T w e n t y S i d e d

So after last week’s fun, painless, and intuitive teleportation process, I’m now standing in the “Shade Perilous.” So far every other place I’ve gone has been named for how much it’s going to kill me, so maybe I’m not as scurred as I ought to be.

Time for an in-game story update! Gather the wee ones and cuddle around Grandma Cahmel’s rocking chair as I regale you with another classic tale of actual rather than assumptive narrative. You can tell which is which because one’s broken and the other one’s just complicated.

As you may dimly recall, the one living humanoid still in the mix is a woman named Vatasha Trenelle. She’s left various notes indicating she’s shadowing the invading party and seeing what happens. Anyway, this is what happens.

It’ll be a bit of a shame to see her go, because she was a novice who was, like us, putting it all on the line in a desperate situation. And she probably had pants when she showed up today, so that puts her one above us on professionalism. If she was a little bit better at exploiting bugs she’d probably be the main character.

Whoop, gotta go, the level’s greeter is on fire.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Ruts vs. Battlespire CH19: Hot, Cold, and Hott”

Rutskarn is a writer, author, wordsmith, text producer, article deviser, prose architect, and accredited language-talker. If you enjoy his contributions to this site you could always back his Patreon.

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.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Ruts vs. Battlespire CH18: Voyage of the Yawn Treader”

Rutskarn is a writer, author, wordsmith, text producer, article deviser, prose architect, and accredited language-talker. If you enjoy his contributions to this site you could always back his Patreon.

So according to my map, those watery tunnels of questionable hazard have brought me to…Somewhere in the Battlespire. I don’t know what I expected, but a guy can hope.

To be more specific, “Somewhere” is a cavern full of unkillable wraiths, projectile spam, impassable magically-locked gateways, and wandering skeletons. None of them are faster than you, and none of them are worth fighting, so it’s not threatening so much as very unfriendly. If Tamriel had a mall, and a Christmas for it to be two days away from, this is what it would feel like.

You know how in the original Doom you would come through a portal or locked door into a demon carnival and be thrust into a lunging, strafing, exhilarating struggle for survival? This area lets me imagine Doom without the speed or fun combat or power fantasy.

Did you get the joke? It’s that the people who made this game own Doom now.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Ruts vs. Battlespire CH17: Super Spirio Bros”

Rutskarn is a writer, author, wordsmith, text producer, article deviser, prose architect, and accredited language-talker. If you enjoy his contributions to this site you could always back his Patreon.