Click Here for Update 9
: There’s actually nothing we need to do down here, but there’s an optional weapon at the hot springs south of the graveyard, so might as well.
TYPO COUNTER: 42
: How did Brian expect anyone to take this game seriously when he couldn’t even run it through a spell checker? Seriously, I get a game having a couple of typos but this is ridiculous.
: “Unless… are you the new guard? You’re here to keep men out right?”
: “Aye captain!”
: “I’ve heard enough. In fact… I heard you like tridents.”
: I like how that line almost sounds like something Sae would actually say in Persona 5. “I heard you like tridents… where did you learn to use one, and how!? Someone must have told you how to use a trident! There’s no way you could have learned how to use one any other way!”
TYPO COUNTER: 43 (Can we please get through more than three lines without a typo? Please?)
TYPO COUNTER: 44 (Apparently not.)
: I also stopped for a bit to test out the Reaper Scythe. It’s not good. You might notice that blue skeleton - the scythe turns any hearts you get into skeletons that wander around randomly and damage enemies on contact.
: I’m also pretty sure you take more damage with the scythe equipped.
: Oh, PhisPhace is here.
: There’s a soccer field here which I think was supposed to be a mini-game at one point. The game gives you a prompt on how to kick the ball (you run into it) but you can’t do anything with it.
: “Yeah. There is something I’m looking for up there.”
: “Then you must be looking for despair and mental anguish. This place is CURSED man! There is a reason it has it’s name!”
TYPO COUNTER: 45
: Nah, I already played YIIK, thanks.
: “This isn’t my first time going here.”
: “Yeah? And I’m sure it sucked the first time you went.”
: “…”
: “Look, if you’re serious about going up there you’re going to need the key.”
: “Where can I find that? Last time I was here there wasn’t even a gate.”
: “The guy who owned this village locked it up after his kids went missing. They went playing up there one day when he was working late… poor guy.”
: “Where can I find him?”
: “The pearly gates or the depths of hell? I don’t know. The guy went crazy out of grief and they say he killed himself. I bet only the dead can find out where that key is now.”
: What the fuck is this dialogue? Seriously, what? It sounds like Andrew trying to be David Lynch and just failing miserably.
: “Hey, I haven’t seen you up here before. When did you get here…?”
: “I’ve been wandering up here for a while now… I have no idea how long I’ve been up here.”
: “May I ask how you got here?”
: “It’s all a blur. I don’t rightly remember.”
: “I think I’ve heard of you before.”
: “Oh, is that so?”
: Seriously though, what the fuck is this dialog?
: “Did you live in the Cursed Village?”
: “Are you the devil, sir? Have you come to torment me and remind me of my loss? Damn, you sir! Damn you.”
: Pfft. I’d make a Loss edit but this game doesn’t deserve that kind of effort.
: “Please, forgive me. I shouldn’t have been so direct.”
: “No, it’s fine. Who are you?”
: “I am Roy Guarder. I’m a scientist looking for information on this after-life. I believe the Cursed Lands contain a piece of information I need. And I believe you are the only one who knows where the key is.”
: “Haha! I locked that place up for good. I never intended for anyone to get back in there again.”
: “I understand that your kids are in there. What if I promise to look for them?”
: “There is no way they are there anymore. Surely they’ve died. I’ve been waiting here for them to pass through. But they never come.”
: “Wouldn’t you like to know for sure?”
: “You really are persistent, aren’t you? You used my kids to try and get this…”
: If you’ll remember from the start of the game, Roy claimed to have spent months traveling through here with his wife.
: The Cursed Lands are effectively Two Brothers’ version of Essentia’s mind dungeon in YIIK.
: Tagline for YIIK right there.
: This feels like baby’s first horror game in so many ways.
: There’s a long boring stretch of nothing for a while.
: This puzzle. This fucking puzzle. I’ve seen Voidburger’s videos on some of the bullshit puzzles in Silent Hill 3, but this tops most of them.
: This tells us that we need to “mirror the Square Moon” to get in. The other sign tells us something about Full, Crescent, and Eclipse, which is presumably the phases of whatever the Square Moon is.
: The spheres down below Roy have three states that cycle when hit - you can see all three in the screenshot. So logically, the answer should be the opposite of that: Black for Eclipse, Crescent (because a mirrored crescent moon would still be a crescent moon) and then White for Full. Or so you’d think, anyway.
