out. And at the top there's links to all of the prior scenes! Those links to the past make me think that this time we're definitely going to have to delve back into prior scenes to figure things out here. Some of the locations today take place in the same locations as the earlier scenes. Someone rolled a cannon into the room where the guy died in Scene 2 and blew some Order soldiers away. The card-playing patrons of the Cursed Mermaid have changed very little! Ok, so it looks like the New Order was planning on marching on the King's Palace (I guess they haven't fully consolidated control) and some of them have been waylaid and murdered. Couldn't have happened to nicer people. Hold the phone, I just noticed something. Lazarus Herst has quite a nose and jawline doesn't he? So does Edmund Cloudsley. And we know Cloudsley was bald back then, he was wearing a wig. Lazarus showed up right when Edmund disappeared and we never saw Edmund again. I think Edmund figured out how to use the Life controls on the Idol and used it to de-age himself! Lazarus is Edmund! David Gorran finally meets his end, at Walter Keene's hand. Keene had 32 years taken from him in the tribunals and tried to ambush Lazarus in revenge, but Lazarus just sent Gorran to take care of him instead. Ha! Hahahaha! All Edmund / Lazarus' plans and hopes are undone as he violates one of his own virtues and lusts after another man's wife. That man is Peter Battley, a drunkard in massive debt who ended up inheriting Edmund's estate when he died and marrying a girl that Edmund sought. When Edmund showed up at his old house with troops, Battley was prepared. Fuck yeah, Peter! Whether the Idol was magic or alien technology quickly becomes irrelevant when a drunk man desperately protecting his wife fires a cannon at Lazarus from 6 feet away. The Idol is broken, and claims one last victim as the two remaining leaders of the Cult fight over it. How about that - a happy ending after all! I really enjoyed this game. There's some DLC for it so I may revisit this at some point and do those but if I do I'll make it a separate entry. If you find a golden idol, leave it alone, it's cursed.

It's Sunday afternoon and I've got some free time, and having just spend a month just moving posts over from Discord I'm ready to get back into gaming. Let's fire up the just-released Inkshade and see what we've got here. We start by being dragged along a carpet in a pretty nice house with an old record player. Some entity with glowing eyes is doing the dragging. Clearly inspired by Inscryption, which is a good game to be inspired by. Much like Inscryption, glowy-eyes wants me to play a game. Unlike Inscryption, this time I am a 'Captain', and I want to 'Sail my airship into the Abyss'. Which doesn't sound like a great idea, surely there are nicer places we can take an airship? To accomplish this, I need two things: A 'Starpointe', and a vessel. And that's all I know when I'm asked to choose a path. The map is very nice to look at but not very informative. I'll try the right path and head East. Glowy says that leads to the Kingdom of Faultis which it deems to be an ideal choice... if I'm looking to be impaled by a lance. Apparently this route can let me find a needle for the 'Starpointe'. The sub-map where we get to pick our path. And we're into our first battle. Looks like it's a hex-based combat system. Hopefully I'm not also merely a novice of the blade. I don't know exactly how to read piece stats but my 2 HP 'Wretch', which is my only piece, did one single point of damage on my turn and these guys have three HP. I am in for an ass kicking. Yep, wretch is very dead. I'm shocked. Glowy says that my starting crew is too weak - agreed! He tells me to get up and go get more pieces from the cupboard, which lets me check out the room I'm in. A gramophone, a table... ... a map with a dagger in it, and a door with light shining through the keyhole. Found the pieces, this little guy with a bat is cute! I briefly check out some of the objects in the room but Glowy won't let me mess with them - yet - so I return to the table. I assume that much like Inscryption there's stuff to do around the room that will be essential but I'll play along with Glowy for a bit, let's check out these new pieces. Glowy makes me start over and I choose the left path this time, and we'll visit the Clergy of Ire. I don't know what the pieces are called yet but I have bat guy, this hat guy, and a little grim reaper with a spear. Combat is pretty straightforward - you can move X spaces, and attacks always hit and do set damage, so playing it out appears to be chess-like. Also if you kill enemies you get 'scrip' as currency for doing so. Winning the battle rewards me with additional crew / pieces. I'll try this Knifethrower. If my pieces die in combat they're gone for the run, but they appear to heal up between battles so as long as they don't die they'll stick around. Currently trying to figure out what the symbols on the map mean by trying each one. This campfire event lets you spend scrip to get benefits to your pieces or curses your opponents. There was one for 100 scrip that would make my knife-thrower do 4 damage instead of 1, so these are big benefits. Cursing these enemies for -1 move only 10 is a great deal for cheap, assuming it hits all of them. The very next battle I ran into had 8 foes on the map and I missed one behind a tree, losing quite badly. Yes Glowy, these are rough battles. Glowy again takes pity on poor me and now gives me a key to the Parlor where I'll find something that will let me make my pieces stronger. I find it refreshing that unlike Inscryption he's not killing me every time I lose - Glowy and I are just hanging out and playing a game. The Parlor has a ton of stuff in it and a nice spread of food on the table. I think it's time to thoroughly inspect these rooms, let's see if I can uncover something useful. There's lots of random things that you can interact with that Glowy just warns you off of or dismisses so I may well miss something important, but I found this piece collection box which I've only just started to fill. We're going to be finding a lot of pieces! Also this upgrade table where I can spend Scrip between runs to permanently improve my pieces! Yes Virginia, this is a roquelite. Holy smokes it's expensive but the Wretch can become a monster of a piece. Every enemy I've run into so far does one damage so if I can get some defense on these pieces I'll definitely get farther than before. Exploring the house has also yielded a couple extra pieces and a bunch of scrip that were lying around. I also found a lighter and this 'light the right candles' puzzle but I don't know the right combination. Since the candles are binary there are actually only 64 possible combinations but I'm going to be a good sport and wait until I find the clue for this rather than brute force it. For now. This statue's head shifts when I'm not looking at it. I think I caught a glimpse of its eyes being open. I found a lantern and got down into a dark basement - some scrip and another piece down here. Searching the rooms was very productive, I found the candle puzzle as well as a gear puzzle behind a painting (I solved neither) as well as several new pieces and almost a hundred more scrip. There are also three locked doors - two in the parlor and one in the basement - so we've got a whole house we're dealing with here. My piece collection has grown much larger after scouring the house. All right, I've spent my scrip on a few upgrades and we'll try the center map this time. I suspect there's a potential strategy where I could do nothing but upgrade the Wretch and do very well but I'm going to spread things out and try to get a collection of pieces up to decent capabilities. You get more scrip for finishing battles faster so I want a team that can quickly clear battles. The center map takes me North where I can obtain an airship. I can now bring four pieces into a battle and some of them do 2 damage. There are 'book' spaces on the map where Glowy gives me a bit of backstory. There used to be four lands united, but because of entropy and decay they fell apart, which is part of the reason why in the game I only have four lands to choose from now. Now that I know Scrip can permanently improve pieces I'm reluctant to spend this much here for a temporary benefit. A random event produces a large battle, can my guys handle this now? Yes, they can - but only, as it turns out, because there's a second way to win battles - you can occupy a gold space and survive the enemy turn to win without killing everyone else, and pull it off here by running for the boat. One piece died but the rest escaped and the journey continues. Shortly after that we hit our first boss battle, and this dude is beefy - he does three damage with a long range attack so he's killing one of my guys each turn. We're so dead. Interestingly, some of the enemy pieces battle and kill each other in this fight and I get the scrip reward for that. But the boss guy can one-shot each of my guys and I just can't reach him before they're all dead. This will be a game of many runs. Just getting to the boss here got me over a hundred Scrip so I'll be able to make improvements every run. Oh boy, I found a slave market! 10 scrip for selling my Lancer into slavery? How can I say no to that? Have a great life buddy! I'm noticing that I'm usually offered 'common' pieces of a given place like Acolytes on the left path, so even though they can't be improved as much as the more powerful pieces, upgrading them will still help since they'll become part of my piece collection. I think I'm going to lose this run because of hidden enemies - and in this case 'hidden' doesn't mean the game has kept them invisible from me, I'm in a forest with bad lighting and the enemy pieces are just extremely difficult to see. I thought I was up against three archers in the dark woods, turns out I didn't see an extra three hiding in the shadows. There are actually seven pieces in this screenshot. The battles themselves seem to be set-piece and I've repeated some of them, so after this initial surprise I'll know to look carefully for hidden foes here. Also I barely managed to pull this one out by attacking forward and holding a golden hex. I've now reached the first boss of the left-side area, the Executioner. He's got decent health, some armor and ridiculous damage but little movement, if I had a ranged unit that did 2 damage I could kite and kill him but that's not in the cards for this run so it ends here after I kill as many of his minions as I can for the money. Chonky but beatable, eventually. When I visit piece upgrades I'm going to see if I can make someone capable of killing him. Yes I think you have, but give me some more time to upgrade my pieces and I think it'll be fine. Ugh, second try at the Executioner, I made an Archer that does 3 damage which is great and kills most enemies in one hit, but when I get to the boss he's not in my available pool of unit options so I'm hosed again. Ah well, I will get him sooner or later. I'm currently just re-attempting the left path because I think I can get this Executioner with this unit set if I can pull the Archer. Giving the Wretch 1 armor proves invaluable as now he takes no damage from the most common enemies and he can tank for the party. Get up there and let them stab you, Wretch! Third time may be the charm, I've reached the Executioner again and this time I have both the Wretch and the Archer. There are additional enemies in this battle this time - is that because of my strength or a random event? Ok, good news / bad news time. First, the good news! The good news! I got three pieces successfully up the left side and killed the boss! The bad news? Killing the boss doesn't win the battle. I still need to get a unit to the gold tile or kill everyone on the map. Hey guys, we beat him! We did it, right? Guys? The party did not survive long enough to accomplish either. At least the boss drops 20 scrip which is a nice amount. I've had a day to mull over how I'm playing this and I think I'm going to change strategies - among the possible upgrades you can improve the number of troops you take into battle and your hand size. I'm going get up to 5 pieces I can deploy and never take more pieces on a mission than I have in my hand so all my pieces, including my best ones, are always available for every battle. I'm going to stop getting new pieces mid-journey because those tend to be weaker than the ones I've focused on upgrading, and I'll only take them if I need to replace a piece lost due to combat (or, uh, sold into slavery - sorry guys I need the money). Ah good, just enough scrip to increase my piece count. It also occurs to me that I've never seen the boss of the first zone I went to in the East, so I should at least go have a look at him so we can prepare. They have something of an ink-theme going, there's a black ink-effect in scene transitions and when pieces die they do so in a little inksplat. Seems a shame to make a mess of this delightful little bar. I love the hexagonal tables. Found the East boss. If you've guessed the pattern by now, you'd be right - he's going to kill me. Yes sir I am ready to bend over. He's got two armor so most of my pieces can't damage him, and my 3-damage archer isn't going to make much of a dent before he runs everyone through. There's two damage types in the game, physical and magic, and I think we'd be best served by bringing a strong magic user or two to this fight. Time to go down swinging. I'll go back to trying the Executioner, I'm sure I can kill that guy with what I've got, I just need to complete the level afterwards. Actually... hold my beer. Just beyond the boss is a golden hex. Maybe I don't need to actually kill him to win. If I can lure the boss away from the golden space I may still be able to pull this off and win a boss level without killing a boss. Ok guys... who wants to be bait? Two archers, a werewolf, a wretch, and an acolyte carefully pre-position for the attempt. Acolyte draws the short straw and runs in first, hoping to draw the Knight's attention. Both