Rutskarn vs. Battlespire CH30: Through the Sucking Glass

By Rutskarn Posted Wednesday Oct 12, 2016

Filed under: Lets Play 31 comments

At great personal cost and after many salt tears, I’ve passed the fifth level of Battlespire. At last that purgatorial desert of corruption, pain, and empty fugue-lives falls behind me; ahead is the Promised Land, a garden metropolis where savegames may be plucked from hanging vines and death means nothing at all. I strike my first new save in weeks, its name reflecting my summery mood.

I will say, my first glimpse of level six doesn’t sing “long-awaited paradise.” I see broad canyons choked with fog, stretching out into smaller trickles that bubble into mobbed-out dead ends. Level design is communication, and right now I’m hearing loud and clear, “we’re going to give you a few moments to get your breath before a carny standing offscreen throws in fistfuls of mooks.”

Speaking of things the game dumps on you long after you could reasonably want more of it, you know those half-naked ladies who’ve been attacking me for a few levels? Well, apropos of nothing, one of them is now trying to Seduce me.

Jeez, I don't know about this, lady. Scoliosis isn't sexually transmittable, right?
Jeez, I don't know about this, lady. Scoliosis isn't sexually transmittable, right?

I guess I must be really sexy or something, that this Seducer Oathkin has taken a sudden innocent interest in my mortal jank. “Oh, I just…love mortal boners. They’re so, uh, quaint. It’s really sexy how inert and three-dimensional they are. And they only last, like, eight hours. So how many of your penises are erect right now?”

The most subversive, mature, and genre-defying thing that could possibly happen here would be if we had a mutual attraction that culminated in a casual but respectful and overall pleasurable encounter. We could make each other breakfast, watch the morning news, discuss our unexpected shared love of knitting patterns based on TV shows, and exchange secondary e-mail addresses before going about our lives. Or resuming beating each other to death. Whichever.

Anyway, we’ll never know. I’m just enough of an embittered cynic that when a busty seducer demon suggests we do the frick in the middle of a war zone, the main thing she arouses…is suspicion. I politely turn her down, and then she gets stuck in a wall. So I guess it wouldn’t have worked out after all. All my family and career opportunities lie outside this particular wall.

Not the weirdest way I've seen someone handle rejection.
Not the weirdest way I've seen someone handle rejection.

So there’s these big, impressive, elaborately furnished gates between me and the rest of the level. I have no key to open them, and discover nothing in the way of relevant buttons, levers, or switches lodged in the countryside. Of course, that’s me being a dumb-dumb. I’m sure somebody as perspicacious as yourself will have no trouble figuring out how to open the door. I’ll give you a hint: everything I need is in this next screenshot. Take your time; this is the internet.

'Green-ness? Portraits. Pixels. A dumb hat. The eighteenth century paradigm of <em>architecture terrible.'</em>
'Green-ness? Portraits. Pixels. A dumb hat. The eighteenth century paradigm of architecture terrible.'

Well? Think you’ve got the answer?

…seriously?

I don’t mean to be rude, but don’t think maybe that’s a bit stupid?

Well, sorry, I’m just saying–I mean, that would sort of come out of nowhere. How would I be supposed to figure that out?

Well, no.

Uh-huh.

I mean, sure, I guess it’s possible. God knows anything’s possible in this game, but…you know what? Fine. Let me hit “use” on that one specific pole for no reason. Now, we–

Well, I’ll be damned. The giant pole turned out to be a log that wasn’t rooted into the ground, and pressing “use” turned out to push it over so that it fell towards the gate and knocked one of the doors open, despite the fact that this sort of gate would presumably bar shut or at least have some kind of lock or at least not have siege measures adequate to knocking it open staged pointlessly outside. But then, I’m not a daedric civil engineer.

On an unrelated note, looks like I’m finally about to score Baby Bop’s autograph!

NEXT WEEK: GETTING KEYED UP

 


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31 thoughts on “Rutskarn vs. Battlespire CH30: Through the Sucking Glass

  1. Da Mage says:

    Good to see there is no sanity checked on the save name lengths.

    God forbid they program something that works correctly.

    1. MrGuy says:

      Oh, there is.

      Any save game with a name containing the words “boss,” “tough,” “before,” “fight,” or “level” is silently corrupted so it can’t be loaded.

  2. Retsam says:

    Actually, it’s not that the large pole forced the door open, it’s more like a secret knock: the Daedra have agreed beforehand to open the door when they hear a single loud knock in the form of an object weighing between 20 and 30 stone (dang Daedra and their Imperial System) being thrown at the door.

    The nature of their secret knock is information that you were supposed to cleverly tease out out from the Seducer Oathkin, in the post-coital pillow talk mini-game. (Which functions a lot like the Oblivion Speechcraft minigame, but it’s a tiny bit less uncanny looking in Battlespire) The developers obviously assumed that nobody would turn down a chance at that action, and so neglected to provide any alternative way to get the information on the secret knock.

  3. sheer_falacy says:

    Man, the dialog options they give you are amazing. Imagine if Fallout 4 gave you the dialog options Battlespire does – wouldn’t the season be going better? On the bright side I suppose the options in Battlespire have just as much effect on the game as the ones in Fallout 4.

