I don't recognize the statue. Is that the ruler? Is he wearing something weird or is head really look like a sparrow with its neck craned?
And here we have the pig. I recognize it from one of the maps we bought from .. whasisname. Anyhow we'll get to this later.
and it smells like shit too.
So I decide to lead the party south, to see where the ghosts go. To my surprise the level here is also quite expansive. The camera angle isn't the best for exploration, and I catch myself trying to cross onto areas of vastly different elevation more than once.
D'arce isn't looking too good so we give her a smoke.
Off the beaten path is a little building
Where we find B&F I. I posted it in entirety in one of the previous runs, so no point in clogging up the post with the contents.
I circle back around and find myself back in the main square again.
So I figure I might try my luck back in the present to see if there's anything important that I might have missed.
This guy attacks us again, but we're ready. We win the coin toss too.
Unfortunately we miss a couple of times and pay the price
But eventually we're victorious, without taking any negative status effects or losing any limbs
This guy was a
The game reprimands me again since my party hasn't had much to eat for a while. We stop to dive into the inventory.
And a little further ahead we see a human enemy standing still on the street. We approach carefully, ready to spring back if there's sign of trouble. However, it may be that his hitbox is a little larger than usual, as the fight starts before we've closed the distance completely.
From the first turn I realize that at best I'm coming away from this with a pyrrhic victory. His skill has been honed to perfection, and the razor sharp steel is too fast for my guys to dodge.
One turn leaves two severed arms on the pavement
I respond with 3 blows, trying to get rid off one of the hands, and stacking damage to the torso. He tanks it.
The next turn leaves me in awe. After killing Darce, the thing manages to sever ALL remaining arms.
Such skill, such power. But his luck runs out on the next turn, as the two remaining cripples bludgeon him to death with their stumps.
Well, the loot is good. Wish we had someone left capable of actually using all of it.
Then a spider crawls out of some hole
We eventually stamp it back into the ground
And then we find a treasure chest..
And another spider..
And I'm restarting. Screw that street. We decide to walk about the city a bit more.
We find a dead knight, most likely one from Buckman's party. Interesting if she could have been saved. Perhaps this was also on a timer much like Legarde.
So most likely the maggot lord beast thing, he's one of the few here who has the strength
After replenishing the wallet, we take a mental note of this closed door.
But there isn't much info on that old passage..
As we leave, we get accosted by a new enemy
Actually I recognize this guy. Back in the basement, when we met Seymour (? is that his name), there was a corpse just like this lying outside of his room. He said he was wounded by that thing, and that they spit acid.
We don't give him any opportunity to spit at us though. DELETE.
In the grim darkness of Maharbe, there is only pottery.
No, there are in fact more scarabs as well.
This one gets a lucky miss from a bunch of my guys, and spits acid onto the mace, which is promptly destroyed.
Well that wasn't very nice of him. Thankfully I have a bunch more, but not cursed.
D'arce is once again unhappy about something. Good lord woman.
The main barrier to this game's enjoyment is the ceaseless stream of reminders that your party is somehow afflicted by fear and hunger. I get it, it's in the name, but having these two things constantly trickle down without end starts to aggravate once you're several hours in.
Another spider is expunged from the streets. They should really pay us for keeping the city so tidy.
As I travel, I realize that I have very few healing supplies, and my food stocks are dwindling. The only place I can think of that will allow us to stock up is that basement I mentioned. So we turn about and pursue the blood portal.
And from there we trek back and back and back.
I've failed to pick up some of the loot from previous encounters.
We break down the door next to Legarde's cell.
I don't remember whether I won or lost the toss. Doesn't matter. The reward wasn't great either way.
Back in level 3 cells, we find some gin and chat with the merc. The doll is sad.
We dont let the merc tag along.
Now we can brute force this door.
Ooooh eerie
But at the end there's just some dead dude
Yeah, wow, all that for bone shears.
A ghost tries to ambush us as we leave. No thank you.
And here's the scarab I was talking about. Although this one's face looks a little worse for wear.
I've forgotten to pay these two a visit in this run. It's the usual. The gold is nice.