archers rush in on either side and each drop a guard, leaving the Knight by himself. Werewolf and Wretch push in behind the left Archer, ready to run for the objective. The Knight responds by ignoring the bait and killing one of the threats to him, pinning an Archer to the wall with his spear - dead. The Acolyte, breathing a sigh of relief, seizes the golden hex and the Werewolf moves to act as a bodyguard for the Acolyte. The remaining archer starts shooting the Knight and the brawny man cries out in pain as a shot pierces his armor. The Knight turns, enraged, and cuts off the remaining Archer's head... but the day is mine! The remaining three pieces escape the manor, leaving it aflame, and both the Manor and the Knight inside it perish in fire! The Acolyte initially hated this plan but it turned out great for him. Glowy has a present for me! I can visit a new room! Back to exploring the house! This place is cool, best room in the house so far. I have a lantern but I can only use when traversing the pitch-black stairwells, sadly our hero the Captain just puts it away and doesn't use it to get a better look when searching through these mostly-dark rooms. Oh, actually we just pull the lantern out sometimes in certain places, like being next to a desk. Fine, I guess. The Praetorium has some cryptic clues... ... as well as some scrip and a couple more pieces like this mean little fella. I feel like I've got a handle on things now. Sorry So, puzzles to solve: Gear puzzle behind painting in the Parlor. Candle puzzle in the Parlor. Need to find a fifth handle for a set of handles in the Praetorium (not sure if I missed it while searching or it's somewhere else in the house, I found three and one was already attached) Telescope in Praetorium shows me stars that blink in and out. Some sort of wall-circle puzzle in the Praetorium. Puzzles solved so far: None, unless finding the lantern counts. All right, back to the board game. The last run is still in progress and now I can choose another path or continue to a second Eastward zone. I assume the second zone will be harder so I instead go back and try to advance on the Westward path since the party is pretty weak now. I pick up some Acolytes to replenish my strength and while we lack the hitting power of the archers it's enough to pass these levels largely thanks to the Wretch's armor. What's this symbol? Looks like a spider is hiding under it. Ah, the 'hard' battle is actually a refreshing AI change. Normally the AI enemies just wait around until you come in range of them, meaning you can kite off single guys and fight the enemy piecemeal. In these hard battles they all come at you at once which is a nice change of pace. I've been taking Acolytes at refill my ranks and one dies here, but another shows up. The party makes it all the way to the Executioner but I don't have enough firepower to kill him, lacking my archers. Instead I take a hint from my last victory and painstakingly kite the 1-move Executioner away from the exit and run past him for the loss of another expendable Acolyte. Another room (literally) unlocked in the same run! Hero party! The basement was extremely fruitful. I found this guy with a lamp who I'm hoping will, in addition to being a piece, be able to light up the darker boards. I also turned all the wheels on this steam contraption which opened a chest that held more pieces. Finally, when I found the lamp guy Glowy showed up and talked about me responding to the piece's 'plaintive cries', and I realized that meant there could be an audio cue when I'm near one - and indeed there is! It sounds like the clink of chess pieces hitting each other. Listening ended up helping me solve the candle puzzle, as it turned out there was a subtle hint on lighting the correct candles as to which set would open the box. More Pieces inside! I scoured the house listening for piece sounds and found another one I'd missed back in the Praetorium. Back on this epic run, I still think the rifle boss of the North area will murder us so I'm going to try going further up the West side. The mansion is burning and I've left an awful ink mess on the Executioner's town. That was... educational. The first battle of the second level completely destroyed the party and ended that run. I don't mind at all - that was a huge leap forward; two bosses, two rooms, and a lot of pieces. We have a lot more pieces to choose from thanks to the six heroes in the middle. I've also amassed a whopping 862 scrip, time to analyze the new pieces and do some upgrading - we'll need it to pass those advanced levels. I took the opportunity to max out party / hand size and then focused on the Wretch for the bulk of the upgrades, with the rest going to a new Rider piece that can move really far. There's some good new options like the Scholar which can act as long-range magic artillery and the Dendralite, a piece that already comes with both magic and physical defense, but the money only stretches so far before it's gone. Starting the next run, the bosses don't stay beaten - I'll have to defeat them again but with these upgrades it should be a lot easier. I think I'll try to take out the North boss with the gun this time, decent chance I have the pieces to do it. The maps are indeed getting harder based on either the pieces I've found, bosses I've beaten, or the upgrades I've gotten, because this is now the first map - with more than twice the number of foes originally present, and more dangerous ones to boot. This originally had just 3 foes that each did 1 damage. On the plus side this also means I'm earning more scrip every map. That piece with the Lantern? Totally works to light up dark maps. And has decent stats to boot. I can actually see my enemies on this ambush map. This time I find a way to sneak up on the gun-boss, who can only shoot directly straight. As a result, he can't just come out of the left side of the bridge and shoot any of my figures here, and the Wretch in the lead has just enough movement and damage to get in there and one-shot him before he can do anything. Not charging up the middle this time worked wonders. That earns me the key to the Bridge. Back to the house! Thanks Glowy! The Bridge has an old-fashioned ship's steering wheel and some complex control panels. I'd guess that we've been on an airship this whole time, I can see stars out of the front window. Several puzzles here. In addition to pieces, one of the puzzles on the bridge yields this compass which is flailing around instead of pointing in any particular direction. I have no idea what use this is. On the way back to the game I caught Glowy looking through the telescope on the Praetorium, once in awhile he leaves the game table and I find him elsewhere on the ship. He's rocking at least four arms with four fingers each. Back to the game, I'm happy to discover that in an area where you've already beaten a boss you get an option to skip all the battles up to repeating the boss fight, for a fee. The fee will unfortunately get higher, and it does mean you don't get the scrip for doing the battles. The pieces from the bridge are particularly good, I've found an ideal tank: Most enemy pieces can't damage this guy, even if he can't hit anything himself. Excellent artillery: 5 damage at range 6 will one-shot most foes. Also, an oddity: The life symbols on this guy are different, why? Ahh, Apothecary - tried him out, he's a healer! This is huge - we're going to be able to keep parties alive much better now as we can pull units back to be fixed on larger maps. Or so I hoped. He healed until he fell down and died. Unfortunately, he has to give away his own health points to heal other units - and he can actually heal so much that he kills himself. And he can't attack at all. I don't see much benefit to a character that's simply a health pool for my other units, I think I'm better off using that unit slot for something combat capable. The Guardian and Corvusier on the other hand are every bit as good as I'd hoped. I should mention that while I think the combat system is a bit too simplistic for my tastes, the animations for combat are very good, and the Corvusier actually calls in a crow that swoops in and smacks someone. Also, an 'undo' button would be nice, combat is fully deterministic but more than once I've accidentally moved a unit to the wrong spot or ended their turn without attacking and there's no way to fix it if you do. I've reached the second Western boss. Unfortunately I lost my artillery in the last battle but that Guardian piece is nigh invincible, I might be able to slip him by and win this via gold hex. I also picked up an Executioner temporarily, right. Alternately if I can eventually walk this Executioner up to him (at once space a turn) I might be able to straight-out kill him with it. Before that I have to take on this whole map with my four remaining guys. This will not be easy. Alas, it was indeed not to be - I probably would have made it if I hadn't missed an Executioner and walked the Guardian right into it. It occurs to me that if we're going to see the former boss as an obtainable piece that I'd want to get a better boss in my collection than the Executioner, who is simply too slow. I'll work on the North / East areas as I'd much rather have either the Knight or the gun-boss in my ranks. I reach the East boss first. A nasty mage with decent protection! This time I have a full party of upgraded pieces, and on this particular run I discovered that you can leave the table and upgrade pieces mid-run, so now the Wretch has everything but a life point and several of my other pieces are fully upgraded. This may look like a lot of enemies but so long as I'm careful I expect we'll clear them with little or no damage and then we can gang up on the boss. I think that eventually your pieces just get a little too tough - provided I position them correctly most of the enemy pieces (except the boss) just can't damage the Guardian and very few of them can damage the Wretch. I move up the left side, kite the boss over to me and gang up on him, and only suffer a total of five damage. If I'd been more careful that number would have been two from the boss alone. Glowy are you insinuating that I was supposed to do this guy last? We get a key to the Maintenance tunnels, which is an infinite repeating dark hallway. Every so often you see this cute little diorama of where you are in the hallway relative to the exit door. Hello me! The treasure in the tunnel yields two of the best pieces in the game - the Knight and the gun-boss, called the Farshot. I already have a Knight as a piece I picked up along the way so I immediately upgrade him. 2nd tier battles are becoming trivial with the fully upgraded pieces. Nothing on this particular map can hurt the Wretch, he could clear it by himself at no risk if I were so inclined. Just for fun I'm running to the end without killing anyone to see if I get an achievement. This in turn has detracted from the value of adding pieces to my crew during a run, because if I do that then I could end up drawing a bunch of mediocre pieces for a given battle and lose a map with them (and thus the whole run), or I can avoid them entirely and always have my best pieces available to crush everything. I'm about to intentionally sacrifice an archer to get my piece count down to my hand size. I guess the game heard me complain about my defense being too high, because it just offered me... a huge defense upgrade on the Guardian. I think we're winning the game on this run. We've found the North tier 2 boss, the enemy Captain of an Airship. He's also a Wretch, but less upgraded than mine. My Wretch just strides onto the ship and solos him and his crew, with the rest of my team playing clean-up. Killing him leads to the Study, which has the Executioner which I won't need unless something with insane defense shows up, and this... thing. Oh good, a paperweight. Finishing up with tier 2, it's back to the Western boss, who can now only do 1 damage per turn to the Wretch. Crunch goes that boss. That leads to the projector room, where I use the paperweight from earlier to shine a silhouette of it onto a wall. The shadow puppetry I always wanted! I've been wondering if I've been getting keys based on which boss I defeated or if I'm getting keys in a specific order. The Projector room reveals that it's most likely the latter - I find a box containing all three of the Tier 2 Boss pieces. Do I really need to be any more powerful at this point? Well, we now have our assembled Starpointe and the Airship. Glowy takes the compass I found on the Bridge from me and sticks it next to the game board and we proceed into, I assume, the final area. I've made a mess of the world. Sailing into the void, the map becomes a series of question marks, and you have to find the correct way via the compass. If you go the wrong way you get sent back to the world map and have to start over. In a cool twist, some of the crew turn against me and mutiny, so this battle actually takes place in one of the rooms I've been on in the ship, the Praetorium. I've been willing to sacrifice you before, don't think I'll hesitate to kill you all! The game throws a penultimate challenge at you with all three bosses in the same encounter, and after that there's just one fight remaining. G.... Glowy? He doesn't fight back, you just kill him. This thankfully does not kill the real Glowy who as far as I'm concerned has been a pretty nice guy up to this point, a bit rude but we're hanging out and playing games. Glowy gives me the key to the main deck. I step out onto the deck and I am greeted by the starry void. The ship is shattered in half, it is doomed to drift forever. There is one piece left to find. My own. Glowy greets me coldly. I thought, perhaps, we were friends. But no, we were playing through my murderous journey to this point, into the Abyss, making me relive it over and over until I reached the end. I murdered countless people to obtain the Starpointe and the Airship, including my crew, in mad journey into this place, for no discernable attainment. Glowy pushes me off the deck, into the void, to fall endlessly into the Abyss.

