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Completed Let's play The Immortal. And stuffies.

Black Cat

Magister
Joined
Jun 1, 2009
Messages
1,997
Location
Skyrim .///.
Chapter the first; The game's title doesn't refer to us.
In which we are introduced to our next adventure and then get eaten by a miniature Dune worm as a welcome.





I was bored last night and decided to have another go at one of those old and obscure games I really enjoy playing, and finally managed to clear it. Then I decided to have a go at making a quick and fast Let's Play of it, given the game's quite shortish, as I still have the puzzles and timing fresh on my mind, and this game really deserves more love. So let's get this party going. Oh, and don't ask about that other let's play thingie. I'm not really in a dungeon crawling mood right now so I'll continue with it later.

immortal001.jpg


Released long before I was even born The Immortal is both a really atmospheric isometric dungeon crawling adventure and one of the best games ever, period. It's also unfairly, almost sadistically, difficult And I mean it: This is a game in which you will die because you got to a tile with a ladder from the wrong side, and that's not a joke. This is a game in which you'll die because you walked into the wrong tile, or because you used an spell one frame too early. This game packs so much tastefully done rape you will be asking to please be sent back to doing blind The Legacy and Dark Heart of Uukrul runs before long. If this game had a soul and a heart this would be its favorite song, and it would learn to speak and sing just to be able to mock us every time we meet an ugly end. And that's without even going into all the dead ends you can get into, as most items on the game come not only with limited uses but also with many spots where they can be wrongly wasted. The reason why all this rape is actually tasteful, you ask? You keep coming for more, and the game obligues. It does so with this look on its face, too.

:smug:

All of this certainly doesn't help making of it anything but a pretty obscure cult game of a time long past, which is both wrong and a waste. So here's little me trying to remedy it.

The Immortal is the story of a nameless wizard, usually known as The Wizard by the really imaginative and creative fandom, who for a personal quest must dare the many dangers and challenges of an ancient dungeon. The guy looks kind of old and feeble, but do not be mistaken: He belongs to the same arcane tradition good ol' Gandalf did belong to and is more than able of kicking cartloads of butt with nothing but a sword as long as the player controlling him is competent enough, while most of his magical knowledge and prowess is for solving puzzles and executing defeated enemies with some pretty brutal finishing moves. I actually like games that make use of this kind of solo wizard that can hold his or her own in combat, so share if you know any more.

As to why is The Wizard willing to enter the dark and treacherous deeps of this particular dungeon, let's check the manual...

The morning sun heats the jagged peaks as you follow the forgotten road down to the valley floor. The bleached ruins of great columned temples and towering citadels rise from the grassy plain like the bones of some colossal beast. This was the ancient city of Erinoch, destroyed by dragon's fire over 1000 years ago. Mordamir spoke often of this city... and the labyrinth below...

Mordamir. You think back to the days when you were young and eager to learn to the spells of sorcery. The old wizard Mordamir took you in and patiently taught you the arts of magic. He taught you how to read the runes and unleash their power. The power of charms and fire. He showed you the strength of steel and taught you to use your wizard's cunning. Mordamir was your master, your mentor. He was your guide down the treacherous path of wizardry. He was your friend.

Many years have passed since you last saw the old man. You assumed he was dead - that is, until a few nights ago, when he called to you in a dream. You woke with the uneasy feeling that Mordamir still lived - trapped in a bottomless cavern. And so you set to unravel the secrets of the Immortal.

It's a pretty good setup, I say. Actually, I believe it to be a much better setup than most dungeon crawling adventures and dungeon crawling role playing games out there, but that's just me. Also, for being a very old game with almost no dialogue and no narrative it manages to tell a nice little tale. Ah, and I almost forgot: This is not a role playing game. At all, really. There are no stats, there are no dice rolls, there is no leveling up. This is more of an adventure game with some action elements that happens to be set in one of the most lethal dungeons ever, much closer to games like Elvira, The Summoning, or things like Cadaver than to actual role playing games, be those from the storyfag bureau or the dungeon crawling committee.

