We’re about to quit the Soul Cairn for good, and I’m very happy to say we’re going to miss a few chunks of it. There’s several things in this level novel enough to talk about without really being compelling enough to do. Apart from being stitched up with dental floss, I’d say the defining characteristic of Battlespire is that it never ruins an interesting idea by thinking it through.
For example: remember those annoying, immortal, ceaselessly pestering “wraths”? According to the wiki, there’s a scroll somewhere in the level that teaches you a phrase to kill them instantly. I was surprised to learn this. I was even more surprised to learn that I’d found that scroll and apparently made no note of any magic wrathtaking incantations. It could be that the information in the scroll was poorly presented, it could be that I noticed it but didn’t get a chance to apply it, or maybe it’s related to how after several hours exposure to Battlespire I lose the ability to read or perform simple math and must be jump-started with a season of Sesame Street.
Anyway, I didn’t miss much by not figuring out the killphrase. The same strategy that worked on the wraths in the first half of the level–running away from anything ghost-shaped–remains applicable. Sometimes it’s pleasant for an RPG to reward lazy gormless cowardice.
We’re past the most trying parts of the level anyhow. After the thrilling jumping puzzle in the last chamber, most of this area’s real estate is dedicated to semioptional loot nooks. These rooms are stuffed with treasure-coffins you need to answer riddles to get into. So, you know, in case you were wondering why there was a placard that was full of coffin numbers and ominous nouns earlier…actually, if you’re ever “wondering” about something in this game, please distract yourself as soon as possible. Wondering about this game is always a bad call. Worst case scenario, you might find yourself playing it.
I like riddles. I even mildly chided the game for having such easy riddles earlier. Well, depending on how you see it, now’s either the time for me to eat crow or for me to start throwing fistfuls of hot cripsy-breaded crow at the developers. This slate of riddles are such that I am genuinely glad the answers are available. Here’s a little sample for you:
Alive I smell awful.
Dead I smell wonderful.
What am I?
This seems less like a riddle and more like a Cards Against Humanity prompt, but after ten minutes of guessing I finally went back and checked my screenshot of the answer key. So what about you? Can you guess the solution?
Give up?
It’s “a pig.”
E’en now, when each day I fill my cup of lonesomeness and drink greedily, my lover’s ghost abides. I remember her lips, crisp and heavy as plums in season; I remember her voice, a crystal goblet that would tinkle and beautifully crash, an instrument in the hands of a master. Her touch was warm as nostalgia and she smelled like a dead pig.
Fuck off, Bethesda.
Oh, and there’s an honest-to-goodness vehicle section in this game. At some point you come to a boat moored at a dock that needs to be rowed down a tunnel, docked at a small island with a treasure chest and an important scroll, and then rowed back again. It’s not a cutscene or an on-rails aside, either; you get into the boat and can point it in any direction. It’s a critical freedom for anyone roleplaying a character that gets stuck in walls a lot.
You can’t attack, shift around, or (as far as I can tell) disembark prematurely while riding the boat, so it’s really just a gondola from one room to the other. You might say it’s a slower water-based form of door, and I don’t really have a counterargument to that. I think it’s interesting that somebody apparently insisted on putting it in anyway.
You might technically argue that (with the flimsy exception of the cart in Daggerfall) the rowboat is the only pilotable vehicle in Bethesda’s catalog. I mean, I don’t know for sure–there could be a little red wagon in the next level–but I’m certainly drawing a blank on examples from other games. Even Daggerfall, which introduced purchasable sailing ships, constrained its nautical content to the pulse-pounding thrill of standing on a bare silent deck alone while going nowhere in particular.
(Remember, kids: the primary difference between early access titles and old-school boxed releases is that something in early access might get updated.)