Or silver, yes.
There are no options to tell them of the dead knight of Rondon in Maharbe. Well, best of luck down there fellas, I've cleared up the passages pretty well. Shouldn't be too much trouble.
We get jumped by an elite guard as we leave the basement. I don't know why he was patrolling the graveyard in the dark, but it is what it is.
He gets very lucky.
I didn't save the game when I was down in the basement. Well damn. But I'm not going back. Too much legwork for some mushies and blue dill.
The stymy the onset of psychosis, we jump into the past where we bask in the warmth of the sun.
Back in the square, we investigate the pig to see if it'll drop us any clues.
It's hollow. That's it. Nothing else.
I pray to Syl at the big statue and then pull out the treasure puzzle map.
What am I looking at exactly? Pig, then go up the stairs to the north west, find 3 statues and open the door? Then go north to some containers?
We go up the stairs, go west, and go through the door. But there's nothing here.
As we walk about one of the harvestmen giggles and moonlights in the hole in the wall. You can still see a bit of his head on the left there.
Defeated by the lack of any containers, we walk through the narrow door and into an adjacent district.
Temple. Sounds fancy.
The sprawling streets are dizzying to navigate.
I find mounds of stone that dispense throwables, using them as mental markers.
We avoid the patrol
The ghosts continue to march somewhere. We'll catch up with them soon enough.
But before that we find something else I recognize - this thing was in the treasure map #2.
How can it be human, Raziel, it's a statue. Someone needs their nogging checked.
Yeah, it's this thing, I think. 3 doors, 4 people, 4 + with the one big O+. I still don't get it.
We dive into a nearby doorway.
The wages of necromancy is death
We climb the stairs and come upon an interesting room. Lots to take in here. Firstly, there's an eye in the wall with a purple sclera. My mind drifts to the giant purple hearts that we stabbed in the erdtree (merc run) and level 7 cells. Seems that this creature was spanning all of Maharbe? What the hell is the thing?
Secondly, there's the vile maggot lord thing encased in a giant glass casket. Were these things created? There's blood on the table too, implying that surgery was performed.
The eye watches us as we walk about.
I think I take a hit to my mind after doing something that stupid
But that's ok
Another journal
Why won't what work? Or is the journal here connected to the one below? This doesn't look like a prison, so why were people held in cages on the bottom floor here? Was the person running this laboratory being handed over necromancers so that he could torture them for information and try to create new life, like the thing in the casket?
The lab leads outside. We can go into the temple proper, or we can continue onwards to the west 'wing' of the laboratory. We choose the latter.
Another eye
This is just the storage area for the alchemical contraptions
Not much of interest. But the sudden surge of healing item drops does not bode well.
We follow the ghosts. To my surprise the yard below is full of NPCs we can interact with.
They're statues.
The king?
Where did he go?
I don't try and bait him by calling the city derelict. He'd probably beat the shit out of our party.
Another one
Have mercy on me when we meet then
The third one
Who are you?
The items are pretty cool, but we don't have the money anyways.
And a fourth one
We leave the dalit to lug around the treasure boxes for the gods.
Little detour for the treasure chest on the balcony.
And another building here
I stop to look at the statues as they cycle through a series of poses.
Hmmmmmmmmm
We fail the toss here
But the fight goes quite smoothly
Talking sense to it doesn't work. It just wants to kill.
There's a doorway here, but it's locked.
After walking around for a bit, we return to the bed and win the coin toss. Nighty night.
The city continues. I've stopped trying to memorize the directions. We're going south.
The setting starts to slowly introduce elements of horror, as chains with hooks are left draped from the balconies of some of the buildings in these streets.
With blood on them, no less. Maharbe was not such a nice place, even in its heyday.
From our vantage point we see a large building with pillars that appear to have .. melted?
We make our way around to approach it.
Well, well. The guy hanging on the wall looks a little like the humming statue. He has only the one eye, and since there's blood on the pavement his expiration was recent. Perhaps this is the guy in the treasure map? Well, I glance at it but it still doesn't make sense.