The game also has a soundtrack I actually like a lot for being both moody and simple, so I will be linking to it when able. For now, let's listen to the theme song as present in the Sega Genesis version, while we continue. Ah, yes. That's it. Again, I almost forgot: The game has about half a dozen different ports and I will be playing the Sega Genesis one, because it is the one I like the most as it has nice sound, pretty good graphics, and it is quite easy to run. Of all the ports it also seems to be one of the most complete ones, as some other versions either added out of place stuff that kind of ruins the mood to adapt the game to the system's perceived user base or removed stuff that was out of the system's technical capabilities back then, like the really nicely animated death sequences and the gory finishing strikes.

Finally, and as I said at the begining, the game is quite short, consisting of eight levels built pretty much to the point, without padding nor random encounters of any kind. It's quite easy to finish it fast once you know what to do, even if the two little levitation segments and the like continue to inspire pure hatred and frustration no matter how many times you play through them. This Let's Play, therefore, will consist of exactly nine chapters: This shortish introduction and then one chapter for each of the eight levels of the dungeon, though the last one is actually just one pretty hard puzzle battle, with a timing that makes the last battle from Jaws of Cerberus sound like a good idea. The scene, however, is very awesome.

So that's it. Before we finish the introduction and start with the game, however, let's get into the correct mood.

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That's how all first rooms should be, I say. Next time we meet we will lead The Wizard through his explorations of the first floor, we will solve some puzzles, we will die several horrible deaths, and we will kill many things in funny ways.

'til next time, then!
 

lightbane

Arcane
Joined
Dec 27, 2008
Messages
10,158
:love: :thumbsup: I remember this game yes, I played the (absolutely inferior) PC port of this game, that removed the fatalities, some traps like the one you have shown and most of the gore. :decline:
Years later I tried the Genesis version and was immediately killed 'cause there wasn't any worm in the pc version and thus I didn't expect this to happen (although to be fair the game gives you a warning and you have 3 lives/continues)

PS: I hope that this time for this lp you'll try to write down the number of deaths your poor character suffers and how.
 

Antihero

Liturgist
Joined
May 8, 2010
Messages
859
I'd have to check but do you just spam your staff in the Genesis version or can you get into melee combat like the NES one? That melee combat would be pretty terrible by today's standards (and probably even was back then), but damned if the NES version's fight music wasn't something.

Edit: apparently, but not as memorable as the NES's:
Genesis version melee combat..
NES melee combat music.
 

Black Cat

Magister
Joined
Jun 1, 2009
Messages
1,997
Location
Skyrim .///.
Chapter the second; Mysteries, goblins, and weapons of mass destruction.





Last time we met we got eaten by a kind of small God Emperor of Dune. This time, however, we will guide The Wizard through the first room without any more deaths, and we will also manage to get him alive and well to the second level! We enter the ruins of Erinoch through the southern corner of the room where we died last time but now, instead of getting eaten, we just carefully walk to the door on the north corner. As we take our first steps there, however, the candle on the circular table will not only become lit all by itself but the smoke from it will soon take a life of its own.

immortal002b.jpg


Meet Mordamir, our character's master. The message this apparition relays, however, is not for us to hear.

An image of the old wizard Mordamir leaps from the candle and begins to speak: "Dunric, you have come to save me. I am in the dungeons far below. I know I can count on you." This explains your old teacher's mysterious disappearance, but there is one thing strange about the message... Your name is not Dunric.

Who is this Dunric fellow, I wonder? And why was Mordamir waiting for him to come, instead of us? With those questions dancing in our head we leave the room through the northern door, and beyond we come across a scene not less strange: A warrior lies dead not far from us, and a goblin lurks near. Even stranger, the sounds of battle reach us from not very far away, and the greenskin charges us!

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This is The Immortal's combat interface, which we will be seeing quite a lot. In the middle of the screen we have our foe, in this case a goblin, and the wizard himself, and the two bars at the sides are those indicating our foe's health, on the left side, and the wizard's own, on the right. And, as you can surely see, in that screenshot the goblin did just manage to strike us as soon as the battle begun, for the first couple of strikes in a battle are very hard to evade, be it for us or for them. As the battle goes on, however, another couple of vertical bars begins to build up: Every time the enemy attacks, regardless of whether it manages to strike us or not, the bar next to its health one will gain a level, and the same will happen to the one next to the wizard's health each time we attack, regardless of whether we manage to strike him or not.

