How Many Brothers Does It Take to Screw in a Lightbulb? Let's Dunk on Two Brothers Until It Breaks

[Timrod]

Click Here for Update 4

: In the interest of saving space, I’ll start using dialog icons instead of full screenshots. Bivare’s is Bidoof, but only because I couldn’t find a good picture of a bivalve.

: “What have you gotten yourself into?”

: “I’ll explain all that later.”

:

: “Is this what you really came here to talk about?”

: “Listen, I’ve been thinking about the whole “other colors” thing. And I’ve decided I need more information.”

: “I’ve already described in detail every thing that I saw.”

: “I know, and your notes were detailed, as I would expect… but I have a way for me to obtain more… direct evidence.”

: Even in a game with minimal space for text, they’re still repeating themselves.

: “…”

: “There is no other way to describe this phenomenon. You said so yourself.”

: I think I accidentally hit the middle option, but let’s be fair here, I think we’d all select the one on the right. Go get 'em, tiger! Get yourself out of this godawful trash fire!

: “Have you lost it? – wait – This is crazy! We’re not even entirely sure how this works.”

: I don’t know if the “–wait–” is a stage direction that got left in or what, but that’s exactly how it is in the game.

: One thing I should mention here. All this text, in the yellow boxes? It scrolls at approximately two characters per second. This first text box took something like half a minute to finish. There is no way to speed it up (edit: on a second run, I found that Z speeds it up). I’ll tell you when the yellow boxes are done, but for full effect, please take at least half a minute to read each of the following lines.

: “This is the most significant scientific discovery of all time!”

: “Proof… of… so many things I once never thought possible!”

: Here’s my question. If both Roy and Bivare went to the magic Game Over Dimension when they died, does that mean that Fucking Wife could’ve come back but just chose not to?

: “Bivare! You’re safe!”

: “Roy, this is life changing. This knowledge can lead to so many things! There is only one issue.”

: “How do we prove it?”

: Jonestown, anyone? Anyway, here’s Tehsnakerer’s favorite line, and it’s kind of my favorite line too.

: If I didn’t know that the Allansons were both godawful at writing, I’d say this line almost works… except that Bivare just offed himself because his brother told him that it would send him to the magic Game Over Dimension.

: Actually, hold on a second. How the hell did Roy get here? Did he off himself off screen?

: “My thoughts exactly. They’ll say we’re crazy.”

: “They already say that about me… ever since I told them of my findings.”

: “I always believed you, Roy. You experienced a great loss, and they couldn’t see past that.”

: You might think this is about the Allanson’s mother dying of cancer, but that hadn’t happened yet. The diagnosis might’ve, but I’m not so sure about that.

: “…Never mind that. Did you see that?”

: “Wait… Roy… that’s… I can see the Bay! We’re right above our home.”

: Apparently, dying in the world of Two Brothers is equivalent to when an admin on a TF2 server hits the “teleport everyone into the skybox” button.

: “Biv, did you see that color before? It came from the island south of the bay…”

: At least it’s not The Color Out Of Space.

: Ignore the fact that the dialog box isn’t loaded yet. I took this just to show that the rainbow ring flashes on and off.

: “There! I saw it! Do you think… do you think we could find what’s creating that colored light?”

: “Bivare. I don’t know how these colors are even possible… I… I am afraid to toy with this.”

: Roy totally behaving like a scientist who practically follows science as a religion, and also someone who didn’t just kill himself for the sole purpose of being able to see colors.

: “This is quite literally the most dangerous experiment we’ve done, that’s for sure.”

: “… I am determined to prove this…”

: “Roy, how do you get back?”

: And that’s the end of the yellow boxes.

: So I may have been avoiding permafucks in Persona 5, but I ran into one right here. It’s not only a game-breaking bug, it’s also a bug that renders your save useless because it forces you into a softlock.

: Roy and Bivare get on a giant turtle and sail away… and then my game crashes because I may or may not have accidentally hit the “full screen” key (it’s F1 and all it does is crash the game). Oops, I forgot to back up my save. So I reload…

: Now, notice that the game says it autosaves at every doorway. We should be fine, right? We just passed two doorways on the way to the turtle.

: Okay, so we’ve got both Roy and Bivare, there’s the items we had… let’s load the data.

: That… doesn’t look like the bay. I think the game dumped us here because we were in a cutscene zone when the game crashed and it didn’t know where to put us.

: So I go through the entire update a second time. No problem, it’s only a few minutes. There’s some stuff I forgot to show: like how there’s orbs you have to hit to open doors, but it’s pretty minor.

: When we get to Bivare on the bridge, he’s… still there. But he’s also behind us. Clearly, Bivare is like Naruto in that he can do the whole Kage Bunshin no Jutsu shadow clone deal.

: Yeah, about that… maybe you should merge with your clone or something…

: We get in the house and the game softlocks. I can’t move because the game spawned Bivare on the same tile it spawned Roy, and it locks me here because I’m pretty sure there’s an invisible wall on the tile above us. We can’t leave, we can’t progress.

: When I tried to reload, the game did the same thing, only this time it spawned me on the screen where you meet Bivare on the bridge. Clearly, the whole “saves at every doorway” thing is a lie.

: This is unfortunately a save-breaking bug. This save is permafucked, and I’m going to have to restart the entire game. This time, I’m going to see if I can set something up to automatically copy the save file when I open the game.

GAME-BREAKING BUGS: 1
PERMAFUCKED SAVES: 1

: On my second run, I took a look at the save. There’s a thing for “level” which you’d think would be for some kind of EXP system. It’s not. What it does is tell the game where you are: theoretically if I knew where the end was I could just warp there.

: See that thing under ‘itemsV’ where it says “goodbye=1”? That’s a variable for whether or not you talked to Silvia on the way out of the inn at the start of the game. The thing under “ObtainNot” is for marking which chests you’ve gotten. It seems to only be for chests with money in them. “sh=” is the amount of money we have, and supposedly there’s shops later so I can edit this to 999999 and save us some time.

: People have said that while you CAN edit Roy’s health, you don’t want to do that because there’s some events where Roy has to die for the story to progress.

: On my second run, I found out a couple of things. The first is that the Guide is actually in the Game Over Realm from the start - I don’t know if the falling part is a glitch or not.

: Second is that you can in fact find hearts in grass.

[Timrod]

Click Here For Update 5

: And welcome back to Two Brothers, now that I’ve completely restarted the game from scratch. Hoo boy are we in for some bullshit today. Assuming this guy’s complete save file I found on the Steam forums is right, we’ll be about a quarter of the way done with this game by the end of this update.

: “It will inspire many questions… how do our eyes perceive these colors? What made them?”

: “Indeed, but let’s try not to get ahead of ourselves.”

: “That’s what science is all about. Getting excited about new ideas!”

: “And getting let down by them when they don’t pan out.”

: “Touche! Well, there is only one way to find out.”

: “I think we need to be careful now. Let’s not have excitement cloud our judgement.”

Typo Counter: 9 (missing a space between “after” and “all”)

: “Yeah. I did just drive a knife into my chest to see ‘new colors’.”

: “Yes, don’t do that anymore. We’re dealing with unexplored facets of science.”

: “…When I was up there I couldn’t imagine a way back…”

: Today, we’ll be doing the first dungeon, which has some GODAWFUL signposting. I actually had to find a video of it to get past it. It’s real bad. First, there’s a cave with some hearts and a sign telling us to go into the Eagle Shrine.

: Everything is walled off, and there’s only really one way to go.

: There’s three doors out of the entry area. The left and right ones are pointless - they lead to rooms full of enemies that have nothing in them.

: This is the left room, as an example.

: Going up puts us in another room full of enemies. They’re pretty easy to dodge.

: That puts us in this room. It’s got these raised pillars that are controlled by the squares on the floor. Going over a square activates it, changing the position of the pillars but also turning the square into a wall.

: On the left is this guy, who left the signpost behind in that cave. We can take his sword, but can’t equip it because Mark isn’t here.

: On my way to the right side, Roy manages to get stuck between a pillar and the floor switch.

Softlock Counter: 2

: On the other side from the old man is this room, which has a switch, a closed door, and…

: An arrow statue. You can push these just like you would anything else.

: Opening the door puts us in here, which is a room with spiked walls that swiftly close in on you. None of the orbs or floor switches do anything, and we promptly die.

: Apparently, the water woman we met in Volta died when we fed her to the Fish King. Roy’s an asshole.

: There’s also a telescope up here which lets you see the world map.

: There’s a heart here we can eat for more max HP. I figured out how these work: each great heart boosts your max HP by 20. You start with 20 max HP, so we’re now at 60.

: Anyway, I couldn’t figure out how to solve the wall room. There’s a bug where if you leave the wall room after going to the Game Over Zone, the game will softlock if you go back in. I had this happen twice.

Softlock Counter: 4

: We then wind up here, in a room with a bunch of things in the wall shooting at us.