: Naturally, there’s also no explaining which way it should be oriented, but I figured that it went from left to right.
: The answer, for some reason, is black, black, white. I have no idea why.
: There’s three directions we need to go in, and each one has a wall that closes behind Roy once he passes it.
: The enemies here don’t really attack you so much as they just kind of wander around. I don’t know if their AI is broken or what.
: Here, we encounter the same enemy, only taller.
: The smart thing to do would’ve been to just run past them, but since they’re not immune to arrows I just shot them to death.
: There’s a couple of very abrupt screen transitions.
: And finally, we have the small version of whatever these things are. The small ones die in a single arrow.
: There’s a small side path you can take to get the Photograph of the Cursed Lands, which is a sidequest item.
: A few screens later, and we run into a giant shitpit of enemies. There are so many enemies here that it actually causes the game to lag.
: I killed a few of them, and then got to the point where I just said “Fuck it” and ran past everything. The enemies do pretty minimal damage and the lag helps stop them wandering into your path.
: This is the central hub area for the Cursed Lands. We still need to do the West and North sides, but I chose North first.
: Basically, this is a dumb ice puzzle, kind of like the one in whatever that late-game area was in Pokemon Red/Blue.
: This one’s really easy. What we have to do is move that one that’s just to the right of Roy down and then to the left…
: And then it’s just a matter of pushing the “princess” up, left, and down into the middle. I feel like this entire dungeon is just a collection of stupid, overused puzzles.
: That puzzle is the entirety of the North area, so let’s go to the last one.
: This is supposed to be related to that sign about faces or whatever, but the answer is to use the smiling face at it. Using the wrong one takes damage, and I got it on my third try.
: We then go through a thing that looks remarkably like that fish building in Egg Harbor.
: Oh right, I forgot to mention - this entire dungeon has this dumbass “scary” chiptune music that has three repeating notes in the background and it’s just insanely bad.
: Now we go through this room and beat up on this heart. There’s no clear indication that it works - you have to just keep doing it. I thought there was some kind of puzzle involved, but no it just has a lot of HP.
Typo Counter: 46
Typo Counter: 47
: A lot of this last area (and honestly a lot of this game) feels like busywork. There’s no reason for this dungeon to be this long.
: We go back, and there’s this random NPC who just kind of numbers stations at us for like… 12 textboxes. The first couple textboxes are hexadecimal but I put them into a hex to text thing and nothing came up.
: I hope you’re ready for an intentionally broken boss fight… as opposed to the two unintentionally broken ones we’ve run into.
: I probably would’ve quit here had I not had the guide to explain this fight to me, because it makes zero fucking sense. There’s this kid who opens that door and shoots a fireball out. He’s unimportant.
: I had to really work to get a shot of this, but what you’re supposed to do is go to the other doors and this random enemy will appear when you open them. You have about three frames to hit it before it closes the door.
: Once you hit the door enemy enough, you get warped onto this one-tile border area and can’t leave. I thought the game had softlocked again.
: Instead, you get into an RPG battle with a Missingno. How original. I’m not sure if the QR code on it does anything.
: Once the Missingno attacks, we can then attack it on the regular game screen. Each attack will cut to an RPG screen.
: After a few attacks, the game dumps us back in the boss arena, only now there’s a weird zombie boy or whatever.
: Attacking it causes it to teleport, but doesn’t actually do anything to the boss’s HP gauge. After a few hits…
: We get dumped back on the border and have to fight Missingno again.
: This is so fucking stupid. So fucking stupid.
: Once it uses “creepypasta”, the the entire screen fills with garbage. You have to find the real one (it’s directly above Roy) and attack it.
: The next phase is more teleporting bullshit. “Sadnessa” spawns behind you and tries to hit Roy with an axe, and the teleport has no animation or anything. This entire phase is basically “stand still and mash attack”.
: This last phase is by far the worst. It’s basically pure RNG.
: You’ll notice that the boss’s health bar has gone up. This is because this phase of the fight consists of a bunch of enemies spawning. The enemies drop hearts, and can eat the hearts to heal.
: Every so often, what happens is that the game will flash and you’ll be back in the middle of the arena with a couple of hearts pre-spawned. If you don’t grab them, the enemies will. This fight took me several minutes due to bad RNG, and I couldn’t initially figure out how they were healing.
: This is the final part of the fight. You get three options - in this form, you want to attack the boss.