This bar represents the character's fatigue, and as it builds up the character's reactions will begin to slow down, making it harder for him to both attack and defend. To counter this the characters need to rest, switching to a passive role on the battle and either taking the enemy hits or dodging them. Every couple of seconds or so that the character doesn't attack another level or so of fatigue will be removed, and the character's actions, be those defensive or ofensive, will get faster.

Most of the time the first attack will strike us. Every now and then also will the second attack, but usually by then I'm already defending. If not, for the third one I'm already clear. Then we just defend, which we do by pressing the inventory button and the direction opposite to that from which the attack will come, until the enemy's fatigue is at the maximun. Then we dodge one more strike and begin attacking, either by pressing the action button, which translates into a lounging attack with our sword that's pretty fast but cannot be followed by another attack, or by pressing either side button on its own, which translates into a sideways attack starting on that side of the screen. This we can keep up into a combo, kind of like in the Gothic games. There's a smallish window of opportunity in which we can press the opposite direction of what we pressed before so that the wizard will add another attack to the combo. Press the button too soon, however, and the combo will stop, and if you press it too late either it will stop or the enemy will get a chance to interrupt you with an attack of its own.

The length of this window of opportunity depends on how high our fatigue is. The more tired we are, the shorter it is. By waiting until our foe is tired and we are are completely fresh before attacking I can then take away between a full half and three fourths of its life bar before the enemy manages to interrupt my combo with an attack of its own. Then it's back to the defensive until the enemy is, once again, tired and we are, once again, fresh, then we finish it off, lossing between one and three health levels a fight, at most. Since the timing is pretty tight, however, i will be lossing more health levels when trying to take screenshots, so I will have to compensate for that somehow.

This also shows us that back in '91 they already knew how to fix button mashing in action adventures and action role playing games. Awesome. Somebody please send this totally new development to Blizzard, Peter Molyneux, and the rest so they can steal it for the next Diablo and the next Fable and the next whatever it is next. That aside, our first battle ends with a magical headshot.

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So now we can loot the dead human warrior we saw before. And, alas, some loot we find! A ring with an inscription reading... Dunric! Also, three scrolls of fireball. When used on the inventory window this spell, just as happens with blink and stone form, will become linked to our action button, so every time we press it later, on the main view, we will use one charge and cast it. The other kind of spells are the ones which, like levitation and flame protection for example, are used the very instant you click on them on the inventory screen, and will remain active for a set duration before expiring without any fanfare or warning.

We now move towards the west, where we find another goblin fighting against a half naked human guy. This goblin, however, is tough, at least compared to the rest of the first level goblins we will find, as he has a full health bar. From the second level on, however, we will miss this guy as the good times. We quickly defeat him by, this time, turning him to a statue of ashes that then fall down into a tiny and tidy pile. Cool!

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Then we move to talk with the guy we just saved, who just happens to act like he was waiting for us when the goblins attacked. Then he also reveals to be actually Mordamir's servant, or something!

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You must rescue Mordamir! He is captive many levels below.

The entrance to the lower levels is hidden. Here is a key you will need. I must go now.

He hands us the key he mentioned and leave. This key opens a chest on that very same room, containing a long list of useful stuffies: 20 gold pieces, a bag of bait, a sack with strong smelling spores, a water bottle, and a map indicating the location of some pit-with-iron-spikes traps.

baitr.jpg

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All of those items, save for the map, are instrumental for our victory. Do you drink the water? You no longer can win the game. Do you waste the spores on this level? The same, you can no longer clear the second level. Etc, etc, etc. In any case, after looting the contents of the chest we go beyond the nearest door and reach a really big room in which a huge abyss opens. Next to it we find a, uhm, something that's kind of similar to a sundial, and also a straw bed.

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There's also a locked door near the improvised bed, which we will open later as this is actually the last room we will need to visit in this level, and where the entrance to the next one is hidden. And, since we are at it, I kind of forgot: The horizontal bar at the top of the screen is there to remind me of my current health. Given we are no longer in top condition I decide to sleep at the straw bed for recovery and, more important, plot advancement. Be careful, however, as you can only sleep once in each level, so while if you die and restore you can sleep again, as you are restarting the level from scratch, if you sleep and then get hurt again you can't sleep again on the same level.

immortal019b.jpg

The straw is a small but welcome comfort in your first day's travel. You drift into an uneasy slumber, wondering about Mordamir. Where is he now? Can you rescue him? You dream of dangers that lie ahead.