It’s soon pretty clear where the exit is. In this room are a couple of energy-blasting crooked crystal pillars which can be individually triggered to shoot at each other. Also, there’s an underwater sigil you can jump onto which teleports you to the roof of a shack where there’s several unlabeled slots that it turns out fit some tubes secreted hidden-object style above head height in some remote crannies of the level. Once the hidden objects are put into their hidden holes all you need to do is use the door of the shack and type in the correct proper name for the next level, learned by reading an unlabeled scroll, and you’re away. Type in the wrong name and you die. Obviously.
And then we’re off! Next stop, the Shade Perilous. How perilous is it? Just a shade.
NEXT WEEK: ACTUALLY THAT MIGHT BE AN OVERSTATEMENT
A Star is Born
Remember the superhero MMO from 2009? Neither does anyone else. It was dumb. So dumb I was compelled to write this.
Steam Summer Blues
This mess of dross, confusion, and terrible UI design is the storefront the big publishers couldn't beat? Amazing.
Batman: Arkham City
A look back at one of my favorite games. The gameplay was stellar, but the underlying story was clumsy and oddly constructed.
Are Lootboxes Gambling?
Obviously they are. Right? Actually, is this another one of those sneaky hard-to-define things?
Grand Theft Railroad
Grand Theft Auto is a lousy, cheating jerk of a game.
You just made a C. S. Lewis pun, I’m onto you Rutskarn….
Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. That’s Narnia business.
I don’t know which is more beautiful: that pun, or the smell of a dead pig on a summer’s day.
So would you say you rely on the glitches to thwart foes?
That depends. Are there copious amounts of barbecue sauce involved?
(with the pig, not the pun)
Aslan as it doesn’t become a contest.
I think no apologetics are necessary.
Is that a literary reference? I Dawn Treader lot, you see.
You’ve already Screwtape-d that up!
These puns! I need Out of the (Silent) Planet!
It’s almost like there are a pair-o-lands-ra here; one inhabited by people who actually seem to *like* puns for some unfathomable reason, and one inhabited by people who really really don’t.
Maybe we’ll just have to wait until we have faces to figure out who’s who…
I admit, I am rather Fawn-ed of the puns.
Someone at bethesda clearly projected their love of bacon onto their target audience.
As well as demonstrating their clear incomprehension of how bacon works. There’s a bit more involved than “pig, but dead”.
Yeah, but it’s a riddle. Are you also going to complain that eggs aren’t boxes, because they are round?
I think it says something that when Ruts revealed the answer, my reaction was along the lines of “Haha, now I get it!”, and I’m a frikkin’ vegetarian.
To be fair, this is something I also do :)
And has never been near a dead pig pre-baconizing. OH DEAR GODDESS, THE SMELL! The sewer backing up into our basement for a week in the summer (complete with sewer flies) was less offensive than that pig.
I am forever grateful that my brain did not associate that smell with pork/bacon.
“You might technically argue that (with the flimsy exception of the cart in Daggerfall) the rowboat is the only pilotable vehicle in Bethesda's catalog.”
I don’t know. I distinctly remember piloting World War I era tanks in Oblivion and Skyrim. You know, cumbersome to maneuver but relatively impenetrable by the time frame’s standards. And prone to technical failure if you try to do anything but navigate in a straight line on flat terrain.
Oh no wait, those were horses.
I dunno, since they have that coupled with incredible mountain climbing skills, I’d say it’s like a WWI era tank combined with a mountain goat.
The Elder Scrolls: One.
10/10 would buy.
One of my favorite Morrowind mods was a sailable ship that also had a (pretty sizable) cabin you could decorate. When I got Bloodmoon, I heard the rumors about the island to the north-west of the island, and I *sailed my ship* there and was able to dock it just off the shore of the small East Empire Company outpost there, and head to shore to start the expansion (later I moved the ship closer to the town you build).
That was always one of the more awesome moments I had in a TES game – a really good third-party mod that I could use to access later developed official content, because they made that later content (unlike Tribunal and the future expansions to Skyrim and Oblivion) part of the overall geography of the game.
Fond memories.
I bet that this boat would be pretty damn fantastic with Tamriel Rebuilt. I am going to need to track it down.