: I solved this room without immediately realizing I had. What you have to do is attack the gear in the corner, which raises the chandelier thing and reveals a switch.

: This puts us on the other side of this wall room. What the game doesn’t tell you is that like the speedrun glitch in Link to the Past, you can actually walk over those thin pieces of terrain connecting the two platforms. This is intentional - there’s a sign later that will tell us this.

: This puts us in another floor switch room. There’s a door you can’t see just off screen to the north. The switches toggle it from open to closed, so what you have to do is make a circuit around the room and then it’ll open the door up top.

: Remember Zelda, guys? REMEMBER IT? HUH? DO YOU? DO YOU? CLAP, SEALS, CLAP!

: “…I didn’t expect this.”

: “It’s not here?”

Typo Counter: 10 (Missing a comma)

: This? This is some fucking godawful signposting. I assumed that you needed an item to beat the closing wall room, and that this was somehow what you needed to do that. In fact, we’re not done here. The developers kind of assumed that you’d figure out the incredibly stupid gimmick behind the wall room first.

: “It must be somewhere else on the island, right?”

: “I guess so.”

: “Well we can’t just stay here all day.”

: So now that’s two times where the game has outright told us that we’re done here… only we’re not at all.

: At this point, I got really fucking confused. I tried the wall room once more, couldn’t figure it out, then assumed maybe it was some kind of joke.

: I had to look up a video, and the answer is incredibly stupid and not at all signposted properly. What you’re supposed to do… is give up and attack the door to break it down.

: Because the Allansons hadn’t ripped off Zelda hard enough, the stairs behind the crushing wall lead to a side-scrolling section.

: NOW we’re done here. Note that even though we “mailed it” to Mark, we have the key on us.

: This is where we’re supposed to use the gear.

Typo Counter: 11 (It’s “beetle” and I don’t think this is meant to be a reference)

: I had an idea of what to do with this boss right away, but I couldn’t get it to work.

: I couldn’t get a good shot of it, so I borrowed one from the Youtube video. Somehow, they made the resolution higher. Anyway, hitting the giant beetle makes it open a door in its chest. The door is EXTREMELY FUCKING FINICKY. Sometimes it’d only work if I was to the left of the door, sometimes it’d work if I went right in.

: This puts you in a room with the beetle’s heart, which you can hit a few times before you get ejected and have to restart the process. You can see I only had a bit of health - this is because missing the door damages you. Thankfully, if you die, you respawn in the same room with full health. What I’d recommend is just setting your HP to 99999 in the save file and then re-setting it to 80 (not 60) afterward.

: Once the beetle dies, it leaves behind its heart.

Typo Counter: 12

: We are then ejected from the shrine and smash through the floor outside.

: “It was in the belly of this shrine.”

: “I-- this is incredible…”

: “It hurts… Roy, don’t look at it! It will drive you mad! Cover it quickly!”

: There’s almost no way this isn’t a Color Out Of Space reference. I linked the Wikipedia page for it earlier, but it’s Lovecraft story about a meteorite that hits a farm in Massachusetts and starts spreading this indescribable color that makes people go crazy and mutates animals.

: “Right…”

: “I did! My brain couldn’t process what I was seeing. Everything was so fuzzy.”

: “This is the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen… I ever imagined! Roy…”

Typo Counter: 13 (Bivare is talking to himself and he’s not meant to be)

: “Exactly. Roy, when I was dead, I saw colors glowing from the far reaches of the earth.”

: WE KNOW! IT HAPPENED ENTIRELY ON SCREEN!

: “And you want to find them all?”

: “We’ll need to find a place to keep this secret and safe. Do you even have to ask? Let’s get out of here…”

: Before you ask, no. I didn’t transcribe that out of order. That’s how it is in the game. I don’t think the Allansons even read through their own script given how many typos and just general fucking nonsense is in it.

: Yeah, okay. So you’ve got something you think is The Color Out Of Space and you… put it in your jacket. Makes sense.

: In a good game, they would’ve done something cool with this. Maybe they would’ve made it so that the ocean is now colored in, or show that Roy sees the world differently now that he’s seen… teal. Also, I have no idea why Bivare has a gear jammed in his head. Maybe that’s why he was talking to himself.

: “You’re as shocked as I am!”

: “Where… where do we keep it…?”

: “It’s clearly a priceless object… so we need to keep it near us at all times.”

Typo Counter: 14

: “Not thinking about selling it already are you, Roy?”

: “Of course not. It is completely priceless.”

: “So what do we call this beautiful shade of… of…”

: “Jane.”

: “Jane…? Yes. I think she would like that.”

: “…”

: “Where should we head now?”

: “I would like to speak to our old mentor, Prof. Ulu.”

: “I don’t know if it would be a great idea for you to go back to Academia already…”

: “Why, even with this proof you still think they’d deny my findings?”

: “Luckily, I don’t think we have to find out… last I heard, Prof. Ulu was working on a dig North of Egg Harbor.”

: Real creative place naming there. Egg Harbor (or by its full name, Egg Harbor Township) is a town in New Jersey right next to Atlantic City. I don’t know that the Allansons are from there, but given that YIIK takes place in New Jersey, it’s probably safe to say they are.

: Next time, we go to New Jersey.

[LaZodiac]

@Timrod

Second is that you can in fact find hearts in grass.

Well, thank goodness for small favours. And by favours we mean “bare necessity game mechanics”.

@Timrod

In a good game, they would’ve done something cool with this. Maybe they would’ve made it so that the ocean is now colored in, or show that Roy sees the world differently now that he’s seen… teal. Also, I have no idea why Bivare has a gear jammed in his head. Maybe that’s why he was talking to himself.

I’ll be honest I genuinely thought it WAS going to happen… the fact that it hasn’t is actually really shitty. Especially after what seems like a… utterly miserable experience in the first dungeon. Good lord.

[Riley]

(with regards to Sid)

Bivare: What is this? Some giant beatle?
Will Smith as Deadshot: Some kinda Suicide Squad?

[Nidoking]

Still waiting for the line the game was clearly based around. Maybe it happened and I missed it.

ROY: Gee, Biv…

[Timrod]

Click Here for Update 6

: Well, we’re in New Jersey now. You might notice Mark behind me - this was actually me testing to see if I could successfully hack him into a place he wasn’t supposed to be.

: I’m not sure if he’s going to be here or not, but the good news is I have a save backup from before I screwed with it. I only recorded a tiny bit of this before stopping anyway.

: I equipped the Huge Sword just to see what it did. For the second run through, I was using the axe instead of the Krobroc Blade. Weirdly, it looks like that axe in the beach area doesn’t do anything - you just sort of have it from the get-go.

Typo Counter: 15

: This scene plays as soon as we take a few steps into Egg Harbor. It plays a song that is about as close as you can get to the theme that plays in Pokemon when your Pokemon is about to evolve without actually being a copy.

: Wait a second… isn’t that the thing that revived the fish instead of Roy’s wife?

: When we go to talk to it, the thing runs away.

: There are a LOT of pointless buildings in this town. The only one we give a shit about is the Inn.

: So I’ll be real with you guys, I don’t feel like grinding money or whatever, so I just went into the save and cheated 99999 money in. You’ll see it later. It helps make an upcoming boss fight slightly less shitty.

: Roy goes to sleep and wakes up on a beach near Fucking Wife in a scene that is absolutely not the end of Ico. Gotta love that bathroom.

: “Hey, you’re the one who made me go back and feed the cat!”

: “Well, you’re here now and that’s all that matters to me… :)”

: Yes, the emoticon is in there in the actual game script. This is Brian Allanson we’re talking about. By the way, for Jane’s dialog portrait, I’m using a photo of Gex’s dream girlfriend, Jane Fonda. Somehow, I think Jane Fonda would hate Roy Rogers, but maybe I’m wrong.

: “Roy dear, can you switch on the radio?”

: “It was our honeymoon, wasn’t it…?”

: “Our honeymoon… just as I expected!”

: “Didn’t we go to the observatory that night?”

: “Mhmm… we gazed at the stars… all night long.”

: “Just the two of us… we should do that again tonight!”

: “But Roy…”

: “…Yeah, Jane?”

: “We couldn’t go… there is no tonight!”

: “What…? What does that mean…?”

: “This is a dream! … I’m gone … you knew that… you didn’t forget that I’m gone, did you?”

: I’m turning Emo Roy on for the rest of the game and answering everything with the crying face that I can.

: “Jane… don’t… please… don’t.”

: “Roy… please don’t be upset.”

: So yeah, as far as I’m concerned this is Roy talking to himself through his dead wife the same way that Alex talked to himself all the time in YIIK.

: “What… what am I supposed to do now…?”

: “Eventually you’ll have to wake up… why don’t we play a little longer, though?”

: “I did…”

: “Is it beautiful…? What did you call it…?”

: “I called it Jane… and it’s not as beautiful as you.”

