By now it was clear that wherever the painting was, looking in the south was now completely impossible. At least for my current abilities. That left most of north, and a bit of east. So, I go down one of the big hallways I haven't gone down yet.
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| Now this is what I call a media room |
The hallways surrounded one room, drawing attention to it. Inside, a room worth pre-rendering, because this one actually is full of interesting furniture. Screw your shafts of light, give me a room that has stuff I can screw around with a little. I immediately know what to do with this room. I just have to go downstairs and grab that VHS...
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| Everything in this game's a silent killer |
As soon as I get out of the room I am face to face with this daemon. I'm calling them daemons, I don't care what I find later. He must have seen me walking into the media room. That's great. So I unload the M10 on him, completely, and after that doesn't work, I throw it at him. One of these days I'm going to kill something with this gun and its going to be amazing. That clips the green tentacle thing that is on every floor, and that makes him angry. He shoots a ton of fireballs at me, and what do you know? He kills the daemon and only nearly kills me. I'd proceed from this point if I didn't think this would put me into a nasty spiral. There's gotta be an easier way of killing these things.
Another reload and I'm trying to find my way around the northern section of the map. Another near incident with the bathroom spirit and I find myself in a room on the northeastern section of the map...that isn't appearing on my map. Yay. I find another note, from Roberts. "This house is not entirely of this world", took us six entries and six hours to find that out? "Time is different here", "countless innocents", "shifting planes". Thanks for that.
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| Can I get through a part of the house without getting molested by horrible creatures? |
The invisible room has a bunch of plaques with numbers on them, I assume 1 through 6. Curiously, I found a plaque with 7 on it outside of here. I finish exploring and am just about to go through a door when I notice another daemon. Good. I run away, go through door no. 4, and end up in the southeastern area, in a hidden niche in some random room. Great, great, great.
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| Just when you thought it was safe to go to the bathroom |
I decide to go north from here, since every other section of this house is infested with evil things that hate me. Empty closet, thanks Mr. Estate Agent. Another bathroom, and unlike the last time, there isn't something waiting to jump out as soon as I open the door. Its waiting for when I open the toilet. Now that that method of relief has been denied, I have to choose between the bathtub and the sink. Bathtub's got blood and bits of flesh in it, but I don't think I can aim inside the sink. Oh, well.
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| FINALLY! BLESSED LIGHT! |
More items, another holy water, I think that's the tenth bottle I have somewhere, another key. To what? I don't know, there's like 5 doors on this floor that are locked. Then, there's an empty room with a closet. I'm thinking monster, but no, the fusebox. It's not even broken. What a relief. Continuing around this eastern track leads me to behind the daemon aimed at the media room. He spots me a mile away and starts magically attacking me. I run. Fat lot of good that does me. I have to go through the confusing southeastern area again, go to the stairs down, finally put down all the stuff that I've been lugging around to make it bright.
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| Haha! Fight each other... |
I find the place the key goes to just north of the stairs down...its the stairs up. Then I get an idea. If the daemon can get hurt by the horror, then it should work vice-versa. If it works vice-versa, the horror should attack the daemon. This works for about a second. The daemon shoots at me while horror is in the way, but then they both attack me. Sigh, back to the drawing board.
I start thinking about my options. Fighting the daemons is straight out, they'll kill me dead faster than a zombie with a shotgun. To the northwest, there's just a pail of oil and a ghost. That makes it the second pail of oil, probably a weird puzzle. The south has basically nothing I need, the room behind the "safety triangle" just has a crystal, and a note, which I won't read until I get rid of the ghosts. The VHS will just result in my death at this point. I've got this green gem, maybe that's what I need to put into the light in the basement?
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| That explains why it looks so modern |
So, as I'm walking to the basement entrance, the one at the entrance to the mansion, I notice the painting again. What is this? What am I supposed to do with it? I look at it some more and see that there's a niche, with green embedded around it. I put it in, and it bursts into flames. Oh, good. I go in, and its a stairs down. Wonderful. I guess there's someplace I haven't been yet. Normal wooden hallway. Suspicious, I wonder what's...
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| Well, that's violent as all hell |
Spooky chain sounds happen, something pre-rendered is inside the next door. When I enter, I see that we're not dealing with an all-audiences horror game anymore. Nope, zombie torn limb-from-limb, whole bunch of chains. I don't know what the hell this room is, the game isn't telling me, and the only thing I can interact with is the corpse, the chains and the pillar. Walking forward just damages you, no doubt from the ghost chains. I dunno.
Since I went down here anyway, I bring up the VHS tape. Might as well. That leaves the second floor. The asylum. Roberts said he saw a crazy person up here, but I'm packing heat, so I'm not afraid of anything.
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| You ever do something and right away regret it? |
What the hell is that thing? It's screeching but it isn't doing anything? Is this the eldritch version of a squirrel? Cornered, afraid, but not eager to claw my face off? If he doesn't want a fight he won't get one.