Hello Readers! Today marks a milestone for me as it is about a month and change since I initially began posting game entries here on the blog. I wanted to take a second to share how this came to be and where I plan on going. Starting in February I was inspired by another game blogger (certainly a rare breed these days!) the CRPG Addict to write up my own experiences playing games and share them as well. I wasn't ambitious enough to simply go out there and start up an actual blog to do this, so instead I began writing into a Discord thread that was only visible to a small group of friends. I managed to keep at it and I found that I enjoyed the experience of pausing and writing down what I was thinking and sharing as I was playing, and after initially dismissing the notion of making it a 'real' blog after about three months in, I finally pulled the trigger and decided to make this, for better or worse, my contribution to the Internet. Sorry kids, it's what I got. For the past month my efforts here have been fully directed at getting the site set up and figuring out how best to efficiently move things from Discord to here, which was somewhat more involved than I initially hoped and the process still required a fair bit of time for each post - but they are now completely moved over and here we are. From this point forward I'll be gaming again and writing directly into this blog. I don't think I'll change the overall style of how I've been doing things - I'll play a game and when I encounter something that I want to talk about or show, I'll take a moment to grab a screenshot and write something about it before returning to the game. What I will do is endeavor to be a better writer, because in transcribing all of these posts so far I also read them, and I found that I was prone to mistakes such as assuming the reader had some knowledge that I did while playing the game and thus I was leaving out relatively important details or context that a reader might find helpful, especially for someone who had never played before. Unlike the CRPG Addict who set upon a clear mission in playing every CRPG in order of release, I have no such restriction - I play PC games that I either find and want to play or have had recommended to me (and readers should feel free to recommend anything in the comments, as I will play just about anything provided I can get it to run!). The main difference I've noticed is that I'm now more committed to finishing a game - there are a couple past entries that I probably would have just put down before ending but now that I'm writing the story of what's happening I'm disinclined to stop in the middle. One thing I've been pondering is what to do about games that I've already played and loved, should I feature them here in some way? Would people want to see a replay of a game where I have the benefit of having done it before? For now I'll put that question aside and continue to play things that are new to me. I've got a couple games that I'm eager to get started on, so here's what's on deck (Not necessarily in order): Inkshade The Case of the Golden Idol Look Outside The Crimson Diamond Bomb Rush Cyberfunk

Let's do some more Atari! 1977 - Sprint 8. Sequel to Sprint 2 and Sprint 4, showing us that even in early days videogames had problems with numbering sequels. Shout out to Final Fantasy for being just about the only franchise that comes to mind that does this. Just number game sequels in sequence people, it will be better for everyone. I immediately start off as a terrible driver but it's not long before I pick up the controls and I'm ripping around the track. This thing had fun gameplay and the basic elements of most future racing games where you need to control your speed to make it around a corner but you want to go quickly. This was probably a hoot with 8 people. It's really meant for multiplayer but it's a nice touch that the other cars rumble around the track even if there aren't players taking their slots. Unfortunately you can't collide with the other cars. There are a couple different track options, all tracks exist within a single screen so everyone can see their car simultaneously. It's got astoundingly good sound effects for this era, you hear the rumble of engines and tires screeching.  The AI is pretty easy to beat once you get the hang of it since it isn't really trying. Next up: Fire Truck! This is a wild  concept for a co-op game, I love it. Sadly the game itself isn't that fun, the two players drive around a fairly wide, mostly empty track with the occasional oil spill and try not to hit the sides. The rear player's job is pretty much just to entirely not screw up the front player's driving. A friend of mine would like to add that he saw this game at an arcade growing up but he could never get his mother to play it with him. Parents, play games with your children! Even if the game sucks! I suspect his mother would not have enjoyed the experience. Now, Super Breakout! Let's see if this version crushes me like that last one did. This one feels a lot more fair than the original. The ball doesn't ramp up to quite the same ludicrous speed as the original and there isn't the randomized angle-changing from wall bounces anymore, thank god. Hits off the paddle feel more controlled as well. There still isn't side or downward collision with blocks, sadly, but this is a significant improvement to the game. The changes make it easier and it's only a few attempts before I break through the top row, aided in part by the holes which get you an additional ball. It's easier for sure but I really crave those side / downward collisions. All right, let's try Lunar Lander and land on the moon! I like games that try for 'realistic' physics and this may be the first one ever. Low on fuel? Add coins. Pay to Win came early! This is some Kerbal Space Program shenanigans. (That actually might be a good game for the blog, come to think of it). But it's definitely trying to do physics-like stuff. We have chosen a very mountainous moon-landing area, nice job ground control. Oh cool, when you get close to a landing site the game 'zooms in' to give you a close-up view of the place you're trying to land. It's an abrupt change but very much appreciated compared to trying to land on 4 pixels. Ok, gentle.... easy does it...... FUCK I think a 'two-mile wide crater' is a bit excessive, game! So help me I WILL land on the 5x space in every one of these missions! Naturally 5x is the hardest space to land on but I didn't come here to get minimum points. Just the mostest gentlest of landings we can manage. Yessssssss! Houston we have touchdown! Ok, second mission: Yeah! Landed that bitch first try! These are easy once you get the hang of it! Third mission - Strong gravity is really strong ... uh.... That's too fast.... FUCK FUCK GODDAMN IT I will not accept less than perfection here! FUCK FUCK I AM THE GREATEST PILOT OF ALL TIME Good news - the last mission puts the gravity back to 'Moderate' Bad news - "rotational rotation" being on means that once you start rotating, you continue rotating until you manually correct it. This makes steeing much, much harder. Still, we got this! Well, not this . This is an inevitable crash. Thankfully we're not an an arcade and I'm not burning quarters on every attempt. FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUUUUUUCK YESSSSSS Lest you get the wrong impression, I really like this game! Lunar Lander is definitely worth trying out if you either enjoy a challenge or prefer your astronauts dead.

"Survive a journey across space in the Auriga Vault, an interstellar gothic monastery crewed by the last remaining exiles of a terrible disaster." - The Banished Vault I don't remember where I heard about this game - possibly BlueSky? I don't know much about it except that I think it's complicated so it might not be for everyone. We appear to be the remnants of a monastery-colony ship that found something unpleasant. I hope we're not doing vows of celibacy, it's gonna make the colonization thing hard. Movement is indeed complicated! There's a very detailed in-game manual and god help you if you don't read it. This feels like a single-player board game, certainly it looks like the designers initially built it as such. The use of actual dice mechanics just gives me that impression. I don't believe I've seen a solar system laid out in an isometric fashion before, but here we are. Thankfully we've arrived here during a planetary alignment. Ok, so let's muddle through this system. The objective is to travel to the planets here, mine resources, manufacture fuel and Stasis (a resource I need for the Exiles to go into Hibernation), and get out before the Gloom arrives and swallows everyone in 30 turns. There's also a Hallowed planet here on which to construct a Scriptorium. Doing this is important since it chronicles the journey and the manual says the journey is over if I can make four of them. Our resources to accomplish this mission: 4 Exiles: Reinald, Paganus, Cheli, Xave. 3 ships: Spire Hendecad , a larger ship with more cargo slots but also more mass which requires more fuel. Accompanying it are Portal Fifty Nine and the unfortunately named Smoke Crater , smaller ships with less cargo space. Each ship currently has two types of engines, one is more fuel efficient and one provides more thrust which is required for landing on planets, but each engine is taking up precious cargo space. I also start with a bunch of fuel, Iron, Water, Titanium, and Silica. Turns out the celibacy thing has no relevance for our colonization prospects, we're all dudes. The System has four planets / moons down three main paths. The center planet seems to have the most resources and it's easier to get to. Before I even start my first turn I'm looking through the manual to see if it lists building costs, because I need to bring the right amount of resources with me to build at least the initial structures to harvest more resources. Thankfully those costs are indeed listed in here. All of the harvesting buildings cost iron, so starting is straightforward, and if we can get more iron on the planet we can build the rest of the buildings we'll need. And all of the main planets also have iron so we don't necessarily need to bring too much. Ok, overall plan: Send one ship down each route, the big ship goes to the planet in the middle. Each ship brings enough iron to set up initial resource gathering. We build what we can to maximize resources and get the scriptorium built, and see what happens when we accomplish those initial objectives. Paganus will pilot Smoke Crater for the most important mission: Build the Scriptorium. A scriptorium needs Alloy and Elixir, and the set of materials here can be used to build Alloy but not Elixir. Smoke Crater will carry some Iron to start manufacturing buildings as well as some Elixir from Vault storage to try to accomplish the mission solo rather than make Elixir elsewhere and bring it over here from another planet. He should also be able to make his own fuel on-planet to return home, Water can be turned into fuel. Spire Hendecad is to head for the center planet and manufacture Stasis, the substance we need to successfully hibernate and have the Exiles survive to the next system. Using the big ship and two exiles here might be overkill, but I think lack of Stasis is the end so let's make sure we can successfully complete at least one system. Reinald, the highest faith colonist, is paired with the lowest faith colonist, Xave. Faith helps you overcome challenges and decreases after every hibernation. Without Stasis I assume our Exiles will die. Portal Fifty Nine has a tough job, one mediocre Exile, Cheli, on one small ship trying to manufacture Elixir with the resources spread across a planet and a moon. If either of the other ships can get their stuff done ahead of schedule I'll try to have them come help here afterward, but Elixir might be easier to make in future systems too. I'm going to try to remedy this by taking the Vault's supply of Silica with me to go directly make at least some Elixir without having to go to the moon.  