: Once it turns into Proto-Jane, you want to use the shield option.
: Well, that shit’s over. Thankfully. Holy fuck that sucked.
: Now we get to go through the same area that we were in at the start of the game, because boy does this game love repetition.
: “Is this… is this the one you told me about? The reason you and your wife traveled this far into the Cursed Lands?”
: “It is… when we last arrived here…”
: “Human, please tell me your name.”
: “I am Roy Guarder, and this is my traveling companion Mark Humeny.”
: “I believe that I owe you an apology. Tell me Guarder, how do you come to walk with the living?”
: “When you attacked me, I found myself in another dimension. A place that men call the ‘Afterlife’. Unlike others, I was able to return to this world.”
: Game, I think we already know who Roy is and how he got here, please stop repeating it.
: “Indeed… and what of the one who restored my life?”
: “What… what do you mean?”
: God dammit Allanson, Roy saw what happened! Stop acting like everyone’s a fucking goldfish!
: “I too was in this afterlife. Something called me here… someone perhaps.”
: “I don’t recall much of that day. I remember… the trap… and Jane.”
: “Why have you come to this place? What do you seek? Did you not find the answer you were seeking many months ago?”
: “I did not… if anything, I just found more questions. I came here to try and find evidence of where the fishmen originated. And then… the trap… you awoke, and I died.”
Typo Counter: 48
: “I’ve come here seeking an object. An object of a strange color.”
: “…I know what you are speaking of.”
: “Do you know where I can find it?”
: “Yes, but first tell me about the fish people. What have my children become?”
: “They are a proud and fascinating race. Their intelligence has helped our world progress rapidly.”
: “Is that so…? I am proud of them then. When we came to [this side] I was skeptical of what we’d become. But I knew we would spread life around this earth.”
: “[This side]? Where is it that you come from?”
: “I thought you had abandoned your quest for this knowledge? Is it not the [Spectrum Shard] that you seek now?”
Typo Counter: 49 (technically, that first sentence isn’t a question)
: “I…please. I would like to know both answers.”
: “Haha! All in good time, Guarder. You came to the one with knowledge of your creation… and you ask me about shards of color! Haha!”
: “You are a curious race… humans. Always concerned with the next world, never with your own.”
: This could almost be good writing if it hadn’t been done to death.
: “Are you implying that these shards of color are from… the afterlife?”
: God dammit! The fucking bird chief or whatever fucking told you they were! We know this shit already!
: “I don’t like this term you use… afterlife. You do not possess the words to properly describe a realm… so you pretend that it is not as important as what you experience now.”
: That’s the exact opposite of what you just fucking said! The entire thing about humans only caring about the next world! Fuck!
: “That is not so. That is just the word we use for…”
: “But I do not come from THIS realm… I come from your afterlife. Is THIS not MY afterlife?”
: “Do you mean to imply that the fish people… come…”
: I mean, yeah, unless they reproduce asexually or are all hand-created by their dipshit fish god who can’t even keep his own story straight.
: “I do not mean to imply anything, Guarder. I grow tired of this chatter. I knew you’d return.”
: “I had to…”
Typo Counter: 49
: “Instructed…? BY WHO!?”
: This entire exchange is around 60 text boxes, and I feel like it could’ve been maybe a tenth as long and still gotten the point across.
Typo Counter: 50
: “Can you tell me what it is…? What is this object?”
: “I do not understand myself. You should take it now. It is not safe here.”
: “What has become of these lands?”
: “They’re horrible. You’re smart to stay here.”
: “Indeed. This isn’t exactly the most pleasant of places to visit.”
: “As I expected… Enter, Roy. Take the shard and leave quickly.”
: “But I still have so much to learn from you!”
: “We will speak at a safer time. Things have changed… we are entering a new era.”
: Oh boy, time to go inside a giant animal for the second time this game.
: We now have four out of the seven color shards, and this game still doesn’t really have a plot.
: Next time, we’ll tackle a sidequest that is probably going to give us a shitty weapon and get the fifth spectrum shard. Hooray.
: “Legend claims that many generations ago a vile king ruled over this entire land. One day a young peasant woman witnessed the King’s men butchering her fellow townsmen.”
: “This is MY dig site! And I ALONE have discovered this amazing new color!”
: “Nor does it belong to the likes of you. Touching this object would surely end your life. Leave this place. You who are bound to this earth are not meant to have this beauty.”