Each time we sleep we also advance the plot and get more information on the background, which is actually a nice detail given the plot is just there as kind of a bonus you can go picking pieces here and there or just ignore altogether until the end, whichever suits your fancy. This is exactly how I like storytelling in games, regardless of how complex or simple the plot may be, so I'm a happy neko.

Once we return to the world of the living, now with a bit more health, we return to the second area we explored, the one in which we fought the goblins and looted the chest, and now walk all the way to the opposite side, where we find another door just beyond the dead warrior. Going through it we come across a corridor with yet another door and, to the far side, another Goblin, who orders us to stop and not get any closer.


immortal020b.jpg

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I forbid you to come any closer!

The song that plays here is called, precisely, I forbid you to come any closer! and it's a pretty cool little theme. And the Famicom port's arrange is also awesome. Since we are at it, with the theme song and those two you already have enough of the soundtrack to perceive those little and nice and catchy recurrent theme thingies that somehow add a lot to the mood and to the general cohesion and identity.

Back to the Goblin, did I mention there's a big pile of coins next to him?

:smug:

I load up my fireballs and, after a little while of positioning, fry his ass with one most precise blast. Don't worry, however: Later on this update we'll face him again and this time I'll cut him to ribbons with my sword so you can get another cool finishing move out of it. He was just on the edge of the screen so I couldn't get a good screenshot of the cooking process, but once we get to level three we will fry several things with fireballs and at a short range, so there's no need to worry about that.

From his, uhm, room or, say, territory we loot three things: First, thirty gold pieces, which along the ones we found before and the twenty we had at the begining go for seventy or something like that. Second, a key. Thirdly, some kind of sealed letter.

keyxz.jpg

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We, obviously, take a peek.

Beware of shades. They are dangerous, invisible creatures that like darkness. Under firelight they cast a shadow by which you can detect and avoid them.

Either Goblins are more civilized than I thought or this guy stole the letter from someone else. In any case, however, this is one important hint for a puzzle we will soon be facing, that's also the reason we got a bunch of fireball scrolls earlier. Before advancing, though, there's another thing I want to show you. Remember the bait we found before? If we throw it to the ground in almost any place outside of the level we actually have to use it...

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Ouch, and people then whines about old Sierra adventures killing you all the time. :roll: This also serves a purpose beyond mere sadism, however: Each time we start a level we have three, uhm, lives, to give them a name. So every time we die we actually get restored a bit before, usually just outside the room, and can continue from there. You must be careful, however, as not all the changes will be undone: While in this case we did not lose the bait, as trying to use it is the trigger to get eaten and thus we did not spend it, later on this first run of the first level you will see how awful can it get with items that do get spent. Also, once you die thrice, which in later levels we will do in a couple of seconds, you either restart the game or punch in a password to restart the level you are in.

Back at the game, we respawn just outside that corridor and return to it. The goblin's still dead, so we just go through the door we haven't been to yet. This leads to a room that extends itself into a smallish corridor, and the floor of this entire area seems to, uhm, move by itself. As you can see in the screenshot, too, the walls are decorated by skulls, and you don't need to be the coolest neko ever to add one plus one and get trap room as a result. The trap, in this case, is that once you step beyond a certain boundary arrows will start flying from the skulls on the walls, including those on the walls you can't see, which is a very unfair technique they really love and use a whole lot on this game. As you can imagine I can't really stop to take photographs of the arrows flying around, so instead we just run through and enter the door just around the corner. I got hit once while doing so, meh.


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If you go back to the screenshot I took of the map you'll see this room is the rightmost one drawn on it, so we know that, starting from the dirt mound and all the way to the rightmost corner there's a line of holes of death. More importantly, though, if we had tried to use the spores before the game would tell us they can't be used on a stone floor. So, naturally, we walk to the mound and drop them there. That means they have just been spent. A couple of seconds later...