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| Yep, that's a crazy person all right |
Oh, good, he wasn't just crazy. Whoever it is hasn't noticed me yet, so I think I'll be safe if I turn around. There's a big hallway on the whole of the westernmost portion of the map. I find a few items, a fire extinguisher, box o' snacks, and a whole lot of those screeching things. Only these aren't letting me be, they're starting to chase after me. I'm starting to notice some locked doors here, electronically. What's also nice is that there's a bathroom here that doesn't contain lumps of human flesh...and...why didn't the furniture removers notice all this stuff?
There's also a note, from Ellen Prentiss, saying something about how she can get through the walls no one else can see. I don't know what she's talking about. I think she might be crazy, but that's just my personal opinion, not fact or anything.
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| How about you first? |
It becomes readily apparent that I have no option other than trying to get past the crazy woman. It works...until I get into her square. Then she talks to me. Its Ellen Prentiss. Makes sense. Talking back, alas, is not an option, but I have a gun...who am I kidding, this isn't going to work.
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| Yay, I killed someone! Finally! |
After exhausting my supply of ammunition, throwing the gun at her, and stabbing her with the ol' kitchen knife for around 2 minutes, I reached two conclusions. One, either every monster has an obscene amount of health, or Two, the only way to actually win fights properly is to min-max the crap out of your character. Regardless, I killed her, and all I got for my trouble was this crappy t-shirt and an axe. What kind of experience did I get? Barely even worth mentioning, just enough to increase my firearms skill, hopefully to the level that I can actually hit the broad side of a barn once in a blue moon. I explore the northern hallway, accidentally letting loose some unspeakable horror because that's just how things have to be.
I shall end this with another note I found, this time from a different player in this tragic play, a different time.
In this day of Our Lord, in the year of eighteen hundred and fifty, I wish to confess my sins before I go to meet the fate which awaits me beyond the gates of death. I have always strove to be a good man. I have failed dismally. I did not have the strength to defeat the powers of evil.Beyond that tragedy, there's an important piece of information here, whatever is going on here is strongly related to the Winthrop blood, Ellen Prentiss knew that, but I'm guessing we're just a relative by marriage? Somehow? Who knows, but everyone else with the blood is crazy. Secondly, I now know who's behind all this...probably...The Karcist. And when I meet him, I'm going to mock him for having a terrible name before he crushes me like the bug I am.
I fear my wife. She is possessed. She torments me daily and brings vile monsters to mock me. She taunts me with loathsome tales of her and her new "husband", a being that she calls the Karcist.
My daughter is dead; She was hung as a murderess in Boston. No bodies were found, though there were many who identified her as the "Siren of Longport". I know what happened to those men. My daughter had indeed lured them to their deaths.
As for myself, I sinned greatly by opening a door to places vile and obscene. I believed I did it to lay my mother's ghost to rest, fool that I was. I have brought darkness into the world. I now leave it, a sad and broken man.
Mile Mayhew
Inventory: Medikit (x2), Axe, bullet-proof vest, spellbook, keyring, briefcase, flashlight, batteries, holy water, electronic tool kit, fire extinguisher, box of snacks, matches, strait-jacket
Spellbook: Shroud of the Shadow Walker, Agatha's Iron Fist, Belgor's Mental Violation, Elixir of Health, Aura of Mystic Defense
This Session: 2 hours 00 minutes
Total Time: 8 hours 00 minutes
I was wondering myself how they managed to clean out half the house of its furniture without encountering ANY of this. The hallways should be littered with the corpses of movers, unless they have much better firearm and dodging skills than you have (which, with your lack of luck, seems likely).
ReplyDeleteI am starting to think that RPG horror and adventure games simply don't work together. The horror element requires you to be on the move the whole time and survive on instinct while proper adventure games require you to stop and think. I mean there's tons of details here that could be clues or puzzles but it seems you never have time to properly investigate them.
And the plot exposition is also terrible, it just sounds like notes copied from tropes' horror sections. It is an entertaining read though, bad games tend to make great posts!
They could have high brawling skill. That's one that's never going to come up in this playthrough. They could be a bunch of Jackie Chans, but that just makes me wish that actually was a movie. They could be the corpses on the ground floor or they could have merely turned red and disappeared. The practical answer is that they legitimately didn't notice these things or they're the zombies/ghouls. I guess the fish demons could have ate them, the ones mentioned to be in the caves.
DeleteThe problem with nearly every horror adventure game, not just the RPG/adventure ones, I can think of is that they're all just very difficult. On this blog specifically, I think Alone in the Dark is the only one that I at least, wouldn't call difficult. (as an aside, I can't believe nobody played Personal Nightmare on the blog before. If I'm still around, and nobody minds, I can play that NEXT Halloween)
But that said, I haven't really been missing clues or puzzles, what I've been mentioning is basically all I can do. Like on the 1st floor, the bathrooms and bedrooms are basically all the same except one has an item. The only areas where it looks like I need to do something I obviously don't have the item necessary to do whatever it is. I'm basically exhausting all forms of examination and there's nothing beyond generic description.