Elixir seems useful but not immediately fatal to run out of. So I have a plan but I don't know the game well enough to know if it's a good one! This seems like an easier system overall, all of the planets starting with iron and titanium means that reaching them with enough iron to build an iron harvester is good enough to get going, and fuel can be made on all of them except this last one where the Water is over on a moon. Godspeed, brave Exiles. Portal Fifty Nine arrives at the outer planet first, and I get lucky on the fuel calculations - he's used up more than half of his supply and couldn't return to the vault. After checking some things it looks to me like he still has exactly enough fuel to reach the moon with water and not a drop more than that. I really need to understand fuel usage or someone is getting stranded. But first, we start building. Planets are simply a little grid with resource nodes to build on. Turns out they also start with a few resources but I wasn't aware of that, I could have brought less with me but I'm glad that I brought some, there's not enough materials in the cache to build the initial iron harvester. If I had come here with no materials for buildings I'd be screwed. Paganus in Smoke Crater reports a serious problem. The blueprint for a Scriptorium is huge ! Even worse, the resources on the inner planet are placed such that any placement of this massive structure will block two of the nodes. Worst of all, once a building is placed, it's placed for life - no moving or deconstructing it. How many books are we putting in these scriptoriums?! This really puts a crimp on the mission - do we sacrifice the resource nodes and build it anyway, or maybe we just skip it and just harvest resources now in order to make our chances of building one in a future system better? We'd pretty much have to sacrifice the Water node here, which means no more fuel.... I'll sleep on it, there's a lot of calculation and planning to be done in this game, this unexpected complication has thrown a huge wrench into my plans for this system. Spire Hendecad is doing better, with two people they've already got all their resource collectors set up and the distribution is such that they can build both a fuel producer and a stasis factory, but that doesn't leave much room left. First hard lesson in this game is that planets are very, very tiny and space for buildings is at a premium. It's slow going for Cheli out on the rim, being on the outer planets he's only refreshing two actions per turn, but he's making progress towards getting Elixirs made. Two actions per turn is limiting Cheli's productivity. Ok, decision time. We're not going to build the Scriptorium in this system. My fear is that if we build it then Paganus is stranded since he can't make fuel, and so not only do we screw up Paganus' resource gathering, we also screw up someone else's resource gathering because now we have to send one of the other ships with fuel to rescue him. Instead we're going to just focus on mining this system and try to gather a bunch of artifacts which will help us unlock more buildings in the future and try to set us up better for a Scriptorium in a future system. Spire hits a snag - the Stasis producing building requires one alloy to construct, and we didn't bring any nor do we have Silica here to make it. It's a small miracle that the Stasis building will at least fit if I go get the materials for it. Spire is going to make a bunch of fuel for the trip and send one Exile off to pick some Alloy up while the other remains on planet to work the factories. Stares longingly at the Alloy that I just left back in the Vault . Spire has the fuel, time to head out. The best source for Silica (for making Alloy) in the system is on the inner planet where I didn't build the Scriptorium, I'm glad of that decision. Xave, piloting Spire , arrives on the inner planet. These trips burn a lot of fuel so we'll take this opportunity to stay here for a couple turns to manufacture a full load of alloy and lots of fuel for Spire to carry back. Paganus is thrilled to have the company. Cheli, working slowly on the outer planet, has crafted five Elixir from the pre-brought Silica and now needs to head to the moon to get more and manufacture fuel. Before he goes he'll need to make six iron and one titanium here so he can construct the buildings to make fuel and harvest water / silica on the moon. At two actions a turn that'll be another three turns before he lifts off, so even though we have 30 turns to do this I'm feeling constrained for time. Cheli only makes it to the moon on his very last drop of fuel. He only just makes it because Portal Fifty Nine is a small ship and the moon only requires 1 thrust to land on so he can use the more efficient engine to get there. I do not want to come this close to running out of fuel ever again. The difficulty there is that how much fuel you need to go somewhere gets complicated . He arrives and starts construction of a Fuel / Silica moon base. I got lucky as I realize that sometimes resources can be underneath the surface, requiring the addition of an excavation building to access - if that had happened I wouldn't have been able to get to the buried ones because I didn't bring enough additional stuff to build one. Thankfully everything is on the surface. This time. Spire is fully loaded with lots of fuel, nine alloy, the spare elixir we didn't use for the Scriptorium, and an alien animal skull that we can research. From the skull comes Knowledge, and from Knowledge comes hopefully good things. She takes off and heads for the middle planet. At 15 turns we're halfway through our allotted time. Reinald is on the inner planet making as much alloy as the small ship can carry back. Paganus arrives back on the middle planet with the alloy so we can start making Stasis there. It should go quickly because Xave has been there mining the pre-requisites for it. Cheli in the outer systems is working on the moon-fuel base to try and get some more Elixir made out there, but it's slow going. You refresh fewer actions in the outer system, so someone on the inner planet can get twice as much done with the time they have. With the arrival of the Spire , the Stasis producer is online. We need 2 Stasis per Exile to make the next jump and I'd like to get more for the future. Cheli has a full load of fuel and Silica to go back to the outer Planet with and try to scrape together some more Elixir before we run out of time. 9 turns remain before the Gloom starts to come in. The manual says it doesn't obliterate the whole system but it starts with the inner planets so Cheli has more turns than the others do. I don't know how quickly Gloom will consume the system so I don't want to cut it too close. I suspect that Spire Hendecad on the inner planet may not have enough time to re-visit the moon fuel base to stock up so I load it up with enough fuel to make the whole trip all the way back to the Vault. I would love to make a trip to the Vault and then come back for a second voyage to grab more stuff with Spire Hendecad and time is getting tight, so I'm going to leave now. It's going to take around 4-6 turns to get there and return to the planet. Her cargo is very valuable - the Skull worth 10 knowledge, 16 Stasis (which should be enough for this and the next system), 8 alloy. Xave will remain on the planet to make more fuel and Stasis in the remaining time and the return flight will probably just be a quick pickup of Xave and whatever resources he can get. Xave better hope I'm right about how long this will take. Five turns to go and Reginald in Smoke Crater on the inner planet has a full hold with more alloy, so he can leave early. This is good because I'm hoping this means he has time to swing over to the Fuel Moon because there was a very valuable artifact on it, Cheli didn't have the cargo space. Have we considered perhaps just mounting both types of engines on the outside of the ship? I'd really like them to not take up space in cargo. 5 turns remain, and Smoke Crater starts running for safety. As Smoke Crater departs, Spire completes her round trip back to the Vault and returns to the middle planet. Paganus and Xave will work furiously until the end to try to obtain more Stasis and Fuel before leaving. I check the Vault's resources to see what I should prioritize getting at the end here and I'm extremely glad I did - I used up ALL of the Iron we had and we have none of it right now! We wouldn't have been able to build buildings in the next system! We'll prioritize it on the middle planet now. Vault to Spire Hendecad , grab as much Iron as you can or we're screwed. 2 Turns left - Reinald snags an alien plant. It's worth 20 knowledge! He heads for home. 20 is great considering I've found artifacts that are merely worth 1. Spire Hendecad is close behind with an emergency load of Iron and a few more Stasis. The last Exiles return to the Monastary Back on the Vault, Reinald checks out the Shipyard. We can construct a variety of ships, but given the limitations of cargo / fuel I feel like 2 cargo slots isn't very useful. The Sparrow design however doesn't even have a traveler - I can see the utility of an unmanned scout to check out places ahead of time, we could have saved many turns knowing more in advance. I'll build a Sparrow. The Vault has a shipyard where you can build more ships with harvested resources. I was wrong, it is not unmanned, sadly it still requires a pilot, it just can't carry any passengers. Still, maybe I'll have a use for it. It only cost one alloy. But I don't think it can carry anything. The game names the tiny ship the Mass Cubic so that it sounds more intimidating than it is. Its one cargo slot has to be for fuel. Zero turns remain. The Gloom approaches. The Gloom makes us sad and eats solar systems. Cheli is the last to make it back home, clutching the precious 12 Elixir he managed to make. By the time he does only the outer planet he was on has not yet been consumed, so we cut it reasonably close. Our supplies look good, we have plenty of fuel, a lot more Alloy and Stasis. Elixir is dependent on how much we drink it - an Exile's faith can be increased by drinking it but to go from Faith 3 to 4 requires 4 elixir, so we can't restore all that we're about to lose. But hey, nobody died, we got resources, we're probably ready for another system, and we learned a bunch. All in all I think our first excursion was a success. Again, once more, into the dim starlight. Stasis: Check. Exiles: Check. In between systems we can spend the knowledge from those artifacts for more blueprints and abilities. +1 Thrust is very tempting because it means our ships can use more fuel efficient engines more often, but we'll definitely want the resource excavator and I can get that plus the Titanium harvester which will save action points. And 12 cargo spaces on that massive ship is tempting but I don't think I could land it on a planet right now. Oh, the abilities on the left only benefit a single Exile. I'm going with the Titanium Harvester and Resource Excavator. Next system: we arrive at Roialmet. There's a beacon here. This is a bigger system with more planets. It also features hazards, the red marks - the last system didn't have any. My goal this time is to build the Scriptorium, there is a hallowed planet for it. Ideally, this time we send a ship with everything we need to just land, build it, and leave. And we also want to see what the beacon is about. Cheli will take the Mass Cubic and first visit the beacon, then scout the rest of the system looking for artifacts. He'll hit a lot of hazards doing this so I start by raising his Faith to 4 with some elixir. The Vault has a chapel where an Exile can spend all day drinking Elixir to raise their faith by 1. Reinald will take Smoke Crater and go build the Scriptorium with it. Xave and Paganus will take Spire and head to an inner-system moon and set up an initial Fuel production base there and then we'll figure out what resources can be usefully mined later on. I must remember to bring enough to set up initial iron mining and any deep resource excavators in case anything is buried on this moon. Hopefully the Hazards aren't too bad. Hmmm... I just don't have enough cargo space to bring enough fuel to get the the Hallowed planet and back with Scriptorium supplies. Instead I'll have Smoke Crater also go to the same moon as Spire initially, we can use it as a stop-off point to refuel and Reinald can help set up the Fuel base before he goes off to the hallowed planet. Actually I don't think there's any reason not to take all three of the cargo ships to the fuel moon and then branch out from there. We'll use more fuel getting there and back but we can make fuel there and should be able to carry more back than we burn up. Ah, strike that - we wouldn't have a fuel efficient engine for one of the smaller ships because we need it for the little scout ship. I can't build any more engines because I didn't bring any methane back from the first system. So, one big and one small ship with 3 exiles to the moon, Cheli to the beacon. There's also Carbon on the gas giant nearby so we can make Stasis on the Fuel moon if we can harvest that as well. We'll bring an Alloy from ship stores in the Spire Hendecad so that we can build the producer without having to go get it elsewhere. Godspeed Exiles! The new ship strongly resembles a fire hydrant. The Beacon apparently indicates the presence of resources - there's an engine, some fuel and Titanium floating here. I'll send Cheli back to the station to return here with a larger ship to pick this up after scouting. The Mass Cubic is super fuel efficient - it can pull this maneuver between the outer moons for a single fuel unit. We hit our first Hazard. Exiles get one die per faith to try to match the difficulty. Despite an 80% success chance, we still fail - but thankfully the last die results in less ship condition loss than might otherwise have happened. Also, can I re-roll that cocked die? Unfortunately hazards do NOT go away after you encounter them, or at least this one didn't. Thankfully we pass it on the return flight, but it's something to consider if you're thinking of taking multiple trips through one. Losing to a dust field appears to be catastrophic in terms of effects but it's easy to pass. I gave Xave the Titanium harvester ability so I want him to be the one to do all the Titanium mining. He can generate 8 Titanium per turn here, the monster. Fuel production is online with 25 turns remaining. Cheli arrives at the fuel base with the Mass Cubic a turn later, it doesn't cost us too much to scout and I really like having the little ship. We found half-decent artifacts on this planet but none of the others.  