: There’s a couple of things I don’t get about this cutscene. The first is why Roy and Fucking Wife are in full color, and why the blankets or whatever are also in full color when the only one we’ve found so far is teal.

: What would’ve made this work far better would’ve been if this was a memory playing back in Roy’s dream, only the water is different than he remembers it.

: “Haha… typical you. Yes, I found one… and I think there are more.”

: “What do you plan on doing with them once you find more?”

: “I’m not sure… since I last saw you no one really cares for my theories… they say I’ve gone mad, that…”

: WE KNOW! FUCK! This cutscene has several hundred words more than it needed to. Hell, I could’ve done it without words at all: have Roy remembering himself on the beach and then the water starts flickering, and then it’s colored in.

: “That losing me made you go crazy and believe in an afterlife? Yeah…”

: Here’s what I don’t get about this at all. Roy actually has a color thing on him. It’s not like it really matters where it came from.

: “Well, I always did make you crazy! But… in all seriousness, Roy - find them and show everyone that they exist. A few months from now… what is happening?”

: “What do you mean? Do you mean the Academia Fair?”

: Roy wants to take teal to the science fair. Amazing.

: “That’s it! Remember we were going to show our findings from the [Cursed Lands]? Then seize the chance to show everyone what you have found!”

: “This… this isn’t a bad idea…”

: “Good! Darn… look at the time… the sun’s already setting.”

: “Jane! Please don’t go… I don’t want to wake up yet.”

: The next place we want to go is this bar. We actually could just skip it… I think.

: We can find Mark in here and get him back. The thing is, if you have Mark in your party, he takes a 15% cut of all the money you find.

: Now we need to leave Egg Harbor. I don’t know how I intuited this, I just kind of did. Maybe I’m just so used to the Allansons and their brand of bullshit.

: On the way out, we get accosted by… Baphomet?

: “…Do I know you?”

: “I don’t believe we’ve met. Where are you heading, Wanderer?”

: “I don’t believe I see a reason to tell you, stranger.”

: “Fair enough. You can call me Voinier. I am a wanderer like yourself.”

: “What makes you think I’m wandering?”

: “You have the look of a man who is looking for something, or someone, that he can’t quite put his finger on. Am I mistaken?”

: “Yes, quite a bit. I am heading North to see a friend.”

: Are we really just going to sit here and make small talk with Baphomet?

: “…”

: “Is something wrong? You seem…”

: “…”

: “I think you should tell me why you seem concerned.”

: What the hell kind of grammar is that?

: “I believe I know you…”

: “No, I am heading to see a friend running an expedition northwards. Is there something I can help you with?”

: “No. I am just passing through… manners are dead, aren’t they? It’s always nice to say hello.”

: “…What are you?”

: Now that we’ve been through… whatever that was… we can head to our next objective, Northern Pass. I’m seriously not sure if that’s supposed to be foreshadowing Roy going insane, or Voinier being evil, or both. Quality Allanson writing right there.

: Northern Pass is just kinda there, honestly. There’s a few “new” enemies - we actually saw one of these in Kalta. I can’t find it right now, but Brian Allanson admitted that there’s actually only I think two enemy AI types in this game.

: All we have to do from here is head to the right and we’re out. The Huge Sword is kind of a piece of shit: it’s not stronger than the axe is, and it has some incredibly fucky hitboxes that can sometimes miss enemies standing right in front of Roy.

: I also found out what the “walking sword combo” is. Basically, if you have a combo medal, you can get an extra forward thrust attack if you press the sword button rapidly while moving.

: Excavation Town has a lot of very pointless buildings, but also…

Typo Counter: 16

: From left, we have the same axe we already have, a blank book, a “knife”, the Eastern Blade and the Gallon Hammer. Since we have as much money as I feel like editing in, I bought all of it. I don’t think any of us feel like coming back later, and it’s not like any of this stuff is super overpowered.

: By the way, one of the reasons I edited in infinite money is because there’s a glitch where if you accidentally try to buy an item you don’t have the money for, the game will subtract the money from your total and not give you the item - or so I’ve heard, anyway.

: For the record, we had like… a few hundred money. I also like how the “no” option is the Tim Buckley B^U face. Two godawful tastes that go worse together.

: I equip the Eastern Blade and leave it on for the rest of the run. It’s more or less the Huge Sword minus the broken hitboxes, and might do a bit more damage it’s hard to say.

: At the north side of town is the dig site, which is our goal for right now.

Typo Counter: 17

: “Hello Professor Ulu!”

: “…Last time I saw you…”

: “You’ve been listening to the stories about how Roy Guarder is now-”

: “Raving like a mad man!”

: “…I’m afraid it may have come off that way… but it’s all changed!”

: “Here Professor… take a look at this.”

: “Surely I am hallucinating ?! What do I even call that - that color… if it even IS color.”

: “I would say that it is color. From a color spectrum adjacent to ours.”

: “Where did you get it? (Surely not from your ‘after-life’).”

: You might ask yourself ‘Is Roy really going to do a complete recap of the story?’ and the answer is it’s a fucking Allanson game, of course he is!

Typo Counter: 18

: “Roy, are you meaning to tell me that… you’ve been intentionally harming yourself to conduct these experiments?”

: “And… that you claim to have the ability to freely travel back to…life? Roy, I will not deny you that these colors exist… but I can’t accept any talk of immortality.”

: “Professor… something changed inside of me after my time with in the [Cursed Lands].”

Typo Counter: 19

: “I never said immortal. When I am on the other side… I feel how easy it would be to stay there… get sucked in forever.”

: Yeah, except what you’re describing is the fucking definition of being immortal! You can’t die unless you want to! That’s exactly what immortality is!

: “But as long as I can still find these otherworldly objects and explore the very nature of life and death, I will do so.”

: And here I was thinking that a Gameboy-style format would force the Allansons to be less wordy, not more.

: “This goes against all I believe in. Roy, I will reserve judgement on your actions until you give me more data. But now I must ask you… you believe there are other of these objects out there?”

: That’s not a typo, it’s just bad grammar. Seriously, sometimes I wonder if English is the Allansons’ first language.

: “Yes.”

: “And when you find them, what will you do with them?”

: “I…”

: “Roy, this is an amazing discovery. - and scientific implications of your discovery could surely change the world - but it WILL NOT BRING JANE BACK.”

: No, I didn’t typo any of that. That’s exactly how the text is presented in the game. There’s a full stop, and then the next line starts with a hyphen.

: “…I… I know this.”

: “Roy, make sure that the reasons you are doing this research are based in logic.”

: Seriously, is it just me, or does this sound like it was run through Google Translate?

: “You need to be careful. Why did you come to me? How can I help you?”

: HE JUST SHOWED YOU WHY!

: There’s something else here I’d like to point out. This game is clearly styled after the Game Boy, presumably from the early Gameboy Color era.

: When developers made games on the Game Boy, you didn’t see gigantic fucking walls of text like this. This entire exchange between Roy and Ulu is around 50 text boxes long.

: They did this for a reason - it was because the Game Boy was a portable system that was powered by a couple of AA batteries and had very limited memory.

: In the Game Boy era, developers didn’t know what your circumstances were when you were playing their game, or when your batteries were about to run flat. They purposely designed their games to accommodate this, and part of that meant forgoing long cutscenes that the player might have to sit through multiple times if they had to turn the system off part-way.

: Now, I’m not saying that any game with a retro aesthetic has to be 100% console-accurate: Shovel Knight wasn’t console-accurate to the NES hardware even if people thought it was. What I am saying is that if you’re going for a game that looks like it’s from older hardware, there should at least be some thought put in as to “how do we at least make the game feel authentic even if it’s not”? The Shovel Knight devs clearly thought about this, but I don’t think the Allansons did.

: “Hmm. it goes against my better judgement telling you this… but in science, it is always a good idea - to repeat the original experiment to try and achieve the same results.”

: “Now, I am NOT condoning harming yourself… but it is the most logical place to start.”

: What he’s saying is, don’t kill yourself, but… definitely kill yourself. Great mixed messages there.

Typo Counter: 20

: I’m not sure if there’s anything to actually do in the Game Over Zone, as I didn’t die at any point between the last boss and the end of this update.

: “Oh, and Roy!”

: “Huh?”

: “Get some rest you look terrible!”

: “Right.”

: Ulu has a mysterious chest he won’t let us open and a heart behind a wall. Nothing creepy at all.

: On the way back, I found a book in the library, which is a big building on the way to the dig site. This is for a sidequest in the Game Over Zone that I never wound up getting to. You’d think they’d put in a dedicated suicide button or something for getting there without having to get hit by enemies until you die. This is one reason I didn’t edit the save to have infinite HP.

: This is another dungeon that doesn’t really have a reason to exist. All you do is follow that weird texture on the ground.

: On the next screen, we run into uh… aren’t those just peahats from Zelda? Whatever. They’re the same as any other enemy in this game.

