Isn't This How People from Quebec Look? Let's (Not) Look Outside

[Timrod]

Look Outside is a survival horror RPG inspired by Fear & Hunger and LISA The Painful. It was originally a game jam entry by Francis Coloumbe (“Frankie Smile Show”) that was turned into a full release in March 2025.

The game launched with two difficulties, Explorer (a difficulty akin to Resident Evil 2’s Arrange Mode) and Survivor. A patch later added Cursed, which is Look Outside’s equivalent of Terror & Starvation difficulty. Cursed does mostly what you’d expect (enemies have more HP and do more damage) but also rearranges a couple of key items to force you to fight a couple of superbosses you otherwise wouldn’t bother with.

Look Outside is notoriously opaque and kind of a wiki simulator, and was something that at first I looked at and said “I’d read an LP of that but wouldn’t play it myself”. I have since played it to completion.

Will this be a 100% LP?

No, and let me explain why. The “Version 2.0” patch added a lot of esoteric bullshit, some of which there’s no way to learn exists without external resources or decompiling the game. Two of the new endings work like this and don’t add much to the overall plot anyway, and so I won’t be doing them. The good news is that the endings are just text and a slideshow, and this game has a full text dump available because it was made in RPG Maker.

What I will be doing is the best ending route (or at least, the one the dev very clearly considers the best ending) on Survivor difficulty. The way this game’s ending routes work, going for the best ending puts you in a position where you could realistically get all but two of them - and those are the two I’m avoiding. The best ending was added in Version 2.0, and as of time of writing has been achieved by less than 5% of players.

Will you be going for the highest rank?

Also no. The game gives you a rank at the end based on a couple of factors: how many in-game days you took to finish it, how many bosses you killed, and how many characters you recruited. Due to a bug which I believe still exists in the most recent patch, several characters don’t count for recruitment points even though they should. There are also a number of bosses unique to the two routes I won’t be doing that don’t count for points.

I will be following pretty optimal routing outside of a couple of side things most people intentionally ignore because they’re not worth rating points.

Content Warning

This game contains some pretty grotesque body horror - it’s not really any worse than a modern Resident Evil game for the most part.

[Timrod]

Summary

: Welcome to Look Outside. Don’t look outside.

: As mentioned in the title post, we’ll be playing on Survivor, which was the default difficulty prior to the Version 2.0 update. I’ll point out the differences in Cursed when we get to them.

: Meet our protagonist, an unemployed French Canadian living in an apartment building in Montreal. According to the developer, all of the characters in this game are actually speaking French.

: Looking outside is a game over. The game really wants you to get the game over, but we’re not falling for it.

: “Hang on. Wait. No. Don’t do it. I.. I got confused. Don’t look outside. It’s bad.”

: “Hi. We don’t speak very much. You’re unemployed, right? I was fired just last month. Haven’t had much luck getting a new job. How are you doing?”

: As I write this, it’s been about a month since I got laid off.

: Picking the first option enables a “no saves” mode, which gets you extra ranking points at the end of the game. I’m not doing that, mostly because it’s pointless.

: “What’s going on outside?”

: “There’s something wrong outside. I.. can’t really describe it, but it’s best if you don’t look. I heard this will blow over in 15 days. But until then, we should stay inside and block out our windows.”

: Can’t blame them. Have you seen Quebec? I wouldn’t want to look out the window either.

: “I think maybe we should talk more. We will be isolated here for a while.. I’ll check on you again tomorrow, okay? Just don’t make the mistake I did. Stay away from the windows. I’m still not sure what this did to me.”

: The game gives us a second chance to enable ironman mode.

: We can name our protagonist. The default name is “Sam”. If anyone cares enough to suggest a name, I’ll use that.

: There are a number of special names that modify the game: most people who have played the game before will name the protagonist “Ash” (“Williams” and “EvilDead” also work).

: The other special name is “Lumpy”, which is a reference to some Youtuber I don’t give a shit about. This puts Sam in a straitjacket for the entire game.

: We’re going to do a few things before leaving Sam’s apartment. The first is watering his plant, which is part of a sidequest we might be able to do if RNG allows. You can also talk to the plant.

: “Hey, plant! Any plans tonight? Right on. Chillin’ at home. I like it.”

: We’re now in the main part of Sam’s apartment, which has a number of things we can do when not exploring and fighting.

: We’ll take this money, which gives us $20 CAD ($14.71 USD) and some change. Money in this game is weird: change can only be used at vending machines.

: There’s a bookcase here that seemingly doesn’t do anything, but actually houses a secret. If you look at it three times…

Nothing interesting here… wait, hang on. Is this…? Oh! So THAT’S where you put it! Screamatorium! This old game scared you so much as a kid. You haven’t seen this in years.

: The video game shelf is next to the TV. We have four games, which are described as follows:

Super Jumplad: Mascot platformer. Very easy, but fun. You played Jumplad a lot as a kid.

Madwheels 97: Racing game with vehicular combat.

Myrmidon: A top-down squad tactics game with little ant people as soldiers.

Screamatorium: The scariest game you ever played. It gave you nightmares as a kid.

: Mario World, Mario Kart, Sim Ant, and.. Clock Tower?

: Each game gives Sam a combat skill for finishing it. The only one we really care about is Madwheels 97.

: Over here is Sam’s oven, which is this game’s equivalent of an inn. Like Baldur’s Gate 3, you need food in order to heal.

: The door near the fridge is the bathroom. Like Fear & Hunger, Sam has stats for how hungry he is, how clean he is, and his general mental state. Unlike Fear & Hunger, these stats are hidden.