With all four Exiles working together on the fuel base, production proceeds quickly and we prepare for the next mission - setting up the Spire Hendecad to build the Scriptorium, and take enough supplies that we can also do some mining there and bring back a bunch of Methane and Silicon if we can get to it. It's gonna take 30 fuel to make the trip there and back so half the cargo will just be fuel. Reinald and Paganus head out, leaving Xave and Cheli at the fuel base. Reinald is our highest Faith exile and he successfully navigates past a difficult dust field. Reinald lands successfully, and the layout of the planet is such that I have to cover the Iron node but we brought enough Iron for a Silica and Methane harvester. The first scriptorium is built! Guys, this was a lot of work for four sentences. Ah, I have a problem. The Fuel base, by one single square, lacks enough space to have both a Stasis and an Elixir factory. I could ship Titanium down to the planet with the Scriptorium, that would work... but costs time and the use of a ship I was planning to go get CO2 at the gas giant for Stasis. Well, Stasis is the core lifeblood of surviving in this game and Elixir is just good for keeping faith up. I think I'll just have Spire harvest the raw resources and bring them back to the Vault and focus on making as much Stasis as possible in this system. Cheli discovers that you need an additional 'Orbital Structure' building before you can build the orbital CO2 harvester he intended to make, resulting in a quick and embarrassing return to the fuel base. Oops, I didn't bring enough stuff to build both the collector and the thing I need to attach the collector to. Spire lifts off from the inner planet with a full load of Silicon and Methane, and since I brought extra fuel it still has enough to go all the way back to the Vault. Once there I use some of the Methane to make a new engine. It's close to the efficiency of my best one with better thrust, and in this case that means the Spire can make this next trip with just this one engine to head back to the Fuel / Stasis base, leaving the rest of its cargo free to haul stuff. With 7 turns to go, everyone is back on the Fuel moon. We've been getting plenty of CO2 from the nearby gas giant and pumping out Stasis like mad. We're up to four full stacks of Stasis, enough to get through several systems ahead. With 2 turns left on the clock, all of the ships have completely filled their cargo hold and are ready to head home. Tons of Stasis, a couple artifacts, and some iron and extra fuel. We got quite a haul in this system and built our first Scriptorium, a huge success. If you can get all the Exiles working together on one place you can do a lot with it. The only downside is that we're going to lose faith and we made no Elixir at all, we still have some reserves on the ship though and we still got some materials to make more. I don't know if Faith 0 kills an Exile but if we have none then Hazards will finish us. What a haul! We have 74 Stasis - enough to go to inter hibernation nine times before we run out. Now we don't need to worry about it at all and can focus on other things in the next system. All four travelers return to the Vault. Once more into the dim starlight.... I only got ten measly knowledge from the artifacts in that system. I'm not sure how well these abilities are balanced. There's a 70-point ability that's worth the cost here and a 35-point ability that's borderline useless. The Lynx engine there is worse than the 3-thrust engine I can already build. Gonna save the knowledge points this time. Welcome to Lonneoenoennoesoet These are some strange system names. This system looks tough. There's only one level-3 Hazard, the main problem is that there's no water on the middle planets - if I'm going to make fuel then it'll either have to be on the deepest world where the Scriptorium goes, with a huge energy cost to get to / from it, or suffer through some outer-planet water with just a few actions per turn. Ugh. There's an abandoned ship in this system, we'll want to check that out. I think my best bet is to suck it up and just make a fuel base on the outer planet with water and stage from there, and we'll also take the Silicon we mined int he last system to the Methane planet and make a bunch of Elixir - we're getting low on faith and need to restore it for systems with future bad hazards. We'll also take enough to build another Scriptorium and try to get a ship down to the inner planet to make another one. This time I'm going to scout it first, the water and massive action count means it could be an excellent fuel source even with the cost of getting there. Ok, Spire to the Methane planet to make Elixir. The two medium ships to the crappy fuel planet. Cheli scouts the system. Cheli discovers 20 knowledge worth of Artifacts on the outermost planet, gonna want to pick these up. And another 10 knowledge on an asteroid! This could be a high knowledge system. I very nearly screwed up here. It would have been a really catastrophic screw-up. This is crappy fuel planet. One iron made all the difference in the world. I went to the fuel planet with only just enough iron to build the iron extractor to get more, but the Iron is buried. It'll cost me an extra iron to build the extractor to get to it. Thankfully there's iron in the location already that I can use, but if I had counted on it being here and brought one fewer iron then we'd have to go all the way back to the Vault to get more, wasting like 6 turns. I get the sense that this game is not actually very hard if you don't screw up, but the complexity of the game is such that it's easy to screw up - and indeed likely if you're not paying sufficient attention to what you know and what the possibilities are on a planetary layout. Incidentally, we can't get both the Iron and the Titanium on this planet due to the layout since you can't place buildings on the whited-out squares. At least it still works as a fuel base but that could have been where the Water was! The Fuel Base is online and slowly making fuel, but with plenty of time to go we should be able to recoup our fuel losses. The Spire is getting Methane from an orbital facility and will soon be making Elixir, but the big news is the abandoned ship! There's an Adroid on the abandoned ship that joins the Exiles. Problem is, he's all that's on the ship - and the ship is in poor condition, has no fuel and no engine. That said it's only Mass 1, like our scout ship, and this one can carry passengers so I can at least use it for both scouting and flying personnel around. I think that's a pretty good deal, so I'm going to abandon the Mass Cubic and take its engine and fuel so we can use this ship instead. Android Iatvolu, welcome to the team! Huh... the Android doesn't use faith, he uses 'Condition'. And he has to spend it every time he navigates a hazard. Condition doesn't come back so we'll keep using Humans for hazards. The Android / Human team scouts the innermost Hallowed planet. Good news on the layout, the Water is buried but we can bring enough Iron to fix that and still build a water extractor and fuel producer. It's feasible to build the Scriptorium here and then manufacture the Fuel to get back out. The Arch Myriad , our new scout ship, runs out of fuel just shy of crappy Fuel base. Fortunately this is an easy rescue mission. In 12 turns the Fuel base has made enough fuel to fully load one medium ship, I'll send it back to the Vault now to both rescue the scout and get supplies for the Scriptorium building mission. I've just now discovered there can be hazards on the planet's surfaces too! This planet sucks! I was feeling like we were going to cut the timing pretty close, so in addition to sending the Smoke Crater with supplies for the Scriptorium I also sent the Arch Myriad just to have an extra Exile there to help set up the base and make enough fuel to escape in time. This ends up saving the entire mission when I discover that I wasn't carrying enough fuel to even get to the planet with Smoke Crater - Arch Myriad has some to spare and we can transfer fuel before landing. Another near-disaster because my fuel calculations were off. The two ships land with only 8 turns to go, but with each Exile getting five actions I think we can pull this off. The second Scriptorium is built! The Scriptorium will be destroyed by the Gloom in less than ten turns, so I'm really not sure why we're building these.  Paganus has had a lonely but successful time building Elixir. He takes off with three full cargo holds and a couple artifacts. Cheli is off grabbing the Artifacts we scouted earlier so we should get a big Knowledge haul. Finally we manage to get a good haul of Elixir out of a system. With all the ship-moving around that I'm doing, our Android friend ends up stranded on the Fuel base making way too much fuel, just not much else that's useful that he can do there. Don't worry, we'll pick him up when Spire stops here to refuel. Incredibly it's only 2 turns before we're refueled and lifting off from the hallowed planet where the Scriptorium got built. 10 actions per turn (5 per exile) goes a long way. Everyone makes a pit stop at the fuel base on the way home to top off. Despite being 'Crappy' this fuel has been instrumental in our success in this system. We are bringing back so much fuel and Elixir that the Vault isn't going to have enough space to hold it all. I've built an additional ship, the Light Thirteen , just to have extra cargo space. The Mass Cubic would have been a much better name for a ship that sits around holding stuff. We now have 36 Elixir so in the final turns of this system I'm going to use it to raise the Exile's faith. This is more expensive than doing it after we lose faith getting to the next system but if I wait for the next system it costs time. Right now I have lots of elixir and I don't know how much time I'll need in the next place. We wave a final farewell to the Mass Cubic , left abandoned in this system. Once more into the dim starlight.... Our Android doesn't require Stasis to hibernate but he does lose 1 condition, so he won't be around forever. I'm halfway done with Scriptoriums so Iatvolu may well survive to victory. We've got a lot of knowledge - 50! in that system.  And we have some useful things to spend it on. Resource excavator 3 ensures that there won't be any resources denied to us because they're too deep. The Engine is the most efficient one we've seen and will make the Scout ship even more fuel efficient. I don't know if Gain one artifact when gathering will generate an extra one (which would be great) or just dig up two at once (which would be meh) but I'll take it in hopes of the former. The Veoetot system promises to be a different beast. Yes, it is very much a different beast. No planets at all. No Hallowed planet so no Scriptorium here. Each asteroid has one resource so we absolutely have to ship resources around to manufacture anything. Lots of actions in all areas of the system. I want to scout everything for artifacts. There's NO thrust requirements to land on anything so we can actually use that tiny new engine to move all of our ships around everywhere, even the biggest ones. We're low on Alloy so I'd like to make more in this system, even if combining three components will be a pain in the rear. This is also not a bad place to make more Elixir, there's SIlicon and Methane in the same row with no energy requirement to go between them. Going between asteroid rows uses up time so I'm looking for single-row manufacturing possibilities. Ok, we'll use both the big ships here then since we have to move cargo. Cheli will take the scout ship and look for artifacts after he sucks down a bunch more Elixir to pass the system hazards. One ship will work the outer belt and make Elixir, the other will dip deeper into the system and get the materials for Alloys. We'll just use existing Iron and Fuel stores for all this initially, and if we start to run low we'll hit an Iron / Water asteroid later for fuel / iron replenishment. And I suspect we'll need someone to sweep the system to pick up artifacts - actually maybe Chell should take a smaller cargo ship for scouting this time so he can get them as he scouts, the fuel costs won't be much worse in this environment. Asteroids are tiny . I hope I can put the Elixir manufacturing building on the same asteroid as at least one of the resources. On the plus side, an entirely 0-energy trip doesn't require any fuel at all. We won't burn much fuel moving resources around. Shipping minerals around isn't bad at all given the lack of need for fuel. We're gathering up a lot of materials for Alloy and Elixir production and Artifact discovery has been going very well. Cheli is about to return with 40 knowledge worth in just this trip. A full load of alloy back to the Vault by turn 10 means I think we're good to just gather some Titanium and Water with our remaining time and use it to build a couple more 8-slot ships for storage. Given its size the Vault's cargo hold isn't very big. The Elixir factory has to go on its very own asteroid and doesn't go up until there are 7 turns left - but with all the resources harvested and shipped these two will be churning out 8 elixir per turn. This is some serious Elixir manufacturing. And that becomes 12 per turn when Cheli, having cleared the system of valuable artifacts, shows up to help. We're headed back with 1 turn to spare. The Asteroid system is our most successful yet. No screwups to slow us down, massive