We poke it
Would be cool if it dropped down behind us as we were leaving. I guess, though, that it's haunting this district in the present. I'm sure that encounter will be lots of fun.
Nonchalantly, Mahabreans transition from hanging tortured corpses from chains to towels from clothing lines.
And we're here. This does not look at all inviting.
Yeah..
There's a hole in the ground. We go around it.
and up the stairs
Slowly we feel our way through the darkness, awaiting spooky abominations to come lunging from the darkness. All quiet, for now.
But soon we spot something. It's chained to the wall. It's not reacting. Then it utters a scream that echoes across the whole temple. God damn. It really does send shivers down my back. We back off.
To the north
There is a weird torture device here, accompanied with hooks and pulleys.
What? Why are we being asked to put some in the chains?
No, I'm not putting anyone in the chains. What the hell is wrong with this game? I walk around for a bit to see if I can interact with anything, but no, it's just the same message. Please hang one of your companions onto the meat hook.
We go back. Figure there's only the one guy we can ask if he knows what to do. But he isn't at all friendly. He screams again. Damn, that's an unnerving sound file.
Despite taking up a big chunk of screenspace we conspire to miss a bunch of our shots.
He does try to go for a coin attack, but we're lucky and finally defeat him.
So the tortured guy is dead, slumped over the chains. His head is missing for whatever reason. Can we put him in the chains? Is there like a weight we must hang off the chains or something? No that doesn't work. No reaction from the game.
(this is an older pic, I think, from before we came to the temple)
So we go back to that room. We took a bunch of damage from the red guy, and we're not far from our save point, so I figure I might as well try and see what happens.
I'm going to stick Legarde i.. trying to skip over the slow text I accidentally shove Darce in there.
Now things get even weirder. There are two pain bars in the top left, and the two pipe wheels can now be interacted with which increase the pain, since I presume we're pulling the hapless victim in opposite directions. But before I do any of that, the Tormented One nonchalantly walks in and starts pursuing us around the room. We bob and weave and eventually run straight into him.
So we put one of our party members into a torture machine, and the Tormented one appeared, can we not just hang me up there for a few seconds and then I'll jump down when he comes in? What is even happening any more?
Anyhow the guy is a beast. Absolute monstrosity. Tanks everything, wipes the floor with Legarde.
And then proceeds to crush me into pulp as well.
By now I'm just confused. The game makes no comment about what's happening, your companions stay silent in the torture room. Somehow they agree to hang off a hook; didn't realize I had built up such rapport! Why exactly I have to perform the torture if the tormented one walks in right after it begins is beyond me. Am I locked into losing a party member? Are there any diegetic clues on what to do, or is googling the answer to all of this the only way forward? Frankly I'm just tired of the bullshit.
We go back to exploring. Now, at least, I realize that the pierced angel thing is foreshadowing.
But after walking around a bunch in the district I can't find anything of particular importance.
We go back to the temple, but in the present. Perhaps things will change?
The red guy isn't here anymore. Alright. Reasonable.
There are now spiders in the torture room, and we can't use it.
Ah, something new! I hadn't realized that the stones I picked up could be used to gauge distance.
Hmmm, well, we've saved our game, let's see what's down there.
We break both of our legs. Legarde and Darce are fine, somehow. I presume I cushioned their fall.
The room is full of golden statues of people. Are these the male analogues of the biomech mothers? Also, as I crawl around I swear I see one of them move, the one that's looking to the left just beside the word 'Touch' in the next pic.
I try to interact with him, but nothing happens.
There's a lot of them. We're screwed if they wake up.
We find the book of ailments here, and it's written by Valtiel. I wonder if this is random loot or if it's placed here to signal that Valtiel was somehow involved with the whole laboratory business.
Ok I found some more interesting lore that might shed light on what was going on
So the clay figures, they were there *before* the fellowship ascended to Godhood? So they are instruments of Grogoroth, Sylvahn, etc?
Finally we get our answer. It was Valtiel that honed his skill in crafting life, populating the streets of the city with the biomech mothers and the maggot lords. But he failed, I presume, since neither of those possess sentience.