: Low hygiene makes you more susceptible to status effects, being hungry lowers your max HP and stamina, not sleeping also lowers your HP and stamina, and being stressed halves EXP gain.

: There’s a bug we can take advantage of, which is that for some reason, showering before leaving the apartment for the first time doesn’t take time.

: You need soap to shower, which is in limited supply.

: Now that Sam is clean, we can go out into the hallway. Standing near Sam’s front door shows your danger meter. The danger meter goes up every time you enter a new room.

: We need to get the danger meter to the first big circle to be able to save. On Cursed, you need to get it to the second big circle. Going into Sam’s apartment gives you EXP based on how high your danger meter is and resets it.

: Before we follow the trail of blood, we can look at the fake plant across the hall and try to take Sam’s spare key.

: Blood means bodies, and bodies mean loot.

: I’m sure that won’t come back to haunt him anytime soon.

: All of the other doors in the hallway are locked, except this one which is frozen. We could thaw it today, but there are some tough enemies inside and we don’t have much of a reason to fight them this early.

: Further down is a vending machine that sells snacks. Don’t use your change on it.

: Following the blood trail, we find some coins and a baseball bat, along with an ominous static-filled TV.

: Wasn’t this room in Silent Hill 2?

: The table on the right has a couple of quarters on it. We need to pick up this bat to progress.

: Weapons have varying damage types. Most melee weapons do either crushing, piercing, or slashing damage.

: They also have a completely random chance to break. The base chance is around 10%, but newer weapons get a “bonus” that’s supposed to lessen those chances.

: Weapons can break twice before they’re destroyed. The first time they break, their stats lower.

: Tonics are one of the only ways to heal in combat. They restore 40% HP.

: Bandages restore 20% HP and cure bleeding, but can only be used outside combat. Experienced players will only pick these up when they intend to use them.

: “Are you hurt?”

: “Hurt? Yes. I’m hurt. Hurt. Want to see? Want to see? I saw it… D-did you?”

The man clumsily conceals something behind his back. Blood trickles down his shirt.

: On Survivor, this fight is scripted. On Cursed, this guy is a boss fight.

: You can’t kill this guy until a cutscene plays, so let’s guard to minimize weapon durability rolls.

He stabs at himself with the knife. The blade easily shreds through his flesh, spilling forth far too much blood.

: “What are you doing?! Stop it!”

: “It’s in the way! I can’t see anything!”

: We guard another turn.

: “I will help you see.. you just need a little help…”

The man’s wounds bulge and throb as he staggers closer..

: He’s engaged Billy Birkin mode.

: Isn’t this what people from Quebec look like?

: Celine Dion is from Quebec.

: My point exactly.

: Once the eyeball comes out, the Wounded Neighbor’s HP is set to 1 and any attack will kill him.

: We can take his knife and a key we’re going to need. I’ve heard (but never seen proof of) there being a non-standard game over involving the knife.

: Supposedly, if you never equip it and go back to Sam’s apartment and look in the mirror in the bathroom, there’s a scene where Sam will wonder if there’s an eye inside him and stab himself. I tried it and couldn’t get it to work.

: Once we leave, the TV inexplicably starts showing a giant eye and a zombie bursts out of the other door. Let’s kill it.

: This is an Onlooker. They’re not terribly threatening - they always start in a “far” state where they can’t hit you, and tend to waste turns gazing at you.

: If you’re really unlucky, they’ll mutate mid-fight. This happens more frequently on Cursed. Mutating heals them and makes them more dangerous, but worth more EXP.

: The room behind the onlooker has a stage 2 onlooker (which are largely identical to their stage 1 counterparts), a key, and a safe.

: The key is a simple key, which can be used on a number of locks but is single-use. Let’s open that safe.

: On Cursed, all item drops are halved, so this would instead be $50 and so on. We want this money in case a random event happens later today.

: Back in the hallway, a couple of onlookers have burst out of the apartment across the hall and move off to the right. A third one emerges from the doorway.

: This one mutates after one turn, but never even gets close enough to attack before Sam kills it. Sam reaches level 2 off this - we need him to reach level 3 before we leave this floor.

: The other two onlookers block the door to the stairs, which is chained shut.

: One of the onlookers manages to hit Sam with Panic, which disables his skills.

: It then mutates into an Observer, the third stage of the Onlooker evolution cycle. Sam gets a crit against it, which does more damage but increases the chance of weapon breaks.

: We’re going to go to Sam’s apartment and save now, because there’s a fight coming up that has a 50% chance of dropping an item I want.

: To save, we talk to Sybil. She’ll comment on certain events when you do.

: This table is full of throwing items - there’s a dinner plate, some knives, and some forks. Plates do crushing damage and have a chance to stun, knives do slashing damage, and forks do piercing damage.

: This table has a crafting kit and two bottles of whiskey, which can be consumed for stamina or turned into other items - notably molotov cocktails, which can melt the frozen door.

: On Cursed, the crafting kit gets moved behind a boss.

: Most fridges in this game can be raided for food.

: Up here is Vincent and a chocolate bar. The chocolate bar is mission critical to our plans.

: I hate that TV setup. Who buys a couch that big and then puts a tiny TV on one side? It’s not even centered!

: I can see why.

: “Hey Vincent, what’s wrong? You didn’t look outside, did you?”

: Vincent is your typical French Canadian flasher. There’s a really easy way to deal with him.

: He’s extremely weak to piercing damage, so we can toss a fork at him for a ton of damage. On Survivor, this can kill him in one hit. Even if it doesn’t, we can kill him without taking damage.

: Vincent has a 50% chance of dropping a chicken sandwich, which you may potentially want depending on which characters you want to use.