I don’t know any of the other riddles, but that one isn’t particularly bad. “dead I smell wonderful” immediately got me thinking of food. Figuring out which food isn’t too hard. The best known foods for smelling good are generally bread, cookies, and bacon. Neither of the first two really fit the alive part, but a living pig does, so there you are.
Really, I’d even say cow would work, but pigs/bacon are more known for the smell.
Oh, and yeah. Horses certainly qualify as vehicles.
Well the point is that “dead pig” isn’t bacon. If it was just dead pig meat that smelled delicious, I could get it, since some amount of preparation may be implied.
Maybe I just don’t hang around bacon lovers, but that riddle applies to any farm animal, of which pig comes to mind about fifth. Riddles with many viable solutions but only one correct one are not fun.
Oh right, all the food product names would work too. ‘Ham’, ‘pork’, ‘bacon’, ‘beef’, ‘steak’, ‘mutton’, ‘a roast’.
Plus abstract stuff like ‘a flower’ because you have to kill it to remove it from its environment and it’ll grow out of poop.
Horses are not “vehicles” in the proper sense of the word. From a game design perspective, they behave like “vehicles”, but the dictionary definition sez it has to be a machine.
Has the definition of vehicle changed in the last six months? Because that definition doesn’t say anything about a machine, it just says
Also, I’d love to see you prove that a horse isn’t a machine, especially considering how definition 2a of “machine” is “a living organism or one of its functional systems”.
I too figured out they were talking about food. And then I arrived at pig by intersecting the set of animals that are proverbially stinky and a set of animals that we normally eat.
Ooo, well, looks like you’ve got a box, and another box, and an ENORMOUS lasagna.
I lol’d
I’d say the power armor in Fallout 4 could be considered a pilotable vehicle. It is something with an animation for climbing in and out of it.
Horses in Skyrim and Oblivion have animations for getting on and off, though.
Looking at this sort of fits my theory that Morrowind was as “unique” and “exotic” as it was in part because they chose to fill it with things they could render effectively. They were stuck with people and those didn’t look good, but otherwise, the mushooms, pyramids, and weird blobby or flappy monsters were all things that the tech could handle.
They couldn’t have made skyrim creatures look good and there’s proof enough of that when you get to Bloodmoon and look at their attempts at real world creatures.
So it was creativity born from limitations. I’m not knocking it. It often produces good work.
I think this is what Chuck Jones meant by “disciplines.” He enforced restrictions on himself to think creatively, which was important because pretty much anything could happen in a Looney Tunes cartoon.
Mythbusters actually did a bit where they left a dead pig in a car for two months, and the resulting stench and destruction (due to rot and maggots) was so bad that the damage couldn’t be repaired and the car had to be salvaged for scrap parts.
Dead pig does not smell good.
I’m probably not the first person to realize the double punctuation in the logo of this series, am I?
One of those is the dot for the i.Which one?Now thats a mystery.
But the letters all appear to be capitals, so there won’t be a dot on the ‘I’.
(And I’d not noticed the double dot until bropocalypse pointed out).
Lies!
I’ve only ever seen the capital I with a dot in Turkish, in which i with and without the dots are different letters with different sounds, and hence there is also a need to distinguish the capitalised versions. But you’d only find the dotted version as the first vowel in a word, so BATTLESPIRE would use a dotless ‘I’ in that position anyway.
Yay, the six weeks I spent hanging around with Turkish speakers has finally found a use :)
It’s all caps, so neither of the above?
Perhaps it’s not short for ‘versus’ after all. Vertically searches? Seems perhaps a little overliteral. Violently seduces? No, it was more the other way around, if anything.
Valiantly suffers?
ViviSects.
“… and she smelled like a dead pig.”
You have the delicate soul of a poet, Rutskarn.
wonder if they meant burnt pig?
I realize this is like 4 years old at this point, but in the first Elder Scrolls game, Arena, there was a vehicle in a single dungeon. A small boat that you could row through about half the floor. The floor had a ton of water with random islands and stops along the edges, despite being underground beneath a forest.