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My brisk trot breaks into a full run when I get back outside and the army, who have not calmed down since two seconds ago, resume their bombardment. I leap down the unbridged chasm through a hail of shortfired green bursts. This time I’m lucky–I hit the water, not the rock wall. Another inch forward and I’d be stuck, and a sitting duck for the only kind of magical attack I’m apparently not immune to.<\/p>\n
But I’m not out of it yet. The rocky tunnels wind left, right, forward, backward…I hear more magic bursts going off, but I can’t possibly wheel my point of view around fast enough to see how they’re landing. I’ve never gotten this far before. I don’t know the way out. I need to get out of this cavern fast. <\/em>Where the hell is the exit? Let me check the map–<\/p>\n This, frankly, is some frog-and-scorpion shenanigans. It’s not that I should have guessed the map would be glitchy–but as my need was great, obviously I should have been ready for something important to glitch out. Battlespire <\/em>has a knack for letting you get so immersed in solving a problem that you take something, anything, for granted–and it has an unerring instinct for what the worst possible thing to break would be. And then it’s time to forget your plans, drink your potions, hustle, and pray.<\/p>\n A few minutes of bottle-popping and creative swimming later and I’m out the door with the boots. And I’ve successfully accomplished the very first item on my revised fifteen-step island-clearing level plan. It’s only recently jumped to the front of the queue–not because of proximity or convenience, but more because up until now it was the only obstacle with a 100% failure rate. What’d I do right this time? Not die or get stuck in a wall, I guess. For me to know what I’m doing wrong I need to know what’s going on in general.<\/p>\n Some of you have expressed the informed opinion that the saving-and-loading glitch on Level 5 probably doesn’t kick in until ten, twenty, even thirty saves in. I genuinely appreciate the advice, but here’s the thing: when I play Battlespire, <\/em>about a hundred different things at a time are simultaneously going wrong. On the off chance a few saves don’t <\/em>end up okay, and something breaks down, I can’t guarantee I’ll notice it until I’ve lost considerable time and invested considerable progress towards the game’s final areas. So instead of gambling that the bug report on the wiki is accurate–not as safe a bet as you’d guess, as very much about the Battlespire <\/em>wiki is incomplete speculation–I’ll regretfully stick with hustling and praying.<\/p>\n Next up on the schedule is Fort Showstopper. I mentioned it last post; it’s a big walled courtyard with four towers, each just large enough to accommodate the ubiquitous wooden up-and-down magical lift. The lift shakily cranks you past a few empty and useless floors before bringing you to an incredibly narrow roof staffed by irate daedra who can kill you in about a second if you’re unlucky. Past them is a button you need to press. Go get ’em, tiger.<\/p>\n I’ll be blunt; these lifts are not ready for primetime. They’re not only the most dangerous things I’ve run into on the level so far, I’d argue they’re the most dangerous things in the entire game<\/em>. There’s no end to the peril: If you don’t proceed directly to the center of the lift, you’ll brush up too close to the ceiling, get stuck in the environment, and die. If you accidentally get off on the wrong floor–or glitch off the lift onto it, because everyone needs a little spontaneity in their lives–the elevator will be stuck wherever it was going to and the game’s weirdly fussy invisible ledge walls will force you to use the glorious imprecise jumping controls to get down, which will virtually guarantee you get stuck in the environment and die.<\/p>\n Eventually you’ll figure out how to use the elevator correctly, reach the top, and one of the daedra on the roof will hit you and knock you into the elevator mechanisms. Where you’ll get stuck. And die.<\/p>\n The first few times I got to this part, it was after I’d swept about half the island. That was before I started worrying and learned to fear the geometry.<\/p>\n Which brings me to some good news and bad news. The good news is that I’ve now managed to scoop up all the hidden items on the first part of the level, which means I’m ready to forge onward. The other <\/em>good news is that from the looks of it I’m not going to have to worry about level geometry for a little while.<\/p>\n Why?<\/p>\n That’s the bad news.<\/p>\n That’s a hot air balloon.<\/em> I’m supposed to pilot that thing. For the record, I’m anxious…about hopping off the shore onto the pier. <\/em>The thought of gambling all my progress that a Bethesda flying vehicle works is downright petrifying. But what choice have I got? My destination’s up a very steep incline with no obvious ingress. My kingdom for a horse to hump the slope with.<\/p>\n I only have one guarantee: whatever comes up next, I’m not going to be ready for it.<\/p>\n NEXT WEEK: STOP ME IF YOU’VE HEARD THIS ONE<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Across trackless dimensional matrices, through the eye of manifest malice, in the murderous playground of a bloodhungry god, across a hostile plain patrolled by unkillable horrors, through the waterfall, across the unbridged chasm, past an army of daedra, I enter the tower. A dozen eyes burning with blue rage turn to me–and I’ve already popped […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[242],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lets-play"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34413\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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