: Sam is now at level 3, so we can eat that chocolate bar to get him back to full HP and stamina. This is important because Sam has exactly 24 stamina and we need it all.

: With the key from Billy Birkin, we can open the door to the stairs. The door on the other side leads to the roof, but is locked.

: Floor 2 is open, but we don’t want to go there just yet.

: The ground floor door is electronically locked, and is connected to two round sockets in the wall.

: We’ll come back for this in the next update.

: Finally, we reach the basement. That stick in front of the corpse is what we came for.

: The basement is locked and the landlord has the key. We’ll keep that in mind for later.

: The guy in the robe is friendly, and we want to talk to him because it’s a requirement to unlock the best ending as well as one of the joke endings.

: “Aha! Another lucid individual! Well, then! Salutations, and so on! I’m Aster, an astronomer. I’m researching our astral predicament. Perhaps you could help?”

: I’ll choose the options we want but do it like dialog. They’re all under “I have questions.”

: “What IS happening outside?”

: “It is an object passing through our solar system, an extraterrestrial phenomenon of sorts. Of this much, I am certain. Any more, I could not hazard to guess.”

: “We simply don’t know yet. Looking at it, even indirectly, causes grave changes in living things. Even looking at a reflection warps a person.”

: And now we have it confirmed. Looking outside and seeing Montreal causes you to mutate into a perfectly normal citizen of Quebec.

: “What kind of object is it?”

: “We have theorized many things. It could be a rare natural phenomenon in space, or some sort of alien technology. And indeed, it could be a living organism of some kind.”

: “Something living?”

: “Yes. Jasper is of that opinion. That it is something we could communicate with.”

: “Maybe we can kill it.”

: “Kill it? I think you underestimate the gravity of the situation.”

: You get exactly one chance with Aster to ask him about killing the thing outside. Doing this is a requirement to unlock one of the Version 2.0 estoteric bullshit endings.

: “Why does Jasper believe this?”

: “I’m not sure. It’s hard to believe something so massive could be alive. But I suppose it is quite an unusual object already, so why not?”

: We need to ask Aster this part to unlock the best ending. It looks like we’ll need to find Jasper to learn anything more. We can also ask him if he needs help.

: “You know, the other night, I had the strangest dream. Normally I take no stock in hokum, but surely this is a sign! In my dream, there was a shimmering liquid pouring from a dark tube. It poured out and splashed on the floor, falling through cracks.”

: “I remember feeling like I had to scoop up the liquid.. to hold it and carry it with me. But nothing worked. It slipped through my fingers.. I just KNOW it means something!”

: Aster’s description doesn’t really tell us what he wants. Most of the endings in this game involve finding specific items to give to Aster and his cultist buddies as offerings.

: Continuing down the hall, we find a door that absolutely doesn’t have a giant monster behind it.

: Just past that door is a key to Apartment 21, which is right next to Aster. Let’s go back and use it.

: This hallway sure changed a lot in a couple of seconds.

: That’s what Bob Vila did to you. You’d watch one episode of This Old House and suddenly your bedroom’s a different color and has new sheetrock on the walls.

: You can hear the door burst open and something chasing you.

: Pits start appearing in the floor. On Cursed, this chase sequence is significantly longer.. but no one on Cursed is going to do that. Why?

: Because we’re going to fight it.

: This is the Grinning Beast, and she is the first boss that counts for ranking points. Like Vincent, she is very weak to piercing.

: Impale is a skill we get for using the pool cue. It has an 11% chance to instantly kill the Grinning Beast - so if you’re lucky, this is a one-turn fight.

: If not, it’s probably a two-turn fight. If you get to three turns, the boss uses an attack that will probably instantly kill you. You can use the dinner plate from Vincent’s to stun her, and then you should get the kill on the fourth turn.

: If we then go back to where the barred door was, we run into this person.

: Leigh is the first possible party member we can recruit. She is the human form of the Grinning Beast a perfectly normal shop owner and can shapeshift into the Grinning Beast become a fan of the Montreal Canadiens.

: Doing this makes her go insane for one turn, which gives her a chance to attack herself or another party member instead of the enemy. We can fix this.

: Can you? The entire city of Philadelphia has been insane for decades and no one’s fixed it. Don’t get me started on New Hampshire, either.

: Her main skill shapeshifts her into the Grinning Beast makes her a fan of the Montreal Canadiens. This gives her a huge attack and defense boost, makes her basic attack hit twice, makes her attacks cause Bleed (which removes a percentage of max HP per turn), and unlocks her other skills.

: Do I get bonuses for being a fan of the Commanders, or for hating the Eagles?

: You get a bonus to losing football games and having season-ending quarterback injuries.

: This is why I only watch the WNBA and women’s olympic soccer every four years.

: What makes Grinning Beast amazing is that if Leigh has a weapon equipped that has a status effect on it, she’ll inherit that status effect on her attacks. While she’s in beast form a Canadiens fan, she doesn’t use a weapon and so her weapon can’t break.

: Do I get bonuses for being a fan of the Commanders, or for hating the Eagles?

: You get a bonus to losing football games and having season-ending quarterback injuries.

: This is why I only watch the WNBA and women’s olympic soccer every four years.

: On Survivor, a pistol and a 12-round magazine spawns near Aster once you either run from or kill the Grinning Beast. On Cursed, Leigh has the pistol and will eat it unless you pay her $100. I assume Canadians survive by eating firearms, like that one manga.

: Firearms are equipped in the right hand, and don’t break. The pistol is kind of useless, but we’ll use it to save on weapon durability.

: On my first run, I never wound up using the pistol at all.