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... a new batch of magical mushrooms of doom grows and fills the air with lethal spores, killing us instantly. Now we respawn, again, just outside the door, which means we actually get hurt by an arrow before we get a chance to move. Once inside, however, we notice the mushrooms are still there, even if the air is no longer poisonous. Basicaly, we are screwed. We no longer can win the game, and if we were to complete this level like this our code to start from level two would be useless, as starting from such position would make completing the game impossible. Yay for dead ends! Now we leave the room by the door at the south, and get lost in complete darkness.

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We orientate ourselves towards one of the unlit torches on the walls, the one next to the door, and cast a fireball, which not only lights it up but also ricochets on the wall and lights up the one on the other wall. That's why they call him the wizard.

:smug:

Before long, however, we notice two small round shadows creeping towards us from across the room. They are slow, yes, but if they actually make contact with you the game turns to the combat interface, where you must win a battle against an enemy you can't dodge, as it has no graphics nor animations. I managed to kill one during my winning run, but that's just because I miscalculated the space I had to reach the door and then did start slashing wildly at the air until I managed to connect a strike and start a combo, and even then I left the room with just three health levels left. It's not worth it.

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Also, this is the leftmost room drawn on our map, which means we must also be careful of pit traps in there. The best way to do this room is to wait next to the door until you have the shadows almost on you and then run to the uppermost corner and from there towards the door below. Before getting to the door, however, and about the center of the room you turn towards the leftmost corner. There you will find a scroll with a charm will o' wisp spell, and if you follow the wall you will also find an amulet of reflective material.

charmj.jpg

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Then we run back to the door we just passed, and by then the shadows will be close and we will just barely pass them. Also, the door is locked but the key we got from the paranoid goblin opens it, but only from this side. Now we are back at room with the big hole, yay. We go straight to the sundial like thingie, step to the beam, open our inventory screen, and use the amulet. The game will then ask us two things: Do we want to raise the amulet? Of course we do! Then, do we also want to read the runes on the side of the amulet? No, we don't. But we will, just because we can. Everything goes next gen.

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And then...

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And that's why you don't read the activation formulas of unidentified magical items, I reckon. If I don't remember it wrong raising the amulet and reading the runes is always game over, even if you have all three lives when you do so. The nature of the amulet is one of the game's plot points and will not be answered until the very end of the game. They actually kind of take a break halfway through the final battle to explain that one, though it only works because talking is a free action.

Now, we restart and do everything again. Along the way we, uhm, well...

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... Ouch. That's one magic sword if I ever saw one. Later, once we are back at the sundial with the amulet and the charm scroll we use the former with the ray of light, without reading the runes this time. A secret passage then opens, once the ray of light hits the jewel on the sundial! We go deeper into the ruins...

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... and thus end this update. Next time we meet more future events will be foreshadowed as we meet the goblin king, an grumpy dwarf, an arab merchant, our first troll, a pack of will o' wisps, and many slimes! We will also solve more puzzles, kill many stuffies, and die a bunch of times.

'til next time!



Also,

Unintentional deaths so far: 01.

Stupid shadow monster in the last room! That's what I get for causing me an intentional game over and having to restart. We will get that a lot later if we don't want to use save states, however, so consider it training. There's no screenshot because they don't have a special death scene, just the normal one when you die in combat or in a generic way so we will get to see that one later a lot.





Now onto the blah blah...

@ Antihero
Both versions are very similar. The NES version has better music but worse graphics, slightly more arcadey gameplay, as there are stuffies shooting from the walls everywhere I believe, and it has only seven stages instead of eight, as the spider's nest was removed because of this or that. Other than that I believe the puzzles, the combat, etc, remains pretty much the same.

@ Lightbane
I played the PC version the first couple of times, too. Then I saw the Genesis one on youtube and got it because it really looks nice, and my mind was blown given how different both are while remaining pretty much the same.

@ Kz3r0
You actually managed to find an image of a Dungeon Crawling Black Cat... I'm in awe of your google fu, I am. :salute:

@ laclongquan
:?

@ Mrowak
Someone has to give those poor forgotten games some love. T-T

@ Azira
@ Crooked Bee
@ Spekkio
@ Malakal

:love:
 

Crooked Bee

(no longer) a wide-wandering bee
Patron
Joined
Jan 27, 2010
Messages
15,048
Location
In quarantine
Codex 2013 Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire MCA Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
Oh-kay, now I actually have the time to read through both updates in one sitting.

