<\/div>Greg Stamos is offering–sort of insisting, basically–to let me on his insidious plot. Which, okay, great. I do appreciate the delicate spokes within cyclopean gears within twilit dimensions that have swung inexorably towards his sinister purpose. I’m sure it’ll be really great. I’m looking for the exit. <\/em>Are you getting this, Greg? Are you writing this down? The story of this dungeon crawl is I’m trying to finish it.<\/em><\/p>\n Perhaps you’ve considered making me your unwitting pawn. Trusting my human naivety, you’d let me serve your purpose without ever understanding the gravity of my role. I think that could really work out. I haven’t understood anything I’ve done so far and I’m pretty sure all of it was my idea<\/em>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n You know, you might be thinking at this point, “I wonder how much of Ruts not understanding this storyline comes down to him not reading stuff.” And I would say, yeah. You might actually have a point there. I’ll actually realize every now and then that one of the unlabeled identical scrolls forming snakes through my sprawling inventory is something I haven’t read yet, and then I’ll bring it up and a couple pages of proper nouns sharing three vowels between them will surge up and I’ll throw a guilty look at my notepad and close the scroll again. You, a thoughtful and erudite player, would have paid close mind to the scrolls, the lines, and the lines between <\/em>the lines and you’d have been transported to a fascinating power struggle between chillingly believable naked ladies. I’ll accept that. But I feel like I ought to say, for the record–I only gave up, like, halfway<\/em> through. I put in hours of good-faith effort before I decided it wasn’t worth it–and if that’s because I was too dumb to figure things out, so be it. But I might suggest <\/em>that there’s a few gaps, perhaps left by last-minute story decisions or lack of playtester feedback, that bring things down a bit. It happens.<\/p>\n Anyway, the gist of what’s happening now is that Greg’s gonna give me the true names of some other powerful daedra, I’m going to mess ’em up, and then he’ll kick me on to the next area. This <\/em>I understand. See, stuff like this is basically what humans are for in the Elder Scrolls<\/em>; when you get past the bosoms and goatees, Daedra are just universe-class melodramatic overthinkers whose master plans get buried in machination creep. When they fight, it’s like a game of chess where each capturing of a piece is a game of Risk where each roll of the dice is a game of Stratego–and if anyone forgets whose turn it is, the whole game starts over just to be safe. Humans are there to be like, “Hey, assholes, I don’t care how this ends, I’m gonna die, do you get it, I’m gonna die, don’t tell me to calm down<\/em>” and throw somebody’s pieces out the window. It’s our gift.<\/p>\n My first house call is to the Grand Daedric Battle Momma Faygo Shawty. The bulk of her fortress lies through the until recently blocked off west gate.I don’t know how my compass decides what’s west. Just go with it.<\/span> After hacking my way through the greeters I come across three mirrors, which is dungeon shorthand for, “this shit’s gonna be trippy.”<\/p>\n So…middle mirror, right? Got to be the middle mirror.<\/p>\n I hit “use” and it instantly whisks me to another place. I think this is the dimension the scholars call, “desktop.” It’s exactly like the game with all the bad parts removed.<\/p>\n As I’m loading my save, it occurs to me that if the game crashes the next time I try that I’ve probably hit an undocumented glitch that will prevent me from ever finishing Battlespire<\/em>. I break into a cold sweat as I face the glass and hit “use.” To my horror, it works just fine this time. Which means that in the balance of time, and after a few other glass trips, I get to settle accounts with this tastefully costumed daedric authority figure.<\/p>\n When I share my reason for breaking into her fortress and traveling through her mirror dimensions, she gets a little bit tetchy. I admit that some name-calling does occur. She throws some anti-mortal slurs at me, then I call her the assembly of elemental syllables that circumscribe her divinity. That ends the argument right there.<\/p>\n Afterwards, I cross the courtyard and brave this fellow’s bodyguards…<\/p>\n …and discover that he’s willing to knuckle under. Okay, we’re making a brisk pace here. Next stop, last level. So what are we looking at? Bunch of narrow glitching stone platforms full of enemies on top of a sea of lava?<\/p>\n You know, I’ll say this much: the game’s stopped surprising me.<\/p>\n NEXT WEEK: I WAS MISTAKEN<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Greg Stamos is offering–sort of insisting, basically–to let me on his insidious plot. Which, okay, great. I do appreciate the delicate spokes within cyclopean gears within twilit dimensions that have swung inexorably towards his sinister purpose. I’m sure it’ll be really great. I’m looking for the exit. Are you getting this, Greg? Are you writing […]<\/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-35109","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\/35109","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=35109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35109\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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