: Oh, right. Have I mentioned that this game has a co-op mode? A second player can take control of Bivare or Mark or whoever Roy has following him around. I’m not sure if it works with Steam Remote Play but if it does I’d be open to try it.

: Eventually, we reach a screen with three “angry rats” and a dead person. I think this is some kind of sidequest, but again, I wasn’t going to spend time dying on purpose to find out - especially since there’s no indication of when the game actually saves.

: I’ve noticed by watching the files on my hard drive that the game doesn’t actually save at every screen transition.

: Roy will say this once if you go near the body, but other than that… nothing.

: This area looks important, but you can’t actually go in the doors.

: These enemies are pretty annoying. They shoot lasers out of their eyes at you.

: We temporarily lose Mark again.

: Up north is a door that won’t open and a chest. The game just keeps throwing combo medallions at me to the point where I’m questioning why the walking sword combo isn’t just a permanent thing.

: Going… I think East from the door brings us to another great heart, boosting our max HP to 100.

: What we have to do is go until we find a box floating in quicksand, and then jump in after it.

: “Uh… yes…”

: “Yes but the light is getting away!”

: “Allow me to assist you in your hunt.”

: “Alright…”

: Unlike all the other times we ran into holes, which reduced Roy to near-death, we have to jump down this one.

: One thing I realized but didn’t capture is that you can actually access Roy’s bag even without Mark: if you press C, the second character will open the bag.

: “Who are you? What are you talking about?”

: “Listen, Roy. I can tell he will not listen to reason. Do what you must.”

: “I don’t know what your problem is, but I speak for myself!”

: The gargoyle is way, way easier than the giant beetle by virtue of being less glitchy. He flies around, does a stomp attack, and then shoots orbs.

: All you have to do is walk right up to him once he’s stomped and then mash the sword button. Roy will destroy any orbs he hits with his sword.

: The only real “challenge” here is that the boss gets invincibility seemingly at random, so it takes way longer than it has any right to.

: Wait, what!? We just kicked that thing’s ass! I barely even took a hit!

: This reminds me of this one moment in one of the Disgaea games where I had grinded my party to maximum stats, instakilled a story boss and got a “He’s too strong! We can’t take him!” cutscene when even my healer could take him out in a fraction of a percent of a physical attack.

: My first thought here was “Oh, they’re probably ripping off Blind from Link to the Past where you had to get him under the light to kill him.”

: Here’s what I really don’t get. Voinier is pretty clearly evil, but then… I dunno. Is this supposed to be a thing where the gargoyle is a Colossus and Voinier is this game’s Dormin?

: In a good game, they would’ve made it obvious during the fight that the gargoyle is blind. Maybe even had a mechanic around it where you can distract it somehow.

Typo Counter: 20! (no apostrophe in “Gargoyle’s”)

: Oh, so we’re in Florida?

: “One I recognized, as a violator of Holy Relics and texts… the other was one I could not understand. A soul unlike any I knew from this earth.”

: How much do you want to bet that Baphomet is the first one?

: “I arrived here before with a companion… I mean no violation to what you view as holy.”

: “I mean no violation”? What the fuck kind of grammar is that?

: “Those two spirits are gone. What is your name, human?”

: “I am Roy Guarder. I am a scientist. I’ve come here looking for something. Although, I don’t honestly know how to explain what I’m searching for.”

: What he’s saying is that he’s a scientist. Yeah, ungh, he is a scientist. Yeah, ungh, he is a scientist. He tries to live on science alone. God dammit how did I not use that one earlier? Also fuck you Roy, you’re a dipshit who is looking for magic colors to bring his wife back.

: “…Guarder…? I like this name… I am The Guardian of this swamp so I guess this makes us brethren in some way.”

: That’s uh… that’s some logic there.

: “Tell me Guarder, when you entered the dark passageway, did you encounter my servant?”

: “I may have. What did your servant look like?”

: “He is a creature of an ancient race. He appears to those who seek Holy Relics of his home place. If danger befell you earlier, it is likely he came to your aid.”

: Oh man, this is another one of those “What does Donny do?” moments right out of The Room. I explained this in the YIIK LP but it’s a scene where… someone asks Tommy Wiseau’s wife what his adopted son does, and his wife just goes “Well, Johnny adopted Donny at a young age and Donny loves and idolizes him…” and doesn’t answer the fucking question.

: Also how much do you want to bet that the gargoyle is the gator’s servant?

: “I believe I met him.”

: “We were attacked, and I was forced to leave him behind.”

: “I see… I have one more question for you… why have you journeyed this deep in to the swamp, Guarder?”

: Because he’s a dipshit who thinks the magic colors will bring his dead wife back.

: “I was following an object I saw floating through the swamp.”

: “!! This object… describe it to me.”

: “I can’t… I don’t have the words. This object defies description! There are no words in my language that can do it justice.”

Typo Counter: 21

: “…Yes.”

: “Much is explained now… I must ask you a favor then. One who has seen the light of the other world - and has returned is one who can surely be trusted.”

: “I don’t believe I understand.”

: “But you do! With my servant gone. I will not last long if the dark powers I feel flowing throughout the swamp come to call. Roy, as a fellow Guardian… I ask you to enter inside me and hide what you find.”

: “Please do not speak of it to others. It would not be safe.”

: I swear, one of the Allansons is into vore.

: “I can do this for you. But… what is coming for what’s inside you?”

: Phrasing! Phrasing! Fucking phrasing! Take that shit to Furaffinity!

Typo Counter: 22

: So wait, what the fuck is this shit? First the gator says that he feels a dark force coming for him, and then… “uh… I dunno, maybe?”

: Next time: THE VORE DUNGEON.

[Timrod]

@Riley

Bivare: What is this? Some giant beatle?
Will Smith as Deadshot: Some kinda Suicide Squad?

Sid.

@Nidoking

Still waiting for the line the game was clearly based around. Maybe it happened and I missed it.

ROY: Gee, Biv…

ROY: Gee, Biv, it sure is boring around here!
BIV: Mah boy, these softlocks are what all true programmers strive for.
ROY: I just wonder what my dead wife is up to!

God dammit how did I not see their names being puns coming from a mile away fuck.

[LaZodiac]

At Prof. Ulu’s place he says “Good Earth, what is that?!” instead of “good god” and I’m like… god I’m not even religious and that’s annoying.

I… don’t like this overly detailed explanation for why we have to have a Jabu Jabu’s Belly dungeon…

[Timrod]

@LaZodiac

I… don’t like this overly detailed explanation for why we have to have a Jabu Jabu’s Belly dungeon…

The good news is, there kind of isn’t one. I stopped recording after the giant gator said his bit, and as it turns out you just go inside him and get purple. I also found a new softlock in the next update and am hoping it didn’t fuck my save.

[Nidoking]

@Timrod

Out of all of this, the thing I want to know most is: Who the heck is PhisPhace?

That scene with Voinier is one of the moments that I remember having seen elsewhere, and I have to say, I think it’s genuinely a bit creepy, in the way it’s clearly supposed to be. It doesn’t really seem to fit anything, and would have been served well appearing without all of this… this around it, but the idea of someone resetting a conversation over and over and saying less and less, getting closer and closer each time, almost suggests that either they’re aiming for a particular result that they have the power to get, or perhaps that they gained the information they needed and they’re gradually erasing the memory of the person they’re talking to. At least, that’s the sense I got.

@Timrod

: “You need to be careful. Why did you come to me? How can I help you?”

I do want to defend this line in particular, though. Roy has shown Professor Ulu a new color, but the question of “what is my role in this quest of yours” seems pretty legitimate. It’s not to help spread the word, because Roy’s asked Ulu not to tell anyone, and there doesn’t seem to be any course of study available. So, what DOES Roy want? It’s not obvious that he’s asking for directions, especially since he said that he’d seen where the various colors were from above.

[Timrod]

@Nidoking

Out of all of this, the thing I want to know most is: Who the heck is PhisPhace?

PhisPhace is some random NPC with one line of dialog who wanders around Egg Harbor. I’ll grab a screencap of him once I’m done recording the next area - I spent like 40 minutes wandering around trying to find progress and so I had to stop in the middle of a dungeon.

@Nidoking

That scene with Voinier is one of the moments that I remember having seen elsewhere, and I have to say, I think it’s genuinely a bit creepy, in the way it’s clearly supposed to be. It doesn’t really seem to fit anything, and would have been served well appearing without all of this… this around it, but the idea of someone resetting a conversation over and over and saying less and less, getting closer and closer each time, almost suggests that either they’re aiming for a particular result that they have the power to get, or perhaps that they gained the information they needed and they’re gradually erasing the memory of the person they’re talking to. At least, that’s the sense I got.

I totally agree. Taken by itself, it’s not a bad scene at all - it’s just that they don’t do anything with it and it gets lost in the noise of the rest of the game.

[SpammyV]

I mean we’re kind of already there with the ROYGBIV puns. Roy Guarder. Roy G. & Biv.