: Before we go into Apartment 21, we can go into Apartment 20 to meet someone.

: “Listen.. I left a full load of clothes in the laundromat on the ground floor. I’m.. not really capable of leaving right now. I think I might be sick.”

: “Can you just grab my clothes for me? I’ll pay you $50 for it. Cool?”

: We obviously know what’s happening to her - she’s perfectly normal. Jeanne is a favorite among fan artists for this game.

: “Yeah, it might be difficult to reach the ground floor at the moment, huh? Lyle, my neighbor across from here, told me there was a way down to Floor 1 from his apartment. You should ask him.”

: Jeanne has a couple of items we want. One is this bottle of Cleanerex. On Cursed, you need this to recruit a party member we’re going to get next update.

: The real use of Cleanerex is making an item that opens certain doors.

: She also has this muffin and a meat cleaver, along with a fridge we can raid.

: Won’t she need that?

: The muffin is one of the easiest ways to get one of the esoteric bullshit endings. We’ll probably see the start of that next update.

: If we stop in Jeanne’s bathroom, there’s a cockroach on the floor. We want to pick this up, even though I never managed to use it properly on my first playthrough.

: The roaches are part of a side plot to recruit one of the better party members - most people will use that party member as a fourth with Leigh and Audrey.

: There’s someone in here.

: Meet Lyle. Lyle is a perfectly normal Canadian photographer and also a gay stalker who is in love with Sam.

: “How are y-y-you doing? R-r-remember me? I’m Lyle! We were uh, t-together. We worked together. At the convenience store.. remember? Ha ha ha.”

: “Oh yeah. I remember.”

: “You remember me?! That’s g-great! I mean, cool. Uh. A-anyway.”

: We get four options, and we want to pick the first one.

: “T-trading? Wow! Yeah! Sure! Let’s trade! You can get something from me and I can get something from you! YEAH! Uhh.. okay. Let me think.”

: “I have photo paper. I can’t give you my camera, though. You’ll need to find your own.”

: As much as it sucks, we need to enable him.

: “Uh! I’m kidding! Hah! Look at your face! You…”

: “Wait, y-y-you said yes?! OKAY! YES! HAHA! It’s a DEAL! But, uh, you’ll have to close your eyes before I get close. Okay? J-just close your eyes.”

: “I’m sorry, I think I s-stepped on your foot. Okay. OKAY! Here g-g-goes.”

It feels like kissing a rounded, burning hot piece of glass. Like a full pot just pulled out of the coffee maker.

: “OH! Sorry. That went off on its own. Uh. I took a picture. I didn’t mean to. It’s alright if I k-keep it, right? You can open your eyes again! Okay!”

: “G-gosh. Thanks. Here’s your, uh, photo paper. Be careful now, all photo paper is very flammable. The sleeve should protect it, though.”

: This is meant to be a hint for how to fight Lyle if you choose to kill him. There’s a non-standard game over for dying to him, and one for killing him.

: If you choose not to kill him, he’s recruitable as a party member. He used to be Leigh tier, but got nerfed in a patch and is now kinda mediocre.

: Lyle is bugged in that he counts for points if you kill him (bosses are worth 100 points) but doesn’t count as a party member if you recruit him (party members are worth 200 points).

: Lyle has a garbage can, which has a chance to have “junk” in it. Junk is used to recruit a party member. They can also have random items or very rarely a magic 8 ball which can win a boss fight for you.

: Vincent also has a garbage can but I didn’t open it because we need to go back there later.

: His back room has mutated flesh covering it. This is what we use the Cleanerex for - if you combine it with Vinegar, it makes Herbicide, which will kill the flesh growth.

: We also find a book of crossword puzzles. These are useless. Unlike playing video games (which gets you EXP and fills some of Sam’s needs), crosswords do nothing.

: If you finish the crossword book, it unlocks a joke ending.

: The bottom door leads to a safe that we don’t have a key for, so we’ll take the top door.

: This room has some items and a perfectly normal Canadian in it. This particular Canadian has a chance to drop an accessory that sells for a fair bit.

: We can talk to this pipe, and it has a sidequest for us. The sidequest isn’t worth doing, and I don’t want to stop to talk to it because there are rats in this room.

: If you’re playing this yourself, don’t kill the rats in this room.

: Our danger meter is rapidly filling. At maximum, enemies will spawn which have a chance to instantly kill on hit.

: Each floor has a hidden superboss that only shows up at max danger level, and you need to kill all four of them to recruit a very well hidden party member. I’m not doing that.

: You have to kill all four bosses, find an invisible door with only Sam in the party, open the door, kill another boss, do a dialog puzzle you get one shot at, and then you get the party member. I think people had to decompile the game to find that one.

: Floor 1 is a maze. It has three long horizontal hallways stacked on top of each other, which are connected with vertical hallways that don’t make sense.

: Right now, we’re in the top hallway, which loops on either end.

: This door leads to the middle of the three horizontal hallways.

A lost letter addressed to “Jasper”. It’s dated to about three months ago.

I destroyed the negatives. They were too dangerous. I know you said you wanted a picture, but it’s a bad idea. I only glanced at the projection for an instant, and am now plagued with migraines. It seems that even indirect observation carries deleterious consequences.

If word got out, images would spread like wildfire and do untold damage. I believe stopping all of our activities is the only safe course of action. I have half a mind to destroy my telescope and blank discs too. Get rid of all my notes. We should just forget we ever found this.

I’ll just lock it all away for now. I don’t want to get anywhere near this.

Your worried friend Edwin,
Apartment 31

: Apartment 31 is two doors down from Sam, and we now know whoever’s inside is a mutant. It won’t open until Day 3.