There's a long ladder going up and we move it out of the way.
And we crawl out of a secret entrance close to the hole into which we fell.
I think I may have missed something, so we go back down.
Sure enough there's another room to the south
The husks are so many they might as well be walls
We find a table with 4 insets. Reminds me of Palace of Midas in the original Tomb raider.
Ok.. so we need four dismembered arms. Right. I don't think that's happening, especially since we don't get to pick up our own severed arms.
We find another latter and another exit.
Yeah, time to reload.
Well, that did dispel some of the confusion I had about the city's inhabitants. Now what?
I pick up a scroll of lockpicking in a nearby house.
Perhaps we should explore the city in the present some more. The gaunt knight spooked me so hard that I haven't done much of that since.
The game lets me throw stones down any place that's missing the floor.
I interpret this to mean that I'll break my legs off the floor down below
But this pit doesn't have a floor it seems. And we die.
And we're back in the past. There is still one building that we haven't checked out - and that's the destination of the ghosts that continue to march through the streets.
This turns out to be very different from anything I expected.
Starts off quite normally, but then..
We are teleported into a cavernous building, surrounded by giants that watch us.
Ahem, I thought there was supposed to be only 4 of you guys?
Where's Nilvan, Valtiel, Chambara, Francois? Is ascension a sham? Does this mean dozens have ascended in the past, but invariable end up sitting here forever, in limbo, when they die?
Well, I do have one and it's about what I'm supposed to do down at the temple, but I don't think this game comes with a LLM to interpret my questions.
I do have another question that's been on the back of my mind - and that's Pocketcat wailing at the moon in the story of the old gentleman coming to visit. It's the one thing in my mind that stuck. So let's ask about that.
Surprising. I didn't know what I was supposed to ask about here, so I googled to see if I was doing it right. Yes, I had accidentally left a space in my question because I used the spacebar to 'enter' it. The game then appends an empty space, and then interprets the question. What you're meant to do is use the enter key when typing (going against 99% of the game where you can use space).
Yeah, moon.
Oh ffs now it didn't pick up on my question because it was all lower case. These guys are absolutely retarded.
Moon. M O O N. Moon. The thing in the sky.
Finally. Thank you. Wasn't so hard now, was it? Also, stripping a string of leading and trailing whitespaces, and turning it to all lowercase is one line of code - the dev is lazy.
Well, the info on the moon is interesting. It seems that the Gods that people perceive, both old and new, are only a subset of the actual pantheon. If Moon was one of the old Gods, there are likely many more. And if all of these guys are the new gods, then it seems that people have long forgotten them.
The wall sculptures in the past of Maharbe seem to depict them. There were about a dozen of them.
I also get a portable save. Nice.
Well, let's visit the library.
Nice decorations. There's an eye in the wall, too. Lovely.
"see" as in fornicate? Oh..
So all those golden babies are .. half Valtiel?
Yes, disturbing stuff. I quaff some wine.
After scouring the bookshelves, we find a pedestal with a collection of statues.
Puzzle time! There are about 5 poses for each, and 5 of them in total.
No bruteforcing it.
Alright, we'll be back.
Another Valtiel piece
One of the children comes to investigate
We kill it.
And more evidence of Valtiel losing his marbles.
We wipe out the two in the corner.
So how is it that they have flesh when Valtiel said he was making them mechanical?
Anyhow, nothing here anymore. Time to depart.
Not much has changed in all that time.
This guy..
I will delete you from Maharbe purely for writing this cringe.
The statures are now arranged. They can't be moved. I guess they're showing me the right pattern, but there are two missing.
We get jumped by a mumbler in the room where we've just fought the embryo
After that, we exit and check the two laboratories
Yeah I get it now. The missing statues are here, contorted into the correct pose.
And there's a prayer circle in this room in the present, too.
More of Valtiel's rants
We create a blood portal and step back into the tower.
Exhausting, this. Don't know when the next part will be up. But I guess we'll be facing off against Valtiel in the depths of the library. I'm not looking forward to it.