[Timrod]

Click Here for Update 7

: I stopped recording after the gator bit because I assumed this was another dungeon. It’s actually not. Hilariously, when I loaded the game, Mark was just kinda here even though we left him at the start of the swamp.

: “At last… I have found another…”

: “Never forget… I have entrusted you with this task…”

: We then have to go back through Adventure Road, because of course we do. I’ll just cut it out, but what you do if you somehow get a copy of this game is head north and there’s signs marking an exit to town.

: You then just drop down and you’re back at the start.

: Halfway through recording this update, I found out that someone (probably one of the Allansons, because we know they did this with the third ending in YIIK) put out a full guide and a world map for this game on Gamefaqs. It contains minutiae that I think only the Allansons would know… like this place.

: This place is in Adventure Road. You go down the cliffside and then head Southwest for a while until you can go north to here.

: The Blue Shrine is completely pointless.

: In one of the side rooms is a shield. You’d think this would be useful. It’s not. The shield works exactly like it does in the 2D Zelda games: if a projectile hits you and you’re standing still, the shield absorbs the projectile. It breaks after three hits.

: There’s also a boss here. There is no fucking point in fighting this boss, and it’s very hard to do anyway.

: Basically, the boss jumps around the arena diagonally. This makes him very, very hard to hit with how broken the hit detection is. He also hits for like, a third of Roy’s HP.

: Naturally, I die and go to the Game Over Zone. There’s a room through a blue warp that brings you to Palma, who was the dead lady we saw earlier.

: Going down this hole will dump you back in Adventure Road.

: I go and kill Wild Cat just because I can.

: Fuck you, Brian Allanson.

: On the way out, the shield breaks. There is a weapon we missed in the swamp, along with an item for a sidequest. The sidequest is broken and has to be save edited to work.

: Outside, Palma’s house opens up as a new location. There is no point going in there, it’s just a room full of enemies and a couple of chests with money in them.

: The mermaid line just kind of comes out of nowhere. There is no mermaid here.

: She’ll also open a cave behind her house, but again, there’s nothing in there but trash.

: I also tried to go get the weapon we missed in the swamp. It’s a spear, but for some reason I can’t pick it up. For reference, it’s in the cave that unlocked once we teamed up with Voinier, right before where we jumped into the hole. You just take the exit on the left instead of the one on the right.

: Fortunately, someone on the Steam discussion boards posted their save file, and I was able to just edit the spear in.

: I also found the sidequest item while I was at it, just because I could. It’s in this cave, which is in the swamp if you keep going to the right of where we first met Voinier there.

: The Animal Capsule is in the Northwest corner.

: I got real fucking confused as to what exactly I was supposed to do, because I recorded this part before I found the guide. There’s no option to show Professor Ulu the shard, and there’s no new cutscene from sleeping at the Inn. As it turns out, what you have to do is die.

: Not gonna lie, getting some real YIIK vibes from this.

: “…This is something I do not understand myself. Who are you?”

: We are then shunted into the regular Game Over Zone.

: There’s a guy here who tells us to go check out Fishington. Do not check out Fishington. We will, and there is nothing there but an unintentionally hilarious softlock.

: We can also trade the book we picked up for a napkin. I don’t know what this does or who to give it to.

: After going back through the North Passage that we took to get to the excavation site, we can go east of Egg Harbor to reach Fishington.

: There’s also the Western Hills, which is our real destination…

: And a shop up here.

: Most of the weapons here suck. From left to right: Razor Axe, Hook Flail, Swift Dagger and Cheap Boomerang. The Cheap Boomerang is a cruel joke and none of the other weapons can cut grass… except the Swift Dagger, which is actually a decent pickup because it has the least broken hitboxes of any weapon thus far.

: When you first equip the boomerang, you can throw it. It goes a few tiles and then drops to the ground. It doesn’t return to you: you have to manually pick it up (and yes, it can get stuck in walls so you can’t pick it up) and until you do, you’re stuck with Roy’s default dagger.

: Let’s do Fishington quick. Fishington has two buildings: this one and the Mayor’s Office. The Mayor’s Office is a dumb dialog loop. This one, though…

: Then the game softlocks. This feels like something Roberta Williams would’ve done in King’s Quest.

SOFTLOCK COUNTER: 5

: Let’s just go to the Western Hills.

: There’s a bunch of NPCs here who don’t do anything.

: I spent like 40 minutes wandering around this giant empty shithole of an area. At one point, I thought I had somehow come to the wrong place and was supposed to, I dunno, go somewhere else. You can actually see where progress is on this screen: it’s the cave entrance right by the weird lizard house.

: The lizard house is full of enemies and is kinda pointless. It has some weapons in it, though.

: Straight back, behind a mermaid who makes a dumb joke about where the hearts in the grass come from (“they come from small animals in the grass”) is a whip. The whip is actually a pretty solid weapon, but is useless because it can’t cut grass or break rocks: both of these are things we need to be able to do and can softlock you if you can’t.

TYPO COUNTER: 23

: I actually tried the “short thick sword” for a bit. It has broken hitboxes, so into the pile it goes.

: You see that rock there? Never destroy that rock. If you do, it’s a long journey back. Let’s just pretend I didn’t go through any of that shit and go into the cave, shall we?

: There’s a handful of skeletons in here but we’re not going to bother fighting them.

: Tip Top Peaks is heavily “inspired” by that one mountain area in Link’s Awakening.

: The first room in here is full of those laser eye things. They nearly took me from full health to zero before I even got in the room, so I just let Mark kill them. Mark will attack things if they get close enough.

: I managed to escape with just a tiny bit of health left.

: You would think this pillar would be part of a puzzle or something, but it’s not.

: Down the stairs is another floor of laser enemies. What I could’ve done is used the spear - it has a long reach and relatively working hitboxes but can’t cut grass.

: Instead, I just took some hits and ran for it.

: Time for a stupid puzzle.

: “Yeah… no problem!”

: “I have an idea… I will help you, and you can just owe me later? How about it. I help you, you help me?”

: Is this supposed to be the villain, or Mr. Dink from Doug?

: Voinier drops an arrow statue we can use to save this guy.

: You have to throw him an arrow, and then warp to the statue.

: And now we can go on to our real target, Birds Road.

: Birds Road is where the combat in this game really starts to suck.

: This is where the game introduces assassins. They’re not hard, it’s just that they out-range most of your weapons that can reliably hit.

: In the corner, we find throwing stars. They’re a limited ammo replacement for the arrows, and as far as I can tell do the same damage but in a spread shot rather than a single one.

: See that statue with the open mouth? Those shoot a wave of fireballs at you if you get near them. Roy doesn’t move fast enough to dodge them, and because of where it’s set to trigger you’re almost guaranteed to get hit by it.

: For some reason, when I killed these assassins it briefly flashed to this screen.

: The shield here can be obtained by kicking a bomb down to it and blowing the boulder up. I don’t know why I bothered to do this - it takes forever to kick the bomb down there.

: You have to go past a couple of these and I couldn’t get the shield to work.

: That lizard-shaped house to the right has a room full of chests. Most of it’s worthless garbage, but the bottom-right one has the Rifle… which is actually a quest item and not a weapon.

: To the north-west is the bird temple… which is shaped like a lizard and shares none of the weird totem pole kind of designs we’ve seen coming up here.

: Actually… shouldn’t this be kinda hard? Roy’s only seen her in the Game Over Zone, where she’s purple - but this world has no words for color. I’m just imagining him going “Uh, she’s a bird.”

: This dungeon is easily the most broken thing we’ve run into thus far. To open that door on the left, we need to hit this switch. This should be simple - just use an arrow, right? The problem is that the arrows won’t shoot upward for some reason. They don’t even come out of Roy’s sprite - he’ll make the throwing motion but it won’t do anything.

: What I had to do was break out the spear, which is just long enough to hit the switch. I have no idea what you’d do if you were playing this in 2013 and missed the spear but also didn’t know about the Kickstarter code thing for the giant foam finger, the only other weapon that can reach the switch. As such, I’m going to label this a game-breaking bug.

GAME-BREAKING BUGS: 2

: The next room has a statue in it.

: There’s a bomb just south of it that you can’t see from the entrance because of the arbitrary darkness mechanic.

: The floor switches in the next room cause the room to light up if you step on them. There’s a switch here that opens another door.

: This room is… honestly kind of dumb. If you stand on those white squares on the floor, it lights up the room so you can see the path, which is otherwise invisible. The light stays for a fraction of a second after you leave the button.

: It’s the other half of this room that’s the real dumb part. See those cracked walls? We can attack those.

: This statue leads to the final area of the dungeon. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to kick the bomb we saw down the stairs up here, right?

: Wrong. The Allansons handled this in the worst possible way - what happens is that if you try to kick a bomb up there, there’s an invisible wall at the base of the stairs that causes the bomb to slide underneath them - this is why it’s not visible in this shot. Either that, or the game just kind of selectively broke when I tried to kick a bomb up there.