: The middle hallway has exit signs and is the only one that doesn’t loop. We want to go to the left.

: This apartment is full of rats, and you can hear a baby crying loudly in the background. Down below is a fridge, a rolling pin, and a chef’s knife - these are upgrades to the baseball bat and kitchen knife.

: We murder our way through some rats in the main room.

: This fountain pen is part of the quest for that pipe.

: To the left is the bathroom, where we can pick up toothpaste and a note.

I’m trying to understand how the planet discs work. Those astronomers have installed strange round sockets for them. There are two discs on this floor, and one door has a socket. But how can you tell which discs are needed? The doors are marked with numbers, not planets..

: The right door has some more rats, which are slightly stronger than the ones we just fought.

: The tail rat in particular has significantly more HP and can hit for around 20-30 damage. If you have a certain item, you can talk to the tail rat. He was a grad student pre-mutation.

: That’s disgusting.

: This room has a denim jacket we can equip as armor, some magazines we can sell, and a child barrier key.

: The key unlocks this barrier, which leads to some vendor trash (you can pick up the music box and the drawings on the wall), and.. this.

: This is the Rat Baby. The Rat Baby is a party member, but it sucks - it has really low stats and its main ability is copying whatever Sam does.

: Sam refuses to take it with him, but it jumps in his bag.

: Back outside, we get a glimpse of this area’s superboss - the Rat King. We’ll kill him two updates from now. He drops the item that lets you talk to rats.

: Just below that is this door, which serves as a landmark. If we didn’t have Leigh, we could get a party member here.

: “Who the heck’re you? This is my home! You lost? Well, come on in, I guess. I’m ol’ Ernest, and this handsome daredevil here is Colonel Squeakums! Say hello, Colonel!”

: Colonel Squeakums can talk, but we need the rat king’s item to understand him.

: “That’s our Colonel! Says he likes the cut of your jib. A solid jib cut, he says. But I say your jib could use more cutting if you’re gettin’ lost in the labyrinth! Ol’ Ernest knows it like the back of his hand.. maybe y’need some help?”

: Welcome back, Minsc.

: There are two other characters who are only available from a random encounter who are direct references to party members in Baldur’s Gate 1, but Ernest is definitely Minsc.

: “How long’s it been? Feels like I’ve been here for years now.. think it’s startin’ to get to the ol’ brain pan…”

: If you don’t have any party members, Ernest will join you for free until midnight. If you do, he wants a sandwich to join for the day. This is why we picked up that sandwich off Vincent.

: We’re not going to recruit him yet, because we’re done with combat for the day.

: If you head just north of Ernest’s room, there’s a 2/3 chance this vending machine is here. We’re going to use all our dollar coins on it.

: The vending machine offers cola, two Deus Ex references, juice boxes, and.. “advice”. I wonder what that last one does?

You wait for nearly a minute.. then, with a laborious, grinding whir of old machinery, it finally dispenses a can. An empty can falls into the tray. Black text is printed on it.

: “Hello! I am Audrey! Please be careful! There is a big monster nearby. It’s very dangerous.”

: Audrey is a recruitable party member, and probably a reference to that one isekai manga where the main character is a vending machine.

: She has a hidden friendship level we need to reach, and picking certain options makes it faster. We’ll want to pick option 1, but option 2 also works.

: “Uh, thank you Audrey?”

: If you’ve already killed the Rat King, there’s a fifth option that gets you slightly more friendship, but it doesn’t really change much. We need to buy a second can.

Another empty can falls into the tray. It has more text printed on it.

: “No problem. I’m happy to help!” There is a drawing of a smiley face. On the back of the can, in smaller text: “Ask a question after you insert coins, and I’ll answer as best I can.”

: We don’t want to do that.

: If we leave and come back, Audrey will be in her true form. She’ll scuttle away once we leave.

: She’s kind of cute for a mutant vending machine.

: If we go in the opposite direction from where Audrey is (ignore Ernest, this was a test recording), we find another door that needs Herbicide to open.

: Next door is Apartment 13. This is where we’re going to get the first of those two planet discs we read about.

: This room is ripped straight from LISA the Painful. We can either feed this thing the Rat Baby, or we can feed it one of Sam’s arms. Once you’re in here, you can’t escape without feeding it.

: If you name Sam “Ash”, you can still equip a chainsaw (if you feed it his left arm) or a shotgun (if you feed it his right arm).

: I know the fanbase hates this thing and has requested the ability to feed it an explosive instead.

: Why did you do that?

: You’re telling me you’d drag that baby around instead of feeding it to the wall?

: Rat Baby is easily the worst party member in the game. Its stats suck and it has a gimmick based around copying Sam’s last action.

: Worse, it doesn’t count as a party member for points. The only reason you’d want the Rat Baby is for upgrading another party member we’re never going to use.

: And there’s our disc. Let’s take it and get out of here.

: The bottom of the three horizontal hallways has this apartment, which has an empty slot and a “1” on the handle. Can you figure out what the puzzle is?

: By the way, here’s the map. I erased some things that we haven’t seen yet.

: It’s the number of moons. Earth only has one moon, and it’s the only disc we have.

: The door opens up. Let’s go in.

: Apartment 11 is a large circle of rebar hovering over an abyss.

: At the top is the Rat Freak. He’s not a boss, but he’s annoying to fight, so we’re going to juke him.

: Enemies will charge at you if you get too close to them, and we can use this to reposition the Rat Freak so we can get the disc.

: This is the Mars Disc. The puzzle in the stairwell had a “3” on it, and we all know from playing the original Doom that Mars has two moons: Phobos and Deimos.