    Also, my guess for how to open the doors was “they don’t open and are strictly decorative”. I figured it had pretty good odds.

    1. Tizzy says:

      To have these dialogues voice acted and animated would be truly epic!

      1. Matt Downie says:

        These are the kinds of dialogue you don’t get in voiced games. The recording process tends to lead to blandness, and failure to improve on mediocre first-drafts because it’s too expensive to bring back the voice artist.

  4. KarmaTheAlligator says:

    Glad to see the game being true to itself with the wall collisions and you being able to save again.

    As for the doors, apart from “maybe you just need to push them slightly, or pull them”, I’d never have guessed the real solution.

  5. Austin says:

    Glad to see you got to save. Although, if you couldn’t save, and then died, that would be sorta funny. But if that happened, I wouldn’t really be able to see the series continue. Keep it up, and keep showing us this wonderful game!

  6. Grudgeal says:

    So, which one of the refusals is the ‘polite’ one for the seducer anyway? The one with the sexist remark and the implied death threat, or the paranoid rant? I mean, I’d prefer the paranoid rant out of the two but I suppose it depends a bit on tone of voice.

  7. ehlijen says:

    Hm, my guess for opening that gate was to shoot that golden disk on the top with arrows (or maybe the blue crystals?). Good thing our intrepid hero didn’t suddenly need to learn how to use a forbidden weapon.

    1. Decus says:

      This was also my guess after decades of zelda and remembering they did a link corpse joke in skyrim and thus probably are also zelda nerds at heart.

    2. Jakale says:

      My guess was for an anticlimax and you just had to push the unlocked door open, which was sort of true. Just had to figure out how the game demanded you push it open.

      1. Pinkhair says:

        That happens in Uru, with a completely non inspectable or interactable envfrq oevqtr va Gryrqnua requiring you to hop at it until your hitbox pushes its physics object down.

  8. Christopher says:

    Hang on, you’ll sleep with the spider monster but pass on the sex demon?

    Anyway, these past couple of weeks have been great. I’m stoked we’re finally in some new parts after last time’s exciting chase.

    1. Locke says:

      The spider demon has a clear motive for trying to get laid, though. How easy is it to get a date when you’re half-spider? That’s a guy who might reasonably be desperate enough to proposition strangers at random for immediate sex for no other reason except to actually have sex.

      1. Christopher says:

        Cahmel shouldn’t sell himself short like that. Have some confidence, man! It’s totally believable that a girl in a bikini would proposition that face for some no strings attached boning. Who else around here is willing and able? The spider monster is several floors away.

    2. Izicata says:

      Sex demons generally have some sort of soul-stealing or life-force-eating thing going on, though. It’s not a good idea for a human to fuck a succubus for the same reason it’s not a good idea for a fly to land in a venus flytrap. Ugly ass spider demons don’t lie about their intentions; if they want to kill you they’ll just try to kill you, and If they want to fuck you they’ll just try to fuck you. They’re not going to kill you after they fuck you unless they’re really hungry.

      1. Tizzy says:

        Unless they’re really hungry…
        … Or a spider. Oops!

  9. Baron Tanks says:

    Last picture: Oh hey, it talks like Gollum. Great.

    1. MrGuy says:

      Originality! It burnsss usss!

  10. Michael says:

    Why is there a talking clanfear there?

  11. Ninety-Three says:

    After the bizarreness of spider-sex, I’m very disappointed that you didn’t try to bang the Seducer, especially now that the obvious consequence can be fixed with a simple save-load. If nothing else, early Bethesda’s attempts to write a titillating sex scene should be hilarious. Please tell me you still have the save to reload so that you can see what happens.

  12. Raygereio says:

    I’m half convinced that Rutskurn did select the “Let’s do what the monkeys do” option and the Seducer Oathkin preforming the dance of her people was the result.

    1. MrGuy says:

      Actually, the seducer oath kin just spends a patient half an hour picking life from Cahamel’s hair

      1. Taellosse says:

        Somehow, that comment becomes MUCH funnier with the (presumably) unintentional replacement of “lice” with “life.”

  13. MrGuy says:

    You have the gate backwards. Its supposed to be opened from this side. Because you’re not outside. You’re inside.

    The one sane man in the Battlespire lives “outside” these walls.

    1. I was going to be really annoyed if that wasn’t the reference that it is. :P

  14. natureguy85 says:

    I like knowing that the Seducer is still spinning behind you as you stare at the gate…. unless you killed her, of course.

  15. Daemian Lucifer says:

    Speaking of things the game dumps on you long after you could reasonably want more of it, you know those half-naked ladies who've been attacking me for a few levels? Well, apropos of nothing, one of them is now trying to Seduce me.

    At least this one has a bra.Which is a rarity here.

  16. Daemian Lucifer says:

    That last screenshot brings up a very good point:You just killed someone(or a few someones) who was basically immortal.Why would any intelligent monster here even attempt to look at you in a wrong fashion?

    1. Michael says:

      Because the Daedra have a really hard time understanding concepts like death, since nothing sticks for them?

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