: And so naturally, you’d assume we need some kind of item to break the statue, right? Wrong again. You’re supposed to kick the bomb up there, but we haven’t reached the event flag to give the stars collision.

: Instead, we need to drop down to another area, because that makes sense somehow.

: Off to the right of that area is where Ceila is. This is why I didn’t edit in infinite HP for Roy, because it will actually softlock the game here if you try that. Hell, the game almost softlocked with the regular amount of HP.

: It’s not at all obvious, but what we have to do is sit on one of the two mats next to her and press down.

: At this point, the game takes our controls away, and I was very afraid I had run into a softlock… or worse. No, that’s how this is supposed to go.

: A good ten or fifteen seconds after it takes control away, the game starts doing damage to Roy in a loop until he dies, because simply having a warp to the Game Over Zone wasn’t good enough.

: “How is this possible?”

: “I will show you the way, but you must walk.”

: The text being fucked up here is intentional… I think. There was a line from Roy that was on screen for a couple of frames where he asks what she’s saying.

: Ceila’s gimmick is that she can fly Roy over small gaps.

: “Now, meditate on a point and let an arrow fly!”

: If you can barely see the arrow, you’re not alone.

: “Share with me your wisdom.”

: “You are on a dangerous path Roy Guarder.”

: “!.. I spoke to you once, as if in a dream… but I just saw you, alive on Earth… how can --”

: “For a man of such self-assuming intellect, you do resort to crude methods… I do not need to destroy myself to come to this place.”

: “There exist other ways… in the temple, I meditate throughout the day, every day… I have done this since I was little. In that time I have never seen one like you…”

: I immediately decide that Roy is now horny for this bird furry because that’s exactly what Andrew Allanson would want.

: “Well… I guess I have that effect on people.”

: “You came to this place in a way many do, that is nothing new. Then you left, that is also nothing new. They all leave eventually…”

: “Then I saw it. You… returned. I wasn’t sure at first. Your people all look similar in my eyes. But then I saw you again… and this time you led another back with you.”

: I guess her entire job is just meditating herself into what’s apparently the waiting room for the afterlife so she can… uh…

: “You were not meditating, this I could see… no, you were dying – did die… a lot… on purpose I suspect a few times.”

: “Listen…”

: “No! YOU LISTEN! I don’t know why you continue to do this, or why it is allowed to continue.”

: So yeah, I guess her job is just to be a ghost cop or some shit. It makes no sense.

: “But you need to stop now. I will teach you the ways of the spirit. The techniques of my people will let you [visit this place without death].”

: “That sounds less… painful…”

: “We did it a moment ago… it was no doubt less painful than what you are used to…”

: “Do not trick yourself into thinking you can ever stay away from this place… once you have seen it, you will be forever drawn to this place…”

: I mean, you could’ve just said “forever drawn here” since the subject is kind of implied but whatever.

: “…”

: “Finish my trial with me… and I will teach you the ways of my people…”

: “… But didn’t we just…”

: “I helped you… you are weak in spirit, and could not do it alone.”

: “…Right…”

: “My father will [test your spirit]. I was tasked with this as part of my own trial.”

: “Of course I will!”

: “First I must complete my trial, and you can help with that.”

: “Of course!”

: Here, I get really, really fucking confused. I assumed that you couldn’t bomb that statue from earlier, so therefore her father must be somewhere else.

: Nope! Talking to Ceila removes the invisible anti-bomb wall.

: We can then grab the Wing Key… except we haven’t seen any locked doors. I knew where they were because I kept wandering around looking for her father, but they’re in a place you actually can’t reach or even see without Ceila.

: The locks are in an area across a gap from the dungeon entrance.

: “It is a trial. When the [chieftain] is locked away in the shrine… a temple servent (sic) must come here and do… a task to open the door.”

TYPO COUNTER: 24

: “What do you mean ‘task’?”

: “I would not tell an outsider even if I knew… It has not been done for a hundred years! But, by listening to the [whispers of the spirits] we can do it.”

: I… don’t think I get it. So you want to show Roy this ritual thing, and to do that he has to complete your quest or whatever, but you can’t let him see the quest. How does any of this make sense?

: “I see. Just have faith…”

: “This is a trial for you as well as for me.”

: You just said it wasn’t! You just said he couldn’t know of the trial or whatever because he’s an outsider! Make up your fucking mind!

: Now we have to find a saber.

: The saber is on a separate platform south of the one with the statues on it.

: I go back and hit the statue, and then go for the door.

TYPO COUNTER: 25

: Except it won’t open. This is because there’s actually three statues. They’re pretty easy to find and all do the same thing the first one did.

: Oh, you thought this was the boss? Hahaha no.

: This brings us to a switch that opens…

: A door right above that first switch at the dungeon entrance! Time for more backtracking. Don’t you just love backtracking?

: And now we’re at the boss.

: “Father - I mean Great Chieftain - I have found the spirit walker… he has agreed to learn from us.”

: “No Great Chieftain… he found his way here without my aid… but he has no wings, so I gave him aid… as was a part of my trial.”

: “His name is Roy… Roy Guarder… sir.”

: “He… does not possess the same… abilities… as his friend.”

: We then enter into a fight with the bird chief. He is a very broken boss and I’m going to have to cheat to get around him.

: As a boss, the bird chief is a direct ripoff of Agnahim from Link to the Past. He teleports around, shoots fireballs, and also has a lightning attack that is kind of hard to avoid if you’re trying to hit him.

: The boss basically does not take damage from weapons - he has a shitload of HP. What you’re supposed to do is reflect his fireballs, but this doesn’t work for a multitude of reasons.

: I couldn’t get a good shot of it, but what he does is fires his fireballs in one of two patterns: either a + shape or an X. He tends to prefer the X shape, which is an issue because they tend to either go into walls before you can hit them back or bump into the statues.

: His lightning also takes off quite a bit of Roy’s health bar. Here’s the real kicker, though.

SOFTLOCK COUNTER: 6

: If you die during the fight and come back down from the Game Over Zone, the game softlocks. This fight is a fucking nightmare.

: With the power of sex and weed, I get a shot of his fireball attack. You can see that three of them went into walls. There’s also a decent chance that he teleports away before the fireball hits.

: I should also mention I had to die once before the full 69,420 HP kicked in, but it did.

: Once his HP gets to about half, he turns into… a generic giant enemy that can be hit directly with Roy’s sword for damage.

: He likes to spam lightning in this form, but with 69,420 HP this isn’t really a concern.

: That fight was complete bullshit. Ordinarily, I’d transcribe the next part, but I want you to experience the Two Brothers ™ experience of sitting through like fifty text boxes.

TYPO COUNTER: 26

: The dialog just kind of cuts off here. This isn’t something I did.

: And now that’s three colors out of… seven? Probably seven.

TYPO COUNTER: 27

: What is this guy, Senator Armstrong?

: “I do.”

[beast_of_burden]

I hate how the text just, lingers when nothing is being said. It shows off the incompetence of the programmers more than any essay could. Also, how do you fuck up hitboxes and boundaries this badly?

[Timrod]

@beast_of_burden

I hate how the text just, lingers when nothing is being said. It shows off the incompetence of the programmers more than any essay could. Also, how do you fuck up hitboxes and boundaries this badly?

: I was actually working on a post-mortem that would explain this last night, but it kind of went out of scope. Let me start by answering your question directly.

: The reason that the hitboxes and boundaries are so broken is that for some reason, Andrew Allanson decided that instead of making his game move on a grid system, he’d do everything by the pixel.

: That kind of system can work in Multimedia Fusion 2, the (now-deprecated) engine used to develop Two Brothers. Freedom Planet did that (as far as I know anyway) and it worked.

: Doing things by the pixel is extremely complicated. This is because you have to account for the player being in weird positions, and have to also do everything with a coordinate system. You can see this in the save file:

: This weird pixel-coordinate system is why everything in the game is so broken. I have a feeling that a lot of the softlocks are due to the game running into a situation where it doesn’t know where to put you, so it just kind of locks up.

: This softlock from Update 5 is a great example of that. The darkened tiles behind Roy are solid, and the pillar in front of him is solid. On a grid system, you could prevent this from ever happening by putting the two things on separate grids to ensure the player could never be standing on both at the same time.

: I’m pretty sure this is also why the softlock on the bird boss happens - the game doesn’t know where to put Roy if he enters the room from the Game Over Zone, so it places him out of bounds.

: The hitbox issues are derived from the issues with the movement system. If Brian had gone with a grid for movement, everything would be easy. Instead, as far as I can tell, he was basically hard-coding hitboxes for every weapon without understanding what makes those work.

[Image Credit: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=412007318]

: One thing I noticed he definitely did was failed to account for sprite collision. You’ll notice in the above screenshot that in L4D2, the melee hitboxes start inside the player’s model. There’s a good reason for this: if they started where the actual weapon model is, enemies could “dodge” attacks by being too close. This definitely happens in Two Brothers, because enemies can get between Roy’s weapon hitbox and his actual sprite.