: We could go to the ground floor, but we won’t. The reason is that the ground floor sets a whole bunch of flags we don’t want to deal with, and we’ll need roughly half a day to get an item there.

: You have to remove the discs every time you insert them, which re-locks the door.

: Before we leave for Sam’s apartment, we’re going to stop by this room. This is the second room from the right in the top hallway, next to the moon symbol.

: This room has some gasoline, two junk, a broom, and a molotov cocktail. We’re saving that molotov for the Rat King.

: Aurelius gives us the name of the thing outside: The Visitor. He also tells us directly what he wants: a painting.

: “What is the Visitor?”

: “We don’t know.. a stellar object that emits some terrible, unknown radiation. That’s our best guess at the moment.”

: “Somehow, it warps utterly anyone unfortunate enough to observe it. We have no rational explanation for that. My personal theory is that it is some sort of malfunctioning alien technology.”

: “What do the others think?”

: “Either a natural phenomenon we don’t understand, or an intelligent lifeform. The observations we collect are intended to attempt communication with it, in case of the latter.”

: We now kind of understand what the cult is looking for: they want depictions of the Visitor.

: “Why not kill it instead?”

: “Kill it? How? It would be like killing the Sun. If this thing is even alive in a way we understand, I doubt we can cause it any actual harm.”

: “What will you say to it?”

: “Um.. please leave us alone? I suppose I haven’t given it much thought. Jasper will know what to say. He has a lot on his mind.”

: The first line is for the joke ending, the second is for the best one. We need to find Jasper, but he’s on the ground floor.

: Before we leave, let’s grab one last item. The bottom hallway has this long string of doors. One of them opens.

: This eye is part of one of the esoteric bullshit endings. If we sit here for 10 seconds, it instantly kills Sam. We need an item off a superboss to do anything with it.

: We’ll just grab this key and leave. We’ll need it tomorrow.

: We’ve still got some time before Sam will want to sleep, so let’s play Madwheels '97.

You put the ol’ Madwheels '97 back on. You’ve played this old kart racer to death, but it’s always fun. You start a new championship.

You’re a bit rusty. You end the first championship in fifth place. you do a bit better in the final two races, though.

Leigh doesn’t seem to understand this game. Instead of racing, she spends her time ambushing and attacking other drivers. She comes in dead last, but probably gets the most out of the game.

You get the feeling something good might happen if you manage to get first place in the championship.. maybe you should play this again sometime.

: Leigh is probably one of those people who plays Sonic Racing Crossworlds and is top 10 in every competition, since that game is entirely about overpowered items.

: This gets everyone 20 EXP and gives Sam 20 “calm”. If we hadn’t taken that shower this morning, Sam would have gotten anxiety right around the point where we got the rat baby.

: Every time you do something in the apartment, you have a chance to get a door encounter. There are up to three of these a day, and they’re pre-determined at the start of the day.

: There are a number of party members who can only be found as door encounters - Ernest used to be one of those before Version 2.0.

: This is the curio merchant. We don’t have enough money to buy the one thing I’d really want off him, and we need to keep $120 around in case a different vendor shows up.

: You might see this and think you could give it to Leigh to fix her Canadiens-induced insanity, but no.

: The status effect she gets is functionally identical to Confusion, but isn’t actually Confusion.

: We play Madwheels '97 one more time before bed. You need four plays to finish it, and we want to have it finished before Day 3.

: Uh-oh. Occasionally, you’ll get messages about something touching you while you’re in Sam’s apartment. You can safely ignore them - they’re from a very obscure party member we won’t meet until Day 3.

: Next time, we’ll go to the ground floor and meet Jasper. We’ll also encounter Sam’s landlord and finish recruiting Audrey.

[Timrod]

Summary

: I just spoke with Salty Vanilla this morning (he contacted me) and he’s making progress on that last picture for the BG3 LP. Let’s do Day 2.

: “This morning, I heard a crash in the hall. Then someone was stumbling around. I think they might still be there. They were muttering something about tooth pain.”

: “They didn’t come close to my door, so I couldn’t see. It is very close to your door, so be careful!”

: Sybil will mention one important thing now that we’ve met Aurelius.

: “So the astronomer is looking for a painting of the outside? There was that painter that lived on the first floor. Frederic. I used to talk to him a while ago. You could ask him.”

: Fred’s apartment is right down the hall from Aurelius, but we might as well get a full party before we go in.

: The door across the hall has been kicked in and there’s some kind of zombie a perfectly normal Canadian dad standing in the hallway. We’ll deal with him later.

: We can now go to the ground floor using the Earth Disc and Mars Disc.

: Sam’s hunger meter is depleted, so I’ll need to go reload and feed him. Before I do that, let’s explore this area.

: Down here is a candy machine. This is what you want to spend all your quarters on. The candy machine has a chance of giving you permanent stat buffs.

: These aren’t the ones we want, so it’s a good thing I’m reloading. Generally, you’re going to want to wait to give these to Audrey.

: This room is a janitor’s closet. There’s two closets on the ground floor, one on the second floor, and one on the third floor.

: This room is the laundromat. We might as well go in because it gets a bit harder to access later.

: One of the washing machines is moving ominously. If I remember right, Haunting Ground had a very similar jump scare.

: We can take this t-shirt (which is useless) and another denim jacket, along with two jugs of bleach and some rags for making molotovs.

: Once we go past that row of three machines, some kind of Canadian cat jumps out of the washing machine. I assume this is what cats look like in Quebec.

: The washing machine with the blinking light has Jeanne’s laundry in it. We’ll give this back to her at some point, preferably once everyone is high level and we have guns.

