Black Sect - Village of fetch quests

By Ilmari

What I like about Black Sect, compared to Le Secte Noire, is that from the start there’s things to do and try. The black cat seems still just decoration, but I did manage to open a window and find some cheese and a metal bar.

Few words on the inventory. I can access it by pressing a scroll at the bottom of the picture. In the picture above, I do not yet have anything, but as you can see, there’s a spot for exactly five items.

If I press an item in the inventory, I take it in my hand, which I have to do, if I want to use the item in some way. In the picture above, I am holding the metal bar. The drawer under it tells me that I have dropped some items on the screen, and by pressing it, I can access them.

When pressing an item in the drawer of dropped items, it appears on the bottom right screen. This will also happen, if I have found some items by searching some place. By then pressing the item (above, the piece of cheese), I see some icons showing possible actions I can do to the item: look, take, search, read, use, feel or touch. It seems complicated, but maybe I’ll get used to it.

Enough of the inventory. I also managed to open a door to a local tavern. A new room! And a living person to talk to! My enthusiasm wasn’t curbed even by the fact that I had no money to buy anything.

A word on the movement. I can move my character by pressing the human figure at the bottom of the screen. I can then choose the cardinal direction I want to go to, or if there’s an open door, whether to go in or out. The interface is pretty cruel here and especially pressing east or west requires too precise positioning of the mouse. Luckily, you can also press ALT and the first letter of the direction you want to move to.

With the exception of the tavern, the game has been surprisingly faithful to the map of the original, with rooms in exactly the same positions. The room east to the starting position had been just decoration in the original, here it had something of interest. I could do nothing with the hanged person nor with the closed door or the fox, but I managed to find a coin. A pixel sized coin, that is. Yes, it’s going to be one of those games where I’ll have to squint my eyes to see that one differently coloured spot on the screen. Fun times ahead. Well, at least I managed to buy some bread from the tavern keeper with my coin.

Exiting the tavern again, I noticed an interesting feature of the game: NPCs appear in the rooms at different times. That is, every NPC appears only in one room and does not move from one room to another, but sometimes they are there, at other times they are gone (this is occasionally a bit annoying, when you’d want to interact with the person and they are not there). In any case, at the front of the tavern I found an organ grinder, who was looking for his lost sheet music.

Let’s move north from the starting screen, now. See that white spot? At the left side of the screen, under the tree? Yes, neither did I at first, but there it is, a piece of soap. By a strike of coincidence, a washerwoman is occasionally at the river, looking for her lost piece of soap. By giving it to her, I gained a safety pin.

East of the river was the graveyard. Just like in the original game, a black-robed figure arrived there at 23.00 and left after an hour. I probably have to find something to deceive them that I am a member of the sect. Within the skull on the ground I found a ring, and in addition, it contained a place for a pentagram.

North of the river was an impasse. In the original game, the road further north was blocked by a tree, here it was guarded by the village knife grinder (strangely specific occupation). He demanded a ring as a price for the passage. What a coincidence I happened to have one with me! The knife grinder said he’d go away just this one time, leaving me only one chance to go north. Then again, like all NPCs, he isn’t always there, so I can just wait for a time when he’s not guarding the passage.

In fact, I didn’t go north at once, but walked west. If you’ve read my posts on the original, this is the spot where I met the most inane puzzle of the whole game. I checked the tree trunk here - and let me tell you, the positioning of the mouse pointer has to be so precise that I was almost giving up hope, but I did finally find the sieve in the hollow tree. I then started sieving the river. I did not find a key to the secret base of the sect (which would make little sense), but a piece of gold (which makes a lot more sense).

I tried giving the gold to the nearest person, that is, the knife grinder. He was happy to take it and said he could sharpen a knife for me. Indeed, I found a knife just north of his room,so his offer came in handy. With my new knife in my possession, I backtracked to the hanged person and cut their rope. Now I was able to search their body and found sheet music. Coincidentally, it was just the sheet music the organ grinder was looking for (don’t ask me how it ended up with the hanged person). As a reward, he gave me a missal.

It’s otherwise in Latin, but there are few lines in French: “Before eleven o'clock struck, I dropped that of the Prince of Tears' into the socket and a disciple came to fetch me.”

This was obviously a hint about what I should do at eleven o’clock at the graveyard - there’s the skull with a socket that has pentagram in it. The only thing I don’t understand is why the organ grinder had a book with this information with him. Is he a part of the sect? If so, why would he give this info to a complete stranger?

I returned exploring the land north of the village and found some ruins, with a beggar living in it. He was hungry, so I gave him bread and cheese. In return the beggar gave me a tablet he had found on the road. It had a column of four numbers, with 2 on top, then 4 and 3, and 8 at the bottom.

I suspected from my experience with the original that a) I should search the bushes, b) that the bushes would contain a poisonous snake, c) that I would have to wear gloves for protection and d) that the gloves would be somewhere on or in the floor of the ruins. Floor was full of suspicious tiles, which I tried lifting with my metal bar. One of them became loose, and all my predictions were right. In the bushes, I found an empty bottle.

Moving forward, I found a locked church, with a priest who wanted some wine before letting me in. Now, I know from the original game that there’s a hideout of the sect in the church. Does this mean that the priest is a member of the cult? If so, why would he help me get in the hiding place, even if he would be into wine? In any case, I had only an empty bottle, so I continued west to a calvary.

At the cross, I found a small key (no idea yet, where it fits). Also, do you see that pixel sized protrusion on the ground? Yes, it’s again time to spot small objects! This time, I found another coin. Taking it back to the tavern, the bartender was happy to fill my bottle with wine.The keys to the church were mine!

If you read my take on the original, you know what happens next: I pull the protruding hand of the statue, and a nearby well is emptied of water. Well, there was something else - I found a mass-book on the church bench, containing a numeric code (13321) - but that’s a minor point. I am a bit disappointed that the game has so far followed the pattern of the original very closely. Sure, there has been additional stuff, but this has mostly been just simple fetch quests. Well, the game still has a chance to impress me!