BC said:
the last one is actually just one pretty hard puzzle battle, with a timing that makes the last battle from Jaws of Cerberus sound like a good idea.

:thumbsup:

BC said:
Do you drink the water? You no longer can win the game. Do you waste the spores on this level? The same, you can no longer clear the second level. Etc, etc, etc.
BC said:
Yay for dead ends!
BC said:
We orientate ourselves towards one of the unlit torches on the walls, the one next to the door, and cast a fireball, which not only lights it up but also ricochets on the wall and lights up the one on the other wall.

:salute:

Overall, I like the atmosphere in this gamey a lot. And you're awesome as always, Neko-sensei!
 

Malakal

Arcane
Glory to Ukraine
Joined
Nov 14, 2009
Messages
10,266
Location
Poland
I remember when games were that hard, good times... Well, not really, but fun memories now at least.

What are those worms? Plot related Deus Ex Machinas or perhaps they are explained?
 

The Wizard

Educated
Joined
Apr 1, 2009
Messages
606
Location
Germany
and of course it's a megadrive game.

all i had was fucking sonic and other jump and run sidescrolling shit.
goddamnit. :(
 

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
Patron
Joined
May 13, 2009
Messages
27,091
Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
I remember reading a review for this game many years ago, back when it was released. The Amiga version scored a 93% rating, but I'm starting to doubt the reviewers were right in the head when it came to some of their scores. After all, they gave Cadaver a 95% rating.

I tried playing the PC version a couple of times, but always gave up due to the controls and lack of a manual. At least now I don't feel bad about that anymore.
 

Black Cat

Magister
Joined
Jun 1, 2009
Messages
1,997
Location
Skyrim .///.
immortalibmcover.jpg

(I totally love the PC & Apple cover)



Chapter the third; In the halls of the goblin king.

Last time we met we managed to open the secret entrance to the second floor after dying many times. Today, however, we will manage to get to the third level without much trouble, given the only interesting way to die on the second floor is by means of slimes. So we start the game, punch in our level certificate, and appear on a small room with a skeleton, two doors, a red jewel, and two slimes. Slimes move pretty fast. Fast enough, actually, if we delay running to the closest door even one or two seconds we will no longer have enough time to reach it before getting om nom nom'ed. We get killed twice by them in the process of getting some screenshots, yay.

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Then we do a soft reset, punch back in the code, and then manage to get through the nearby door before getting digested. Beyond we come across a merchant playing some lute like instrument thingie, but before we talk to him we open our inventory and use our charm spell, that the game tells us will charm the will o' wisps, first, and then if we cast it again it will free them to kill any enemies on the area. We accept and then run deeper in the area, ignoring the merchant for now. If we had gone anywhere before using the spell we would have gotten, uhm, generically killed, but given we are cool the will o' wisps don't hurt and instead we manage to reach the two doors on the far side of this area.

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We get through the wooden one, advance a little bit, wait for the nice lights to follow us, and then read the scroll once more. They purge this area of goblins before long.

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We search the bodies until we find a bag full with dust of complaisance, which uses the same graphic our bag of bait uses, amd then return through the metalic door we saw before in the room with the merchant. Along the way back to him we find a rock, as well as a will o' wisp that forgot to follow us up to the next room but decides she is now our pet and will follow us around for the rest of the level.

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Greetings, friend! Come. I've got something you need. These parts are plagued with slime. You can't venture safely without my slime oil for boots, a bargain at only only 80 gold pieces.

We try to buy it but we are lacking for 10 coins, so we wait for a little while before getting near him once more. Next time he decides to only ask us for 60 coins for the bottle, and we accept. :roll: We use it in our boots and go through the door leading back to the room with the slimes. Now the slimes can't eat us, so we can search the skeleton for a elvish sword. We can also place the rock in the room and then run in circles until one of them get in the same tile as the rock is, as then it will eat the rock and let a gem there for us to pick. And yes, there is a clue about this later. I'm just doing it earlier than we are suposed to. We also pick the red gem that was there from the very begining.

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It's important to note that once you get the elvish sword from the skeleton the game will tell you that you notice something wet and green under the skeleton, and ask you whether you want to searh it or not. Answer not or you will die to a slime hidden under the skeleton, regardless of you having the oiled boots or not, I believe. In any case, when we pick the elven sword the game will tell us from now on we will enjoy greater agility and stuffies when in combat, though the difference is so small as to be meh.