: Good hitboxes are hard even for seasoned developers. The team behind Skullgirls, as an example, took years to fine-tune everything to avoid those kind of scenarios. Brian Allanson, who had basically zero game development experience, did not. All he had to do was go with a grid system and everything would’ve worked out.

: So, where does the blame for this lie?

: Brian Allanson blames the Multimedia Fusion 2 engine a number of times in his Kickstarter posts as to why he felt he needed to remake the game.

: Now, while it’s true that MMF2 wasn’t the greatest engine (it was re-made as Clickteam Fusion 2.5 with a lot of changes) that’s not really the root cause. As I mentioned earlier, plenty of other games have been made in MMF2: Freedom Planet and the original Five Nights at Freddy’s among them.

: I also looked it up, and MMF2 did in fact have a system for making grids for movement. Brian purposely didn’t use it.

: So, in a nutshell, that’s why everything is so broken - because Brian went with a complex solution that I don’t think he really understood.

[beast_of_burden]

So he put the cart before the idea of a road was thought up of for the horses to even ride down. That explains so fucking much.
This was sold for real money. Thirty bones iirc.

[LaZodiac]

God this game is agonizing. I’ve been following it up until this entire bird nonsense and now I feel completely at a loss for what is going on or what happened.

[Timrod]

Click Here For Update 8

: Now that Roy has fulfilled his spirit quest or whatever dumb bullshit, there’s a meditation mat in his bag that he can use to go to the Game Over Zone.

: In the Game Over Zone, there’s a sidequest that involves talking to this guy five times, but each time you have to leave the area and come back.

: I went to walk to him, and then Roy fell into… I have no idea what this is. Little did I know, it’s actually a softlock. This is the Bird Shrine, but an area of it that’s out of bounds.

: Now, this isn’t a softlock… yet. We can go into Roy’s bag and meditate again to go back to the Game Over Zone - in fact, you can do this even if you’re already IN the Game Over Zone. However…

SOFTLOCK COUNTER: 7

: It is actually a softlock because now even if we talk to the Guide, we get sent back here and thus we cannot make it back to the world map. Thankfully, this somehow was not a save-breaking bug. I’m just as mystified as you are.

: The first couple of times, he makes small talk.

: While we’re up here, there’s a thing we can break to get a “Super Small Mermaid in a tiny bottle”. This is part of a collection sidequest that feeds into the bigger collection sidequest - that being the one we got the Rifle and Animal Capsule for.

: His third location (I talked to him once off-screen a few updates ago) is in the northwest part of the zone. There’s a “Sword of Color” here that we can pick up, but it never actually shows up in our inventory.

: Fourth location is through a red warp thing you can see from the center of the zone.

: The last one is through a warp. If you’re wondering what he’s saying, it’s dozens of text boxes about how he came here trying to find his wife and couldn’t and then he lost his face and now he’s not sure if she went to “heaven” and he didn’t, etc. I can transcribe it if people really want to see it.

: Anyway, he gives us the “Ubie Doll”, which is easily the most useless piece of equipment in this game.

: The doll gives Roy the ability to jump, so it’s basically the Roc’s Feather from Link’s Awakening. The thing is… jumping is USELESS. It doesn’t let you access anything new, and you can’t use it to jump over enemies - in fact, doing so gives them a free hit on you.

: Even funnier is that if you use it in a town, Roy will do his game over death animation instead of a jumping one.

: And now we get the amazing Bivare segment of the game. The good news is that we can skip like, half of it.

: “Recently, she joined the Order of Ramsden (A secretive religious sect).”

: The traditional Allanson “tell, don’t show” technique at work.

: “When we last spoke it wasn’t on good terms. My ever growing doubts about the ‘after-life’ led to a long quarrel.”

TYPO COUNTER: 28

: “Hopefully I can get an audience with her. Last I heard she had taken a vow of silence - which might work out in my favor as she’ll be forced to listen.”

: “I don’t know what I intend to prove, but atleast I have proof of my beliefs.”

TYPO COUNTER: 29

: Bivare has a spear and his throwing knives.

: Now, what we’re supposed to do is get on that boat and sail to the next destination, but we can get there faster by just swimming.

: We can find a magnifying glass for Bivare north of the dock. It does nothing.

: There’s a big expanse of nothing on the other side, but if you just keep going to the right…

: You wind up at a path.

: The building we want is in the northwest corner.

: “It’s good to see you too, Agnes.”

: “…I’m happy you came. I was starting to miss that face of yours.”

: Yes I’m recycling icons from YIIK and yes it’s because I couldn’t think of a good joke to use for one. Also, didn’t he say she took a vow of silence?

: “Careful now. Don’t want to go giving me the wrong idea.”

: “HAR HAR, Mr. Guarder.”

: “It really is nice to see you. I traveled quite a while to get here, you know. Roy and I were at Egg Harbor.”

: “It’s lovely there this time of year. How is Roy doing?”

: This doesn’t sound at all like a nun who has just taken a vow of silence. If I had to write a character like that, I’d probably have them just speak in ellipses until Bivare starts making fucking sense.

: “As good as can be expected. His wife dies and he throws himself into his work. In typical Guarder fashion of course. He still hasn’t gone to see Jane’s parents… not since the funeral, at least.”

TYPO COUNTER: 29

: “I see. It’s a shame. She was such a beautiful young woman. Don’t you think?”

: “Of course. She was one of my best friends. Neither of us will ever be the same.”

: I know he’s talking about Roy when he says neither of them will be the same, but the way he’s saying it makes it seem like he’s saying “Neither (Fucking Wife) nor I will ever be the same” and it’s like, no shit, she’s dead.

: “She’s in a better place now. Even if you don’t believe so.”

: “That’s why I’ve come. To talk to you about that.”

: “You don’t mean to seek spiritual advice from me do you, Biv? I never thought this day would come.”

: “Hey now, don’t get ahead of yourself. I’ve come to brag. I’ve seen it.”

: “You’ve seen what? The light?”

: Now, I know this game has no plot to speak of. It’s not clear what Roy or Bivare’s motivations are beyond “science!” and it’s not really clear why we’re doing anything at all. This scene though… this scene is totally pointless. What’s it trying to do? What is the purpose of this scene?

: “!? What do you mean?”

: “Remember when Jane died and Roy was ranting - about colors and the after-life and all that?”

: “Well, we’ve been experimenting with it. And we can prove it exists. You see, Agnes, there exists another real filled with the most GLORIOUS colors.”

: “I would try and describe them… but there aren’t words to explain how amazing it is.”

TYPO COUNTER: 30

: “- you claim exists. But I can tell you that there is another world beyond this one. And it’s incredible.”

: “So you’ve come to mock me? We may not be together any more, but I thought you still respected me. You’re a real rotten bastard Bivare Guarder. Get out of here!”

: “Hey! Calm down Agnes! I’m here to tell you that I understand.”

: “Now I don’t know about your religion and other beliefs… but I can promise that there is a life beyond death.”

: “But how on earth do you know? What did you do?”

TYPO COUNTER: 31

TYPO COUNTER: 32 (2X TYPO COMBO!)

: “What is this complex device…?”

: “A knife.”

: “So you stabbed yourself to see the after-life? If it was that easy to come back from, someone would have done this ages ago!”

: Seriously though, what the fuck is the point of this scene? They’re talking about shit we’ve already seen for like, the third time now.

: “THIS is where it gets weird. Something happened with Roy when his wife died. For some reason, he can walk between our life and the next.”

: “I couldn’t think of a way to return, but then Roy appeared… and he brought me back. It was incredible.”

: “… … I …”

: “You don’t believe me?”

: “It’s… just…”

: “A little far fetched?”

: “It’s just unfair! Why does the agnostic scientist get to experience the glory of the afterlife and - and not the faithful like myself? This is madness.”

: No, this is Two Brothers.

: “Calm down… you’ll get there eventually I’m sure.”

: “And what do want from me? How can I help?”

TYPO COUNTER: 33

: Have you noticed something yet? This is almost the same conversation that Roy had with the professor at the dig site.

: “Your order has been around longer than most. It’s said that your faith has a leader… someone who has lived longer than any other human or animal.”

: “I was wondering if you could tell me where they are.”

: “…”

: “I’m not going to cause trouble. I just want to speak with him. I want to see what I can learn.”

: God dammit. I’m not sure if this is worse than the whole Golden Alpaca thing or not.

: “Thank you Agnes.”

: “Of course. I am happy you believe.”

: “Any chance of you running off with me in search of adventure?”

: “…You know I can’t.”

: “Not even for science?”

: “Take care of yourself, Biv… don’t kill yourself again. You’ll get to the after-life one day. Just don’t bring it on yourself.”

: And now we’re Roy again. I’m very surprised we didn’t have to backtrack through Road of Birds again.

: Our next destination is the poorly-signposted Narrow Way.