Alloy and Elixir production, and a huge Knowledge haul. We actually get ahead of the game on faith loss and have plenty of Elixir left over. Two more 8-slot ships have been created just to hold all this extra stuff. Once more into the dim starlight... The Fifth system. Faleffet. Another system with a beacon. I wish I could zoom out further and see the entire system at once, its huge. Huge and hard to screenshot. Just put it together in your mind's eye. This system goes very deep, and features several double-time transitions from the outer system. It'll take a whopping 7 turns just to get to the inner planets so if we want to build a Scriptorium we have to be quick about it. We are good on just about every kind of supply material... except for basic Iron, the stuff you need to start building infrastructure. I drained our Iron supply for the Asteroid infrastructure and neglected to replenish it. We only have two now, and the only thing saving us from basically ending the game here is that locations with Iron will have an Iron already present, meaning that I can build the Iron harvester which itself costs three Iron. I'm going to be fine but if locations didn't already have free resources sitting around this game would be over. So, three main objectives here: Replenish Iron supplies, build the Scriptorium, get Artifacts. The Scriptorium will be a challenge. These are some brutal energy costs to get to the inner planets. The good news though is that there are two water planets down near the Hallowed planet, so if we can just get there we can manufacture fuel to get back out, this time we don't need to carry enough fuel for a round trip. First order of business - Cheli goes deeper into the system to scout for Artifacts. He's taking Portal Fifty-Nine since it proved so handy to just have cargo spaces ready for the artifacts when scouting last time. Everyone else heads for the very fortunately discovered water / iron outer planet to get fuel for the journey in and Iron to both replenish supplies and provide enough to build more infrastructure in the rest of the system. I spend a long time planning when entering a new system. Our Iron planet has a very generous location cache! We actually could have built an iron extractor here even if we had no iron left. The energy costs for the inner system are such that I think my best chance is to use a bigger ship with more space for fuel. Even though it's less efficient I can dedicate a lot more cargo to fuel space. With 27 fuel I think Spire has enough to go all the way to the inner system planets, and we can both harvest more Iron in this Iron / Water planet next to the Hallowed planet. It pays to not have to rely on the Hallowed planet for anything if you want that Scriptorium. And with the time it'll take to get in and out I want to start their journey early. We can hit the Beacon on the way back out. I don' t know if Hazard / artifact generation is random but this planet that Cheli had to navigate two level-4 hazards to get to rewards me with a 20-knowledge plant.  Excellent work Cheli! YAHTZEE I really hope I've got the fuel calculations right on this. Spire 's final descent into the inner system costs a whopping 12 fuel. Let's see, three fuel to land, three fuel to take off, two fuel to then get back to the Iron / Water planet... leaves us with one single fuel remaining. We have just enough fuel to land and build the Scriptorium first before we establish the fuel base. I prefer to do it that way so we can free up the cargo slots currently used by the Scriptorium materials. You know what Iatvolu, you have earned your place in the Exile. I give the Android the honor of constructing this one. That proves to be a mistake. This is absolutely the last time we let the Android write the Scriptorium entry. I was hoping to get both Iron and Fuel (Water) from this planet to take out of the inner system, and that isn't happening with this layout. Fortunately I think I can still get fuel out of it, and that will be good enough. With a fuel base up, Spire searches all the inner planets for Artifacts and comes away with a pretty great haul. This is going to be another big Knowledge system. Because the flights between planetary orbits are taking several turns in this system, I attempt to save time by having Smoke Crater come in from the outer fuel moon and deliver fuel to Cheli in Portal Fifty-Nine . Cheli drops off his artifacts with Smoke Crater and gets topped up on fuel so he can immediately fly further into the system from here rather than going back out first to refuel. Spire Hendecad (left) is on the way back to the vault. Behold, the dance of masterful logistics! Cheli finally reaches the beacon with 10 turns remaining. 4 alloy is not bad for the price of 'free'. Actually, even better, there's enough Titanium / Water here to just take it and land on the planet to make a fuel base. 6 water can turn into 18 fuel. The planet has some freezing temperature hazards but I can work around that. In the waning turns of the system, everyone works the Fuel base for additional fuel before we have to head out. Spire runs the Fuel and Iron (Not forgetting it this time!) back to the Vault. We burned a lot of fuel in this system but we'll still be well supplied for the next one. Two full stacks of Iron and plenty of fuel later and we're ready to go. I'm going to burn through a bunch of Elixir to get two exiles up to the max Faith for what could be the last system - if we CAN build the fourth Scriptorium, we will, and presumably win. Or at least 'end the journey'. Drink that Elixir like there's no tomorrow! Again, once more, into the dim starlight... We went crazy  on artifacts and got 160 knowledge. Sadly the ability choices aren't great so we're saving most of it. The water one is solid though, pretty much always need fuel! Feels like the systems are getting more difficult. I just had to deal with long travel times in the last one! It's actually not that bad, it's seven turns to get in-system like the last place and the energy costs are lower. We can do this. We can get there. It's time to cast efficiency to the wind. All five exiles are going to pile together into two ships and head down together to build the Scriptorium, and everyone will be present when it is built. This game has been quite a mental exercise. You really need to think about what your ship is going to carry to accomplish it's mission and pre-plan what you are doing. I've spent a ton of brainpower on logistics, primarily on entering and analyzing how to handle each system when we first arrive. Our last system is a nice change of pace - load up on enough supplies for a Scriptorium and a fuel base, just in case, and pack the rest of the cargo with fuel. The turns pass quickly as we do nothing but travel down together. The foundation laid. Paganus does the honors. The Final Scriptorium is built. Uh... does anyone want to rewrite the bit the Android did? No? Well, it wouldn't have been the same journey without our Android buddy, would it? Your victory is that your story lives on. Banished Vault was a really interesting game - very cerebral, and like nothing I'd played before. I'm ready for something less mentally taxing.

I follow Yogscast games on Bluesky, and they published this little number. Border Pioneer "is a pixel art city-building game that combines survival and defense elements." So, build a city, defend a city. Sounds simple enough. Apparently I start with an Adjutant to help me out. My classmate Steve will accompany me! Looks like it's a card-based town builder game with exploration. In the tutorial I have to 'explore' for six months. The king's envoy brings you some initial resources and your starting card deck. The cards so far are buildings and they cost and generate the various resources - houses cost food and generate people for instance. The resources are gold, food, hammer (used to build buildings) and population. Interesting, cards have a limited total number of uses, so one card might only let you place 1-2 farms and then it disappears. Building placement matters, your logging camps generate additional resources if they're next to trees. Fields generate more food for being next to each other so I'll want fields in a big clump. Between turns monsters appear so there's a tower defense thing going on, you also get military units to play around with and can buy more as cards. The attacking slimes do about as well as you might expect Jello to. I significantly mismanaged my food in the tutorial and have run out at the start of Month 4. Fortunately Steve the Adjutant's ability is to give me 200 food once if I run out, which saves me from, embarrassingly, failing at the tutorial.  I had assumed that the +42 food above was a NET change rather than just my food gain - the people are eating 64 per turn. I end up dismissing a couple soldiers to free up population to place more the fields, which slows food loss to the point where we can at least make it to month 6. That fixed, by the time month 6 rolls around we have a respectable little military that has no trouble with the tutorial boss. Slimes! More slimes! Time for the real thing! Looks like the 'campaign' is a series of discrete levels in the same format. Level 1-1, explore for 9 months (you don't really 'explore', just survive it seems). There's a skill tree for your character where you can unlock various benefits for future levels. This level is a little more complicated than the tutorial, the enemies have two routes into town. I'm closing one route off with a wall which should 'encourage' enemies to go the other way and fight at the left chokepoint, but if the route is too long enemies will try to get through the wall instead. I should have put the town hall a bit further left, it's actually got a very good ranged attack that can help in defending the town. I got a nice upgrade for 'sniper' towers from the first monster chest so I'm going to focus on getting as many of those as I can. And this Orchard is very much going to help with the food supply! I've been avoiding placing additional logging camps / mines because I don't have the food to sustain them. Oh nice, your units can't actually die! They just yell 'SOS' and run back to town for healing when they run out of HP. I don't actually end up getting many sniper towers but it doesn't matter, I now have a barracks that spews out a ton of little guards and I'm capping off this level's military with this juggernaut of a Heavy Support unit. At two months to go this should easily clear the level. Just to go a little crazy on my first run, I got 'Militia Conscription' which spawns a bunch of farmers - but statistically the militia are better than higher level guards?!? A whole lot better, in fact - can we have them join the military full time? Lv 12 Guard: 222 HP, 14 damage. Lv 9 Farmer: 369 HP, 27 damage. A mob of conscripts, backed up by professional infantry and mercenaries, with support from archers and fire and ice mages, led by a huge hulking bruiser in plate armor makes this a settlement the monsters will regret assaulting. And this is without an additional 12 guards that the Barracks throws out when the battle starts. I think the final enemy wave might outnumber us, but not by much! Ok, I MAY have misread how conscripts work and they MAY have all gone home before the battle actually happened. Glorious battle! The foes are mostly killed within seconds of stepping out of their portals. The loss of the conscripts makes no difference - but of course this is the first level. I'm playing on the second highest difficulty so I expect this won't be as trivial as we move forward. Victory is achieved, and I unlocked another Adjutant option, Thaars. Looks like he's a military unit, Steve was out there getting food but this guy will fight. The second level sees us rebuilding a town formerly destroyed by Goblins. There's some pre-existing defenses here so I'll defend using them, forward of the town. Thaars is a decent unit, probably worth about 3 regular guards even before you upgrade him. The addition of a medical tent prompts a change in tactics - now the main force will initially defend the first wall closer to the portals, then when a couple solders get wounded they'll run back to the medical tent to heal up and form a second line of defense with the towers. I start to plan my defenses around units recovering from their injuries. I got an event to open a chest in exchange for adding a couple enemy mages to the next wave, how bad could they really be? As it turns out, pretty bad! They're Necromancers and they keep summoning skeletons! The first defense line quickly shatters and the horde rushes through before most of the front-line units are healed. Thaars barely saves the day when he's healed up and I run him around behind the enemies to attack the wizards. By the time they fall the enemies have smashed all the second line towers and only a few archers and holding the remaining enemies back, but thankfully I discover that walls / towers get repaired after a battle. If you don't fully lose this game against a wave, you'll still be in decent shape - your defenses don't get worn down nor do your soldiers die. Food issues lead to some economic stagnation, which leads to a weaker military at the end of the scenario than the absurd strength we had for level 1. It's still enough to hold out using the fallback defense and we clear level 2. Level 3 - we must kill the Goblin King! The layout is interesting, looks