: Down the hall from there are two bathrooms and the landlord’s apartment, which is locked. That bottle next to the flesh door is important.

: This is your first bottle of herbicide. The apartment that just opened up on the third floor has vinegar in it, so we’ll use it on this door.

: The women’s restroom has a garbage can and a first aid box with bandages in it. We’ll leave the bandages for now.

: Further down is a first aid kit. These are the only way to revive a KOed party member, and restore 50% HP. They can only be used outside of combat.

: And here’s the Venus Disc. We won’t need this for a while, but we might as well get it while we’re here.

: Venus, like Mercury, has no moons at all.

: The men’s restroom next door is very important to visit before we go any further. See that guy by the sinks? He’s a party member, and a VERY good one at that. I used him all the way to the end on my first run.

: The game checks how many permanent party members you have when you first open the ground floor. If you only have two (Sam and Leigh, for instance), this guy will be in the bathroom. Ernest and the Rat Baby do not count toward that limit, and I suspect that’s why they don’t count for party member points in the end-game ranking.

: If you have more than two, he’ll be in that locked janitor’s closet we passed by and won’t be accessible until you’ve cleared the basement.

: “Awful. Terrible. What a world.”

: “Oh, you snuck up on me. I was musing to myself. I have a lot on my mind. I’ve seen you before. Call me Papineau, resident custodial engineer. I’m afraid I may be the last of the maintenance staff remaining.”

: “We’re facing a worst- case scenario. A class-K janitorial disaster. I am quite overwhelmed.”

: "What happened to the staff?’

: “The chief custodian, Gaston, is missing. He has a key ring for all of the janitor’s closets on him. Mine was lost in the turmoil.”

: “Arthur worked the residential floors, Jean-Pierre worked security, Brenda worked the boiler room, and Sylvain was our certified electrician. All of them are missing. They may be dead, or worse…”

: “Although I do have hope. After all, the power is still on, and we still have hot water..”

: “Need any help?”

: “Do you know your way around a mop?”

: “I’ve used a mop.”

: “That’s good. That’s very good. I can’t do this alone. I need to appoint you as deputy janitor. Will you accept this commission?”

: On Cursed, Papineau will want four bottles of Cleanerex before he’ll join you. You can find three of them on floor 3 and need to buy the fourth.

: “Excellent. Welcome to maintenance. Our battle against chaos will eventually end in defeat, but our work remains vital. Our primary task is to retrieve a key to the basement. The landlord, Mr. Henderson, should have a spare.”

: “Then, we need to restore the elevator. Its strategic importance cannot be overstated. Pray we find our custodial colleagues along the way.”

: This guy’s name is Nestor. He’s important to that sidequest I mentioned that comes from the bleeding pipe on Floor 1.

: There’s a free small key in this stall, so let’s grab that and move on.

: By the way, there’s a person in this stall. He’s important to one of the esoteric bullshit endings and recruiting a party member.

: We’ve got Papineau, so let’s look at what makes him so great before we move on to this next screen. By the way, this screen is a point of no return.

: If Papineau is in the bathroom, you haven’t recruited him, and you move on to the next screen, he dies. This only happens if he’s not in the janitor’s closet.

: On Survivor, Papineau comes with Joyeuse, a very powerful weapon that boosts attack and defense. Joyeuse is the first weapon we’ve encountered to have “safe hits”.

: Safe hits significantly reduce (but do not eliminate) the chance of a weapon breaking. Usually, only boss weapons have them.

: He also comes with a mackinaw jacket, which is a really good piece of armor, and an arrowed sash that boosts his physical attack by 30% at the cost of 20% HP and Stamina.

: Rent in Montreal must be cheap if he can afford a jacket like that. Decent ones go for $400, and the really high-end ones are closer to $800.

: You’re wearing a $100,000 designer dress.

: On Cursed, Papineau doesn’t have the jacket or the sash and becomes less viable as a long-term prospect. He is very much a weapon character.

: One screen to the left is the reception desk.

: And as soon as we reach it, a bus crashes through the front door. Thankfully, the front of the building collapses immediately so no one sees the Visitor.

: If you wait around for a minute, a giant hand emerges from the front. This is a boss we don’t want to deal with yet.

: Down here are four passengers. From the left, you have Feely, Armknot, Touchy, and then a smaller enemy down below.

: If we were to fight them, we’d have to fight all four at once. They’ll eventually disperse through the building, and Touchy will eventually reach the bathroom where Papineau was and kill him.

: Instead, we’ll take this door into Mutt’s. Mutt’s is, weirdly enough, a tutorial zone. There are friendly mutants citizens of Montreal here who will tell you about status effects.

: Mutt has “special items” on the counter. These increase in price every time you buy one, and there’s only really one item we want - it isn’t here.

: The other item is a belt that DOUBLES max HP but halves max stamina. This can be useful for Papineau or for another party member we haven’t met yet - but will soon.

: There’s $100 in this wallet and a bottle of beer on the table above. More importantly, if we go into that door in the back..

: We find the bathroom.

: Gift boxes have one of seven things in them. Once you open one, the others are guaranteed to have something different.

: This would be great if I didn’t need to reload again, because we’re about to run into some horrible RNG.

: The best thing in the gift boxes is an Explosive, which does 100 damage to all enemies.

: The Uranus Disc is in a different place on Cursed - it’s in the basement and you have to kill some strong enemies to get it.

: Uranus has 28 moons. The 28th one was discovered in 2023 and doesn’t have a name yet. The other 27 are named primarily after characters from Shakespeare.