: It’s like, two screens long.

: See that little black thing following Mark? That’s a random encounter with enemies. Our next stop is the graveyard, because there is a hilariously broken sidequest there.

: The graveyard is fucking huge and also full of graves for what I assume are family members of the devs.

: The only reference I could find was a grave for Harry Mason, the protagonist of Silent Hill 1 who later dies in Silent Hill 3. Fuck you, Allanson! Keep your hands off Silent Hill!

: There’s a grave to the left of the entrance that has a key in it. It’s not immediately obvious what this does.

: There’s also one to the north-east that has a collectible in it.

TYPO COUNTER: 34

: I wasn’t sure about the names on the graves until I saw this one and a couple near it with the name “Alfaro”. Jose Alfaro and Tony Manfredonia were both composers on this game. They also did work for YIIK. We’ll talk about them in the post-mortem I’ll work on immediately after this update.

: If you have the Graveyard Key, Roy will stay here until it gets dark.

: There’s two underground mausoleums that will unlock, one in the north-east and one in the south-west. I think you have to do this one first but I didn’t really check.

: There’s another bottle mermaid to Roy’s left, but that’s not why we’re here.

: In one of the corners, kind of on the north-west side, is this jar that’s spewing smoke. You’re supposed to break it and fight a bunch of skeletons, but I had the spear equipped and couldn’t break it.

: These skeletons are different in that they throw fireballs and also are vulnerable to arrows when regular skeletons are not. I had to die and come back with the axe to finish them. By the way, if you die after destroying the jar, it resets your progress on the sidequest.

: The second mausoleum has a chest with a sidequest item in it. It’s through a gate which looks like it needs a switch to open, but you can just walk right through it.

: There’s also a great heart we can eat to bring our health maximum to either 120 or 140. I lost count. One thing I should mention: you see that sarcophagus behind Roy? If you hit those, skeletons come out. The thing is, the skeletons that come out aren’t always visible, so you can die from invisible skeletons.

: Once we destroy the jar in the second mausoleum (I forgot to capture it but it’s exactly the same) we can go to… a hole in front of Fucking Wife’s grave.

: This is the “Fallen Hero”. He’s a boss without a health bar who sits in one spot and does nothing. I’m not even kidding.

: He has an orbiting skull that will damage you if it hits you, but… other than that? He won’t move, won’t attack, and won’t do much of anything. He’s also immune to Roy’s attacks.

: You can damage him by pushing one of these bomb things near him. It has to be within a certain pixel range, and if you go too close the bomb teleports back to its starting location. You then have to finagle Roy into a spot where it’ll trigger the boss to raise his scythe.

: He’ll then charge forward into the bomb and take damage. The thing is, not all statues have bombs on them. It took me a second to realize this.

: You have to do this four times before he gives up. Now, you might ask why we couldn’t just trigger his attack and then swap places since the bombs are mounted on arrow statues - and the reason is that if you go too far away he drops his scythe immediately and just goes back to sitting still.

: “Who… what are you?”

: “I am… I was a great warrior and a member of a sacred order. Our brotherhood wandered the realms maintaining peace, and protecting the innocent.”

: “When we discovered this land, our leader sensed the importance that it would play in the future. The task fell to me to guard this land, until such a time came when I was no longer needed.”

: “However, over the course of the years I grew restless and angry. Eventually my brothers returned, but our commander said that the events had not yet come to pass.”

: “As they turned to abandon me once more, I lashed out in my anger and murdered my leader.”

TYPO COUNTER: 35

TYPO COUNTER: 36 (2x Typo Combo!)

: “As the darkness closed in I swore that one day I would return to get my revenge. You asked who I am. I am an oath breaker, and murderer. I am the soul of the nobel warrior that I once was.”

TYPO COUNTER: 37 (3x Typo Combo!)

: “By defeating me you have helped me to finally overcome the anger that consumed who I was. The sun is about to rise, and when it does all the damage that was done above will be undone.”

: “I will finally move on. But before I do I ask that you take my old weapon.”

TYPO COUNTER: 38

TYPO COUNTER: 40 (3x Typo Combo!)

: I’m glad I did this to rack up the typo count, if nothing else. The scythe is special in that it’s a “color weapon”. As far as I can tell, that means nothing since I think all the weapons in this game actually do the same damage.

: Next time, we’ll progress with the “story” and uh, probably see some more softlocks and two dozen typos or something.

[Timrod]

: Now that we’ve done that last update, let’s continue with the post-mortem. Last time, we talked about why so many of the bugs in this game happened.

: This time, we’ll be talking about what the Allansons did to try and save the game from failure - or more accurately, what they didn’t do… and whether the game could be fixed.

: When Two Brothers released on Steam in December of 2013, it was almost immediately obvious that something was very wrong with it.

: Some people couldn’t get the game to load. Others quickly found game-breaking softlocks as early as the introduction to the game, before Roy’s wife dies.

: There weren’t many immediate responses by Brian or Andrew Allanson. The earliest one I could find actually addressing the bugs was posted on December 20th, a full two weeks post-launch.

: The Allansons did update the game… exactly once, to fix a handful of bugs that addressed almost none of the myriad issues people were reporting to them.

: I should mention that the game (and this patch) both apparently came out on the Humble Store and to their Kickstarter backers in DRM-free form about a month before the Steam release.

: The developers largely remained silent until March 27th of 2014, nearly four months after the Steam release and five months after the initial Humble Store launch.

: If they ever did any further polishing, no one ever saw it. I’d also like to address the “Mac/Linux” thing quick - they never existed.

: That isn’t to say the Allansons didn’t promise them - they did, in both the Kickstarter and on the Steam store page. There’s a number of posts from Mac owners who purchased the game on Steam only to find out that it didn’t run. I should add that this was before Valve was sued in the European Union and forced to implement a refund policy.

: While I don’t know exactly how long it was there for, posts on the Steam discussion board indicate that the Steam store page for Two Brothers said it was Mac-compatible for several weeks post-launch.

: Finally, in May of 2014, Brian announced that he had scrapped plans to patch the existing game and was going on to remake it in Unity. I’m not sure how he planned to accomplish this, but there’s some hints from his later posts.

: It appears that at first, Brian had attempted to port the original MMF2 game to Unity, which wouldn’t work for obvious reasons.

: The most obvious death knell for Two Brothers, or Chromophore as they were now calling it, was in September of 2014. Why, you ask?

: By September 2014, Andrew and Brian had been contacted by a publisher - likely Ysbyrd games, the publisher for YIIK - and had signed a contract to produce YIIK full time.

Nintendo eShop - Chromophore: The Two Brothers Director's Cut E3 Trailer for Wii...

: What’s clear is that Brian DID work on Chromophore for some time - he even put out a trailer that made it to Nintendo’s Youtube channel for a release on the Wii U.

: So why didn’t it release? To understand that, we need to look at Brian’s posts to the Two Brothers Kickstarter from a few years later.

: First, at some point between 2014 and 2016, Brian had a falling out with Tony Manfredonia and Jose Alfaro, two of the three composers (the third being Andrew Allanson) for Two Brothers.

: The falling out was so bad that they demanded Brian remove all of their content from the game. I can only guess as to why this was - both Jose and Tony were in the credits for YIIK.

: My first guess is that one of them discovered that Andrew had plagiarized a song from Shadow of the Colossus and left because of the possibility they might be associated with that.

: The second is that there was some kind of internal falling-out. That’s also possible.

: On top of this, the Allansons had apparently paid money to a third party to complete the console port for the Wii U, only to have the company renege on the agreement.

: I have no idea what the truth of this is, and I really can’t speculate as to why it happened.

: The thing is though, in 2017 - a full year after they now knew that the game was music-less and not coming out on the Wii - they were still insisting that Chromophore would be a thing.

[Image Credit: https://twitter.com/j_rake_pygm/status/1123854194987937793]

: By the way, one frightening thing I discovered is that there are apparently fans of this game. Weirdly, even people who bought it in 2013 still seem to hope there’s going to be a re-release. That fanart is from 2019, by the way.

: There’s also YIIK fans and I question their sanity.

: So here’s the big question: could Two Brothers be fixed? I think so. Maybe. I think it’s more fixable than YIIK is to the point where I don’t understand why they’re even trying to salvage YIIK.

: This game has issues that can be fixed with patches. YIIK has issues that can’t be solved without basically remaking the entire game from the ground up.

: The other thing I don’t get is why they haven’t just announced that Chromophore is dead. It’s pretty clear that it is, especially now that they’re focusing on YIIK again.

: The next time I do one of these, it’s going to be on the connection between this game, YIIK, and the lessons that Brian should’ve learned but didn’t.

[beast_of_burden]

I like to imagine that the only fans of YIIK is just parallel versions of the Allanson brothers.
These two games, they’re so fucking awful, that they’re extremely enticing. You can’t get rid of these failures from your brain. I want to see them fail a third time, honestly, just to see how worse it can get.