like the enemies split initially but I can probably funnel them to one area. Also the mission is to kill the Goblin King 'By' month 12, so I might be able to take a crack at it early. he King did not show up early but I managed to get a rip-roaring economy and have turned that into a mighty military. Thaars leads a mercenary group up front since while mercs cost money every turn, they also earn you money for kills they get so this gives them the chance to pay for themselves. The stuff that gets past them gets munched by the regular army. On the Eve of Battle, Adjutant Thaars gives a rousing speech to the troops, but goes into perhaps too much detail about what exactly they are going to do to the Goblin King's corpse and the men get a little weirded out. The high priest blesses the war-weary soldiers. One battle remains. The Goblin King appears in the morning leading a mighty host! The battle rages for several seconds as the humans charge into their foes! The Goblin King tries to flee as his troops are slaughtered, but to no avail - he is cut down where he stands and the mission is complete. I unlocked a lot of additional Adjutant options! For this next level we're going to try Adjutant Fulmarion, in part because it says the cards will now come from a [Nature] deck instead of [Kingdom], so I'm looking forward to see what that means. Thaars was genuinely great but I have to at least try the others. This level switches up the challenge to specifically reach a large amount of food. I don't think I've ever cracked 300 food and usually don't have much of a food surplus, if any. Oh my, this is an interesting level shape... kind of like a, uh.... It's a decent level design but it could be bigger. Oh good, you also get a bonus of double food production so a surplus will be much easier. And the nature cards have plentiful food production. I just need to make sure I can defeat the monsters. Yeah, nature was a great choice - by the time the first monsters show up I'm already at +154 food production. Double food production makes the goal much more attainable than I first thought. I have a very small mobile force this time, the cages spawn some animals and I try to lure enemies into the center where Treants attack them. We're up to almost 500 net food a turn so I just need to hold out for a couple more months.  So animal cages and these druid-archer guys give me 'beast companions'. I cannot for the life of me determine what these animals are supposed to be. Are they dogs? Pigs? Bears? Food goal reached. One unexpected benefit of Nature is the presence of these magical wells, which both provide a lot of food AND give your units an instant healing effect after they run out of HP. With a lot of the wells your forces are quickly back in the front lines after being hurt. We'll give Adjutant Old Bob a shot for the next level. He turns more units into pikemen. Hopefully that's helpful against the Orcs we're going to face. Pikemen are excellent . They hit the enemies from further away AND push them back, meaning a big enough group of Pikemen generally doesn't get hit by melee enemies at all. Keep them at bay! Crushed it, onward! We've gotta kill an Orc Boss. Today's Adjutant will be Robin, who tells all the archers to shoot two arrows at once, which for some reason makes them hit their target less. It's probably fine, the arrows may well just hit other targets in a horde. This is an intensely forested level. You get a logging card to clear out more space and I may actually use it a bunch, but the trees should slow down monsters. My guys are having a bit of trouble holding back the enemy on their own, but we have a backstop of towers to help. Robin's ability applies to towers as well, so when the enemy gets within range it's a lot of arrows raining down on them. Between the ice towers and druids and knockback from Ballista towers the slower enemies can't make forward progress, but it takes me a long time to kill them. These battles in the woods are a slog for both sides. These have been my toughest battles so far but I think this Vengeful Militia ability is my key to victory. Even if the hordes do reach and destroy towers they'll turn into extra units. Old Bob's 'pikes for everyone' is probably a better combat option, but Robin's 'Throw Arrows Everywhere' is more fun to watch. Done! New Adjutant is Hermi, who pulls from Magic cards. I haven't been using spells much because they're 'one and done' cards. We're exploring near the Hell Pit, because that's a good idea. Now enemies can come from all sides. I've probably handled the right side better than the left - on the right I was able to use walls to funnel both spawn areas into one zone. On the left I've got two groups independently fighting. That done, the next mission to get 3000 gold here is proving quite challenging! I almost lost to the last horde of skeleton-archers that ripped both my units and buildings to shreds as the combined force just rained concentrated arrows on my stuff. This wave almost did me in. The next wave has even more archers, and I'm thinking of mounting a forward defense right at the portals this time to try to gank as many archers as I can before they form this arrow-death-mob. The forward defense is initially a complete disaster. Big tough tanky skeletons come out of the portals that I'm set up to guard, and all the archer skeletons pour out of the portals that I didn't guard! My troops get stomped. Fortunately the big skeletons end up crowding out the archers near the defense buildings, so the defenses there slow down the tanks while the archers are stuck behind them. That buys enough time for the troops to heal and mount a second attack against the archers in the back before they can smash the buildings. Gold scenario is complete, easily the most challenging so far - I came close to losing it about three times. Time to kill a Litch! I think Thaars is my favorite adjutant so far, it's nice to have a beefy unit right from the start so you can focus on economy for an additional month or so up-front. The game is about striking the right balance between food, production, spare population for troops, and military power, so having an early edge in military power gives you more time to ramp up production early. The enemies also come from all directions this level but I've figured out that walls 'encourage' enemies to move around them and you can set up a traditional tower-defense path if you have enough of them. Routing enemies is a bit tricky, if you overdo it they'll just attack your walls instead. Another near-catastrophe - my wall shenanigans backfire when I make the northern route just a titch too hard and the AI decides that some of the southern portals will no longer traverse all the way to the north chokepoint, instead breaking through the south wall. I didn't notice until they were half done destroying the housing and nearly at the town hall! This was too close for comfort. Pulling my troops back from the North to stop this resulted in the Northern wall towers being overwhelmed. Thankfully the troops were strong enough to pull it off in the end, barely. My major mistake this map was putting the town hall close to the right edge of my build area, thinking it's arrow could get some damage on enemies as they traveled up towards the main towers. Unfortunately this just makes the enemies mad at it and they charge directly at it, forcing me to defend it with a part of my force even against fully land-based waves, and unfortunately I can't move it. Just a couple months to go and I have a powerful army, so all is not lost, but this is making the battles harder for sure. Captain Jack, welcome to the resistance. A motley crew stands ready to oppose the lich and its minions. BRING IT YOU ASSH... oh, they got inside the west walls this time. I quite like the battles in this game because it behooves you to maneuver your troops around to hit things like enemy summoners while leaving groups of troops back at the base to hold off the hordes. I wish it had more options for actually organizing your troops, giving them hotkeys would be a much appreciated extra degree of control. The Lich refuses to die several times, summoning additional monsters when it does, and the horde breaks inside the compound from two directions, but by now my army is strong enough to hold off the attacks effectively. Eventually the Lich dies and stays that way. The next snowy area introduces cold which halves production unless you use Bonfires to keep it at bay. Warming all the buildings is necessary now. This area also features these mushroom-giants which take forever to kill and smash soldiers with every attack, but I have enough forces that he can't chew his way through everyone and make forward progress before people get healed and come back. My guys are still fighting him even as I post this. Next mission involves getting 9K production. There's a bunch of damaged mines that you can restore away from the main village. I'm going to try walling them off so monsters hopefully just avoid them and fight the monsters down by the village instead. Well this is a new problem - apparently your town can't get too big or the game starts to penalize you. Is civilian number 201 a compulsive eater? Ah well, we've got a great economy so we'll try to hold the population here to get to 9K production. That one took a long time, finished in month 16. All right, time to take on the Snowfield boss. At this point I'm finding the gameplay loop a bit repetitive, so if the end of the game weren't in sight I'd probably stop, but with only four levels to go we shall soldier onward! I will see it through to the end! An interesting map, with the opportunity to try something like a 'forward containment' of the monsters. One of the different enemy types are 'ghosts' which both fly over walls / terrain and can only be attacked when they become visible some distance from the spawn portals, so I detached this little 'Ghost Patrol' force to handle those while the meatgrinder smashes corporeal foes. This proved unnecessary as the ghosts actually fixated on the barricades at the chokepoint and attacked the same area as normal foes did, so for this map I can just keep building up a Death Star of a defense area with both towers and troops. A small wall keeps funneling all my foes to the left. I keep a small force north in case ghosts or something get past the main defenses. The addition of a Fortress makes the chokepoint nigh-impregnable. The Mush-Mother wreaks havoc with my impregnable fortress by carving a path through the terrain to the north! Gah! When I acknowledge that my plans were entirely dependent on the enemy voluntarily walking into the worst place for them it does feel like my own fault. It's touch and go as the troops try to defeat her without the benefit of towers. She almost smashes the town hall before she goes down. Quit bitching Thaars, we won! The Final Adjutant comes straight from Game of Thrones, the Mother of Dragons! I know who's coming with me now! Time to take on the 'Hell Pit' The Dragon is cute and fun but he relies on directly-activated abilities, meaning to be effective you pretty much personally have to run him yourself while in combat. This is counterproductive when you need to be managing your overall force and be on the lookout for where enemies are breaking through a defense somewhere else. I can easily see myself losing because I'm trying to focus on this guy while some monster group gets to the town hall. As such we're going back to our boy Thaars to finish this out. The final battle approaches! The last level features 'multiple routes' for the enemies to approach from but aside from flying enemies it's pretty easy to route them to a single chokepoint. You'll get the most out of towers if they can all defend one place together. A group of Pikemen delay the hordes from one portal set while the rest of the army smashes the other. This delaying tactic effectively concentrates my force against half the enemy horde at a time. Demons file into the meatgrinder. The battles are getting dense enough that they are slightly slowing the framerate. This might be partially my fault, I upped the monster limit in game options. The medical tents are very busy! On the Eve of battle, the circle of magi debates on how best to seal the demon. The battle starts off with a group of conscripts trying to hold off the demons around a Purification tower, delaying them as long as possible while in the Demon's influence. I hadn't noticed prior to this that unlike other units, conscripts don't go back to heal during the battle, but when they're slaughtered to a man it's pretty obvious. Unlike my other immortal troops these poor farmers died to the last man. Sorry guys! The final boss is here! The Demon... Eye! It's... more of a mouth with  an eye, really. Most of the bosses do something when they die, and THIS one resets the entire final wave! I'd been pushing the monsters back when he showed up and this results in a mad scramble back to our original positions. It's the boss plus everyone I just beat! In the confusion Thaars decides to try to fight them by himself. He's running to the hospital shortly after this. But the chokepoint and the army are strong, and the enemy doesn't break through. No close calls at the end, we got this. Victory! Wait, I'm now the Duke of Exploration and I can just claim ANY unclaimed lands? Guess I'll just claim every unclaimed land for myself then? Thank you, your Majesty!