Now, however, we leave back to the merchant and then back to the area where our Will o' Wisps killed the two goblin guards, and enter the room they were protecting.

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Now we must be very careful. The two guards here, if we get close to them, will scream something about protecting their king and charge us, and they are pretty tough, moving way too fast and having a full health bar each. The right way to solve this area is to walk to the left following the southwestern wall, though you will have to be careful as if you press left from where you enter you will automatically leave the room. You need, therefore, to click up twice or thrice, then left, then up, then all the way to the left.

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This will let you standing near the earth mound, and you should already know what to do: Walk very slowly towards the mount. You are not in place until the closest goblin reacts to you, then you should quickly open the inventory, use the spores, and run away. As I was taking screenshots, however, I was too slow and just almost managed to get out the room.

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One of the goblins got me, as you can see, and given I had been playing Cadaver and Darkmere before I got my key bindings in a twist and had lost two thirds of my health before I did remember how you dodged and parried in The Immortal, as at first I thought the emulator had broke or something as it wasn't reacting to my keystrokes as I expected it to do...

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Even then I almost defeated him! He had only two or three health levels when I died. :(

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But then I had my revenge. I had already placed the spores, and when he got to me I was running away and almost outside the room. The game then tell us to get ready to continue and we respawn outside, but as I did show you on the previous chapter the spores do not get undone upon respawning.

:smug:

So we enter again and loot the corpses, finding nothing but that the Goblin King's still alive, though just barely.

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but the poison is taking effect. When he sees you, he attempts to speak: "Give me water... the fountain... I give you... information... peace..."

If right now you haven't had an eureka moment about what is the game really about you are totally hopeless, I reckon. In any case, the game asks us whether we want to give our water bottle to the Goblin King or not. We do so.

"I'll tell you how to... next level... past slime... three jewels... slime... rock becomes... floor... right, left, center of the..."

Then silence. His hand opens, releasing a key.

That's the hint i mentioned before about getting the jewel out of the stone by means of a slime. And, in any case, we are almost done. We return to the room with the merchant and this time enter the door a bit south of the spot we got the rock from, which will lead us to a small side corridor with our first troll!

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At the end of this corridor there's a door leading to another corridor, which is where we would get by means of the second door on this level's first room, and there are only three things of interest there. First, there's The Immortal's one and only dwarf, *SQUEEE*. Then, there's this level's straw bed. Finally, there's the door leading to the corridor going to this level's last room.

First, naturally, it's dwarf time.

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Don't bother me, I'm cutting a gem. Yes, you need it. No, you can't have it. I wouldn't give it to anyone, least of all you. Go away.

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We need that jewel, but the little and foul mooded runt will not give it to us. What to do? Well, remember that dust of complaisance we got from one of those goblins we did defeat earlier? We open our inventory and click on it. The game then tells us that to use the dust of complaisance we will need to throw it to the air and asks us if we want to, given we will only get one shot at this. We do.

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Let me help you. Please, take this gem. No, really, I insist. Take it and go with my blessings. Good luck.

:love:

He leaves through a secret passage and we are more or less done, now. We go to sleep in the straw bed thingie, which triggers both a late hint for this level and also a hint for the following ones.

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When you clear your mind of the day's troubles you start to think about the goblins. They appear to be rational. Perhaps you can reach some agreement with them.

Refreshed, we awake and enter the last corridor. It is protected by two more slimes and, being a corridor, it's hard to reach the end without the merchant's oil, though once I did it, even if I hadn't the Goblin King's key when I got to the end and it was, like, whooops. In any case, we unlock the door with the Goblin King's key and enter the last room. There's three symbols on the floor, each with four holes. This puzzle may seem to be easy, but honestly I got quite stumped here because my pseudo-OCD mind could not fathom the concept of just putting one jewel in each of the three symbols, so I was totally sure I had to deduct which of the three symbols was the right one and then place the three jewels on that one symbol following the order the Goblin King told us about.

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And that's it for today. Next time we meet, The Wizard will start discovering what the hell's going on in there, as he helps the Goblins against the Trolls and then single handedly invades the Troll's territory in a quest to find the next ladder down! The game will also begin getting hard, as the third level is the last one we will have a chance in hell of solving without dying a couple dozen times, at best.

