T w e n t y S i d e d

I’ll spare you a recap of what’s going on in the Scufflescaffold, because this wizard I found bravely cowering in a hidden chamber has furnished a fabulous one. Take it away, Clarentavious.

So some old man’s yelling at me–in “very small words”–to go find his chambers and get a bunch of McGuffin plates spinning. Which is a pretty good recap, and it certainly jogs my recollection of how much I hate this wizard. I do have a few follow-up questions:

Where. Your. Quarters?

Are. Legs. Broken?

Considering. I’m. Undergraduate. Why. You. Make. ME. Find. YOUR. Quarters. Fix. YOUR. Problem.

Is. Condescension. Coping mechanism. For. Atrophied genitalia?

Oh, what’s that, Clarence? Since all this game’s dialogue is prewritten, you have no way of responding to my shitty antagonistic statements? Wonder what that feels like.

Anyway, this doesn’t materially affect my approach, which is to continue straining the labyrinth for mission-critical bullshit. I’ve now filled in enough of the mostly-useless map that I can at least get an idea of where to look next, in between frustrating jumping puzzles and scuffles with the locals.

I learn something new and baffling every other time I get into a combat. Remember how I mentioned dremora throw balls of magical explosive energy? Remember how I mentioned they’d sometimes accidentally get enemies or themselves in the blast radius in their fruitless attempts to kill me with energy I’m immune to? It turns out that wasn’t what was happening at all. Like most tourists, I’ve shot my mouth off without really understanding the intricacies of dremora culture.

My first clue that something else is going on came when I kited the above monster. In my attempt to get him one-on-one I edged inside the detection range of a dremora–waiting patiently, alone, with sword drawn. He twitched toward me–instantly registered the presence of an intruder, turned to the nearest wall, and began blasting himself with head-height bursts. I was so taken aback I didn’t take a screenshot, not that I would have captured anything but special effects and dremora-induced dremora agony. Please keep in mind that none of his nukes were even kind of in my direction, nor the direction of any other living creature. It killed him approximately four times faster than I could have reached him. Besides his eyebrows, I have no idea what was going through his mind.

Clearly there’s something going on here. I’ll be sure to ask the next dremora that doesn’t flash-fry his face off what that is.

Nothing that fights in melee is much of a hassle as long as you’ve got room to maneuver. Bethesda never did get around to fixing a quirk of their 2.5D combat: as long as you can move faster than opponents, you can carefully backpedal at such a pace that you can hit your opponents and they can’t hit you. It’s not idiot-proof, but even when done crudely it turns impossible fights into fair ones and fair fights into routs. Once, in Daggerfall, I put down a few hundreds city guards in my daring level 1 heist of a Formal Brassiere, because that game was a Venn overlap of horny and stupid.

This is a funny engine for RPGs and roguelikes: strategy and skill and level don’t factor in unless you really want them to. Either a challenge can be cheesed to the point that it’s trivial or the game’s so glitched or obtuse that no tactic can save you.

I come across a room of floating platforms and walkways, which is the five by five room with a locked chest of the Battleverse. At the end of it is a wooden elevator situated over a pool of lava. I’ll let my dremora friend explain its function.

I take the elevator up. There is a handful of chumps.

I deal out a handful of lumps. Lumps not pictured.

Then, after ascertaining that there is nothing useful in any of the manifold chests or bags in this room, I save. Then I wait for the elevator to come back. And wait. And, uh, wait some more.

…

Uh-oh.

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.