I'm going into Blue Prince knowing nothing other than it's an 'adventure puzzle game' and people seem to think very highly of it. This place is huge! And remote! My great grand uncle has left me his huge estate in his will, with one condition: Seems like a jerk move to make me find room 46 in a 45-room house. On receiving this note I think I'd just build another room? That would make number 46 in a 45 room estate, done and done! I guess I'm supposed to find the question mark room? And... that's it. We begin. Our hero is dressed up to explore the jungle rather than a mansion. It's first-person game, but I can only make so many room transitions per day - I lose a 'step' every time I walk through a doorway. I accidentally cost myself two 'steps' by initially stepping outside and back inside before finding this note. I guess this is a reasonable rationale for why I can't just bring a bunch of stuff in. It also prevents me from just building a 46th room, so that plan is out the window. Also, the layout of the house changes every day! Trying to make a map will be useless! But I do have a self-updating map, and there's one other room on it. I'm currently at the bottom in the Entrance Hall. Choosing a door lets me pick what room the next one will be from a selection. The house isn't just changing, I'm basically building it each day as I walk around. My first two rooms are a bedroom.. and then adjoining that, a guest bedroom that's also a dead end, so guests and hosts can have the.... unique experience of having to pass through the host's bedroom whenever they go to bed or get up (or need to use the bathroom in the middle of the night). This is going to make for some awkward mornings. I chose those rooms because they get me extra steps, but they also created a dead end and now I'll have to backtrack. In the Guest Bedroom I found a clue to solving a puzzle in the Billiards room. I take a moment to step outside and explore around the house, and high on the 'implausible insurmountable obstacle' list is this gate with a coded padlock protecting this little orchard and a shed. Darn, if only this gate were not locked, I could get in there! Feels like these simplistic art pieces on the walls may be clues for something. The art feels a little out of place in such a nice house. You can find items that will be used in later puzzles / games, I imagine once I'm out of steps I'll lose it and have to find it again. I wonder if any given item always appears in the same room. Pick up everything you can! The key turned out to be for these great little logic puzzle boxes, you get to open one. I'm getting three kinds of resources - keys, gems, and money. Some of the room placements have gem requirements, and I saw (but didn't place yet) a shop where I presume the coins are spent. Oh good, the Antechamber will be easy to get into. Actually the Antechamber will not be easy to get into. Guess this means the Antechamber is locked and I have to use levers to unlock it. I screw up day 1 by assuming that this weight room effect will only halve my remaining steps if I step into the room. That assumption was incorrect - just placing it robs me of 13 steps. Locked doors get more frequent as I approach the antichamber and I run out of keys, and soon will run out of steps. Thus endeth day 1. I got close but failed to reach the Antechamber. Day 2 is cut short by me having to leave in the middle of the run, and finding out you can't save in the middle of a run and just have to exit. Happily there doesn't seem to be a penalty for doing so other than you having to end the run, so I don't think there's any problem with taking a lot of attempts to accomplish something in Blue Prince. Some day 3 breakthroughs: I place an Observatory room which you can use to see constellations that will give you bonuses on a run (this game appears to be a repeating mass puzzle, sort of in the vein of Outer Wilds?). The Observatory features a puzzle to set up the telescope but it only needs to be solved once. I also solve a boiler room puzzle, which lets you provide an adjacent room with power, and the next room I place gets the power running through it, so there's something we need to provide electricity for but I don't know what. If this is how electricity works then I'm afraid plumbing and sewage are a lost cause. Looks like one of the Sinclair relatives may have ended up stealing jewels? Come to think of it there have been quite a few gems just lying around the house... New day - looks like I keep whatever star resource the observatory gave me, so I'll try to place it every day if I can. The clocks in the Den all show the same time, and time progresses over the course of the day. Oooh, on Day Four I managed to exit the house via the garage and unlock a gate forever! So you can make permanent changes that help you in the future. This unlocks access to a little stand-alone room outdoors with it's own separate room set, cool. Hopefully I don't need a bomb shelter anytime soon. Another bonus - I've unlocked an 'allowance' which gives me some money at the start of each run. Which means this is a roguelite, the gameplay loop repeats but you can permanently improve your starting state. The Game's publisher is 'Raw Fury', which is quite the contrast with such a sedate experience of spending your time walking around an house with nobody else in it. I've discovered the 'Laboratory' room which modifies the house rules for the day as well as a machine in here that requires power, so I need to achieve a house setup that features both rooms and successfully route power to it. The experiments can yield significant rewards, doing things like awarding extra steps for placing rooms. Even after I provide this thing with power I'm going to have to figure out what to do with the switches. I also found a gear wrench that will let me permanently adjust the rarity of some rooms. This would help with the house-drafting game in the long run except I'm not exactly sure what I should  do with it because I'm not clear on what rooms I want to see more of right now. Ah well, if I screw things up hopefully I can find it again and do better next time. Ah, this is also a sort of deckbuilding game. I found a room which will permanently add an option to the house room deck, and it has a strategy guide. Can I remove rooms from the house forever? Probably not, some red rooms are pretty rough. I'm often unsure of whether objects, drawings and diagrams in any given room are clues or not, but this definitely is - there' s a room called the Great Hall with seven locked doors and keys are a precious resource. Knowing the layout behind the doors will help me use those limited keys efficiently. Look Timmy, Santa brought you a massive steel safe for Christmas! "Thanks Santa I always wanted one!" My best run yet, I reached the Antechamber but all three entrances were sealed off. I did find a broken lever so I probably have to find where to fix said lever and then pull it to open it. Just getting there is not enough. Sweet merciful heaven the pictures! The pictures are a clue to a message! And the pictures actually depend on the location in the blueprint layout, not the room they're in! In reference to that puzzle, I can't come up with what words these two images represent. Most of the others however I've been able to do and once you have enough of the words you can fill in the blank with context. flight? airplane? paint? planet? Another permanent unlock! I had to draft the laboratory next to the boiler room to give it power, so after I pulled a boiler room and a re-roll for room selection I used it and got lucky. Powering the lab and solving a puzzle in it netted me a new outdoor area. And I pretty much lucked into this but I accidentally supplied power to the furnace and it forged a key for me, so when I can obtain power I should be powering rooms to see what they do. Normally there isn't anything useful in the furnace room. Interesting, I got strange revelations from a coin-operated fortune teller! Trippy! They dial up the creepy on this guy. Is this a metaphor or the future? We're going heavy on the metaphor. Poor cat. Which is where, exactly? I finally managed to do what intrepid climbers can only dream of - surmount a waist-high locked gate. Doing so provides a big boost to my steps each day. You normally start with 50 so this is a 40% increase in steps. And this book I found in the orchard's shed feels important. I'll try to place garden rooms on rich soil and see what happens. I've been keeping a notepad file to write stuff down because a lot is going on. I won't share the whole thing because there are some puzzle solutions, but here's my current list of goals: Find the East / West levers. Repair the broken lever in the greenhouse. Get into the Antechamber. Find the key to the Foundation door. Open Safe in Office, identify bust it is under. Open Safe in Study, determine if D8 Black King is relevant to it. Find remaining safes. Find safe deposit key and open deposit box. Find use for Microchip. Find and turn on last gas faucet. Read more library books. Drain rooms other than the pool. Get Network password for house terminal. Get Network Password for Blackbridge terminal. Reach 4th Grade and beyond. Find music sheets 5-7. Place Greenhouse on Rich Soil. Why is this mountain all fucked up? I can see it in the distance from the front of the house. There has to be a reason for it right? This blog and the screenshots I've taken have been invaluable, I snapped pics of all these in the Chapel when I first found them days ago, and now I've stumbled upon the puzzle for it. The roman numerals clued me in to these being relevant to a puzzle somewhere else. And that puzzle led to a whole new area! There's an entire Catacombs under us! I've been assuming that the levers to the Antechamber are somewhere in the house, and one is- the broken lever in the Greenhouse (which I still haven't repaired or pulled because I have yet to get a house layout with both the Greenhouse and the Coat Check where I stored the lever - one of the frustrating aspects of the game is that you may want to do something but it might take you several runs to get the room combination to do it). I found a document that mentioned the Greenhouse as well as an East and West lever so I assumed there were just those three somewhere in the house, but this reveals there's a North lever as well, and the other levers may well not be in the house at all. As with many puzzle game maps this one is ripped into pieces and scattered around. The Resevoir is down here so I'm going to have to get to the Pump room in the house and do some water level stuff to proceed further, but this was a huge discovery - probably the biggest single leap I've made in a run. I assume that if I lower the water level a little I'll be able to get in the boat and take it across, and there's a nearby flooded stairwell that I assume I need to lower the water level by much more to traverse. It's back to the Pump room if I can find it again. I found the West lever and opened one of the Antechamber doors! From this is looks like I'll have to find and use that North lever too to make a path beyond. At last, one entrance to the Antechamber is open! A couple runs later I manage both Greenhouse and Coat Check together and I unlock the South door - unfortunately the West door didn't stay open! I'll have to get into the Antechamber the same run I pull a lever, but at least I don't need all three. A couple runs later I finally manage to both open a door and make it inside. I already know which door this unlocks, I just hope I have enough steps left to get back there. I'm really enjoying this game, it's very cerebral, and it's a very unusual mashup of genres which lets me take my time and think about things. But every so often, our protagonist would be better served to not bother with whatever puzzle is required to do something, and just clamber over the waist-high gate, or in this case... SWALLOW YOUR ARISTOCRATIC PRIDE AND CLIMB ON A COUPLE BOXES SO WE CAN SEE WHAT THE BUTTON DOES. Ok, I got to the button. The solution actually was climb on the boxes - but not here, where you can just do it, no. It involved four pushable carts that can be lowered and raised in order to make a path. I found the North lever, same run! The way through the Antechamber is open, and the door is number 46! Is this victory? There's a lot of goals I still haven't accomplished. Victory indeed! My winning house is not one I would have designed. It looks like it's going to hit itself with a hammer. There's definitely more to discover in the game, and there are hints that there's a 'true ending' if you solve more things, but for me I think I'm good to stop here at the normal one. I've enjoyed my time with it and I'm ready to move on. There are, after all, more games to play. In particular: I never found the passwords for the computers (which galled me the entire time! Where / what are they?!?), there's a microchip-related door to unlock, and there's a fourth permanent change to the Mansion that I never activated. But who cares? I inherited an entire Mansion that I'm terrified of ever sleeping in.