Oh, also...

Unintentional deaths so far...

01 to stupid shadow monster thingie.
01 to stupid goblin royal guard.

I wanted to reach the fourth floor before starting to die. There goes my reputation. :(





Now unto the dialogue trees...

@ Blackadder

You now? You are my hero, really. Regardless of what obscure little game I manage to discover in some forgotten corner of the internet you already know about it and played it, and probably cleared it too. Next you'll say you actually cleared The Summoning without any help and mapping the teleport maze by yourself, then I'll make a little Blackadder shinto shrine on my garden.

Some day I'll find some cool old game about dungeons that you don't know, you'll see! :P

@ Unkillable Cat

Hey, Cadaver is, like, totally awesome! 11/10, game of the millenium, at the very least. :3 But then I really like those isometric, uhm, action+adventure+puzzle games. Diablo should have stolen more of Darkmere, Cadaver, Shadowlands, The Immortal, etc, than from rogue likes, then it would be a totally awesome piece of game. :obviously:

@ Malakal

Wizards are tasty and wormies are hungry, more or less. Plot wise they are just there, though given Erinoch is kind of a very ancient dungeon in a fantasy world it's mostly the same kind of reasoning behind there being Goblins and Trolls and giant spiders and slimes. However, and while all of those just kind of live there, all of the human characters here are related to Mordamir in some way or another, so at least the game will not pull some random adventurers on us.

Outside of that the wormies are just a kind of omnipresent enviromental danger that will make up for some pretty harsh sequences later on, the first of which is the longest of the two levitation segments and the second of which is a room you must traverse touching only certain tiles while using a worm detector's beep beep sound thingie to know when you are about to step outside the good tiles and into the angry worm's stomach, as the good tiles and the bad tiles are identical in appearance.

@ The Wizard

Awwww. :3

:love:

@ Crooked Bee

Thank you for the nice words, Miss Bee. :3

And yes, the game's really atmospheric. Though, somehow, many of those isometric adventure thingies from back then managed to be really atmospheric little games. It's kind of weird.

@ Radisshu

Indeed. This game should remain a testament of why good 2D sprites and animations will always be better and more characterful than 3D stuffies.
 

Crooked Bee

(no longer) a wide-wandering bee
Patron
Joined
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Messages
15,048
Location
In quarantine
Codex 2013 Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire MCA Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
:love:

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Heh, this is awesum. All slime attacks in all games should be like that.

BC said:
And yes, the game's really atmospheric. Though, somehow, many of those isometric adventure thingies from back then managed to be really atmospheric little games. It's kind of weird.

Yeah, it's indeed weird -- those games managed to create a great atmosphere with truly minimal means. And look at all those bid budget games nowadays, so bland and banal and boring. That's why it saddens me when the likes of Richard Garriott says that the main thing we should aspire to is more "interactive storytelling" and things like that. :/

EDIT. Whenever I see the title of this LP, I tend to misread it as "Let's play the immortal stuffies" or "Let's play with immortal stuffies", and chuckle. :D
 

lightbane

Arcane
Joined
Dec 27, 2008
Messages
10,158
No, Bee, you're mistaken, the one to blame are these angry fans that only complain and whine, who are contrarian and hate creativity :M

Is it possible to kill these two guards and talk with the Goblin King without using the spores?
 

SCO

Arcane
In My Safe Space
Joined
Feb 3, 2009
Messages
16,320
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
This old man takes no shit.

Kidnapped my BRO teacher? I will cut them in half with my gladius

:yeah:
 

Malakal

Arcane
Glory to Ukraine
Joined
Nov 14, 2009
Messages
10,266
Location
Poland
Nya nya nya nya nya nya NYAAN!

Slimes! Goblins! Trolls! Regicide! Thats the shit a good wizard does. Kills things and doesn't afraid of anything.

Will we see some more interesting spells by the way? Dont get me wrong, slashing seems to be fun in this game what with serious death animations for enemies but its a WIZARD isnt it?
 

lightbane

Arcane
Joined
Dec 27, 2008
Messages
10,158
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Where's your multi-classing now?? :yeah:
 

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