Update 8: Maintenance Duty
In another case of characters in this game using too many goddamn words to say too little, we get complained at by the Director to go fix the mess we made down in the air shaft control room picking up the gun that probably doesn’t actually work.
Before we go to maintenance, there is one thing I kind of neglected up to this point. Just like Azriel has the spare magazines, Delta Six has his own set of collectibles - in this case, handwritten notes he can find strewn about Center 7. There are six of these in total: two of them are automatically picked up as a result of advancing the story.
The first one is in the elevator, on the left. It first appears during the previous Delta Six segment.
This second one appears during that part with the air vent puzzle, in front of a locked door across from the gym. The other two are in areas we can’t access right now - one is by the firing range, and the final one appears in the elevator once the other three are found.
When we get down to maintenance, there’s a burst pipe spewing steam across the path near the door. The handle nearby turns it off (as does the second handle behind the floor vent near the bottom of the screen).
Then we get to do this stupid puzzle again, only this time we need to light up all of the numbers in order to reset the system. It’s not terribly difficult and there is a reset button but I used a guide anyway because fuck you, Wadjet Eye.
We then have to open the tool cabinet and withdraw a wrench and two pipes, which the director goes out of his way, Dan Brown style, to inform us are ten-inch pipes made of magic space metal or something. I kind of stopped giving a shit about him several updates ago.
What follows is an extremely stupid “puzzle” that makes me think the developer of this game probably played Space Station 13 at least once. Like a good Atmos Tech (the kind that doesn’t get banned for breaking into the AI and overwriting its laws with the Wikipedia page for the state of Wyoming) we have to use the wrench on the broken pipes, remove them by hand, put the new ones on, wrench them in place, and then turn the steam back on to test it.
I should mention that the game is dickish enough that if you don’t wrench the new pipes in place, they come off when you turn the steam on, making this stupid filler puzzle take even longer than it has to.
Oh, hi Balder. What are you doing down here? More importantly, how did you even get in here?
So yeah, in case you can’t tell, Balder is basically going full-on Eddie Dombrowski (the fat guy from Silent Hill 2, if you haven’t played it) and getting ready to force us into a gunfight in a meat locker. He has a full villainous speech about how he wanted to rape Epsilon Five and whatnot, but fuck that I’m done with this game’s bullshit.
Or he’ll just punch Delta Six once and tie him up with rope he got from.. uh.. actually, where DID he get that rope?
Instead of doing the logical thing and just killing Delta Six here, Balder walks up and down the pipes like a moron and keeps being Eddie Dombrowski. There’s no clear way out of this situation - Delta Six can’t untie his hands. The answer is deus ex machina. No, really.
Right next to Delta Six’s foot is a shard of glass that is not there until this exact moment. Go ahead and look back at the previous screenshots - it’s not there. It’s not clear where this glass shard even comes from, since there’s nothing with glass on it in this room apart from the control terminal.
For some reason, you need to use the foot action on it twice to pick it up. This has to be done when Balder isn’t looking - he looks away when he’s walking toward the top of the screen.
Now comes the annoying part. Just below the upper wheel thing is a hole in the pipes where highly pressurized steam is leaking out. We can’t see it right now, since it magically shuts off when Balder enters the room. The trick here is to talk to Balder when he’s walking away from Delta Six and approaches the right spot. It’s a fucking annoying puzzle since the developers expect you to get it just right.
For reference, this is the spot.
Okay, devs? Let’s just talk here. Being hit by high-pressure steam does not cause you to just bleed randomly. That is not what third-degree burns look like.
I feel like this is kind of a wasted moment for character development that would actually make sense with the plot. It would’ve been really cool to see Delta Six go all Hotline Miami on Balder here and slam his head into the floor or beat his face in with the wrench to show that the whole “being trained as a mindwiped assassin” thing is acutally working or to give some more ominous emphasis on what the “final exam” is, but no.
Anyway, let’s be Dipshit McDeviantartOC again, mostly because we have no choice. Dipshit has a thirty-line conversation with Kane about what he’s doing, even though we already know this. I feel like I need another Slowtaku edit, but I’m going to just limit that to one per LP.
Welcome to the Weather Control station. As soon as Azriel walks in, the two grey conveyors in the foreground stop moving, and Azriel makes an obvious comment that they’ve been turned off.
The first thing we want to do here is kick this pipe to dislodge it, and then pick it up. This is part of a long, stupid puzzle that was more or less the first point where I started using a walkthrough when I played this the first time.
We then need to go up that ladder in the background and shoot the padlock on the supply cabinet to get an extension cord.
Now comes another stupid puzzle. In order to get the power working, we need to plug in that machine with all the switches on it. The plug goes into a socket on the second level, at the top of the ladder.
The logical solution would be to plug the cord on the ground into the extension cord, then throw it up through the hole and plug it in at the top. The game will let you do this. It does not work. Instead, you need to plug the extension cord into the socket, drop the cord through the hole, and then connect the two plugs using the box for height. It’s dumb.
Immediately following this is an even dumber puzzle. For some reason, the weather station’s circuit breaker will only allow one system to be on at a time. There are six switches, and the game is perfectly content to let you flip them to no avail. There are no clues to this other than a fuck-long spew of bullshit if you examine the machine itself. The answer is to look up a guide and figure out that you have to pull the first and third switches.
Oh, and then we have to go back up here and flip a switch. Pacing!
Azriel can then go downstairs and ride the conveyor belt like he’s Mario or something. I wonder if that long, brown stain on the floor is a metaphor for how bad this game’s writing is.
Oh look, it’s Sayuri! She’s apparently actually Barry Adama or something. I don’t know or care anymore. Fuck this game. There’s a massive dialogue dump that I’m going to just put into three lines.
: “You can’t have the juice! Also you’re a fucking idiot because the Boryokudan were following you the entire time!”
: “JUST AS ACCORDING TO KEIKAKU.”
No, really. You can say that.
What follows is the single most dickish shooting segment of this game. You know how I said getting that achievement for not taking any damage was sadistic to get? This is why. You have two Boryokudan assholes who are constantly jumping out of cover to fire. Both of them can hit you regardless of which side you pull out of cover on. There’s no way to headshot them - you have to spam the spacebar until they go down. I had to crank the difficulty down to easy because I was dying in two or three hits.
The Boryokudan were apparently load-bearing goons, as the weather facility starts to self-destruct once they’re dead. For some reason, even though they clearly came to kill Azriel, they actually brought the Center 7 file with them. Ready for one last stupid puzzle? I know I am! The data packet somehow flew out of the Boryokudan’s hands and magically drifted down to the conveyors. We can’t shut them off using the switches…
So we can just stick a pipe in the gears again. Azriel then does the truffle shuffle over the conveyors to get to the data packet.
Anyway, there’s another ten-minute-long text dump after this. Again, done with this game’s bullshit.
Oh. Oh! If you haven’t guessed the plot twist by now, this pretty much spells it out. Next time, we’ll get to see Delta Six’s escape attempt.