: The five biggest ones are Oberon, Titania, Ariel, Umbriel, and Miranda. The smaller ones include Puck, Cupid, Juliet, Desdemona, Cordelia and Ophelia.

: Umbriel is a sparklefur name if I’ve ever heard one.

: Mutt doesn’t have much to say yet - we’ll need to talk to him once we get around to recruiting Audrey. He’ll buy items off you, which might come in handy later.

: Outside, we run into Feely blocking the door to Mutt’s. He’s not all that hard, and has a low chance to drop a decent armor.

: This is where the bad RNG strikes. You see that thing behind the giant hand? We need to talk to it. It’s a special encounter that can only happen in rooms you’ve been to before.

: I believe the earliest it can show up is Day 2.

The pale face’s features do not move. It seems to be a mask.

: Meet the Shadow. It is part of an esoteric bullshit ending known as the “Mask” ending. It’s also why we made the stop in Jeanne’s apartment yesterday.

: “Hello…?”

: Just like Audrey, the Shadow has a friendship mechanic and we need to pick the right answers to boost that.

: “You seem okay…”

: It doesn’t talk, all it does is move its mask.

: There is no answer. You think you notice subtle movements under the shape’s robe.

: “Do you need help?”

: It seems to be hungry…

: We can hand it any food item, but higher quality food boosts friendship more. The muffin is considered the highest quality.

: It eats it. It seems like it enjoys the food. Still facing you, it backs away…

: At this point, I decide I’m going to show off a few more things before I reload because there’s one other thing we’re not going to bother with.

: Armknot is one of the other bus passengers. He eventually ends up in the laundromat. He does a shitload of damage and we really don’t want to fight him right now.

: Touchy is much easier to kill. As previously mentioned, he’ll eventually wind up in the men’s bathroom and kill Papineau if he’s still there.

: If we head north, behind where the reception desk was, we encounter Jasper. We can’t do much else in here yet.

: Jasper won’t tell us what he wants, but we now know we need four offerings depicting the Visitor. Let’s go through his dialog options.

: “Tell me about your group.”

: “We observed the Visitor months ago and have been working tirelessly to learn about it, but it has come at a great cost.”

: “Do you think we could kill it?”

: “No, no, no! That’s not what this is about! We don’t want to kill it! This isn’t about revenge!”

: “I think I could kill it.”

: Men think they can kill anything.

: It’s just a giant monster. You can beat those up just like anything else.

: I could kill it.

: “What an absurd thought. This is not what we want. Not what she would have wanted, either.”

: There’s one more thing we need to talk to him about for the best ending, but we can’t do that until we’ve been to the basement.

: The door to the left has some vodka and another roach. From my understanding, you only need one roach for the roach sidequest.

: I forgot to screenshot it, but the planet lock behind Jasper has a 29 on it. We could open it with the Uranus disc and the Earth disc, but the Earth disc is currently in the lock keeping the ground floor open.

: To the left of the bus is the one room we need to visit.

: This is the mailroom. Feely will end up here if he isn’t killed - if he is, his corpse will be teleported due to a bug.

: This cell phone is the one reason we’d want to come here on Day 1. It is part of Leigh’s quest and takes four days to complete. The phone is out of power, so we’ll need to charge it.

: Back here is the Sun disc. It’s kind of an anomaly. There are two places that will tell you how many moons a planet has if you insert the disc. One is in Vincent’s apartment.

: You would think that logically, the sun disc’s value should be zero because the sun has no moons orbiting it. But here’s the description: “The Sun. Orbiting it are 8 planets, and so far 5 dwarf planets have been found.” The sun disc’s value is actually 13.

: The sun has 13 known planets orbiting it. The last ones were discovered in 2003 but not classified until 2005. There’s the eight planets everyone knows, plus Ceres, Pluto, Makemake, Eris, and Haumea.

: Those last three were what caused the re-classification of Pluto as a dwarf planet in 2006.

: This paper goes with the pen we found in the rat apartment. We’ll hand that to the pipe at some point.

: The door in the back requires five discs to open, and has a picture of Saturn on it. How many moons does Saturn have again?

: 274. Some of them are as small as a mile in diameter.

: This puzzle is kind of funny. Between 2019 and 2023, using a giant telescope in Hawaii known as the CHFT, a group of astronomers discovered 128 previously unknown moons in Saturn’s far orbit.

: Two weeks before the game released, the Minor Planet Center (which operates out of the Smithsonian) classified those moons to give Saturn its official total of 274. For purposes of this game, Saturn has 146 moons.

: We need to kill some time, so let’s go upstairs and go into that apartment.

: Clint isn’t difficult to fight on Survivor. He has 60 HP, which is about three times what the stage 1 observers have, and a single weak physical attack.

: On Cursed, his arm opens up after one turn, which increases his damage by a lot.

: This is the tooth apartment. There are little tooth monsters all over, which go down in one hit to pretty much anything.

: There are two doors on the left. We want to take the lower one first. On the table is a baseball cap, which boosts agility.

: What we need is this teddy bear. We can then leave the room.

: The first door on the left is a bathroom, and has this perfectly normal Canadian child in it.

: This kid is a party member. If you want to recruit him, you need to pick the first option. Otherwise, you can kill him or fight him as a superboss near the end of the game.

: “I’m a neighbor.”

: “Oh yeah, you live in front, right? Hi. Hang on, I’m brushing my teeth. What do you want?”

: On Cursed, Joel needs six toothpaste to join you. There’s a shop that opens up on Day 2 we could use to get that.

: “Your sister is sick?”

: “Yeah, my sister is sick! She bit me on the nose when I was playing with her…”

: “Oh no! Are you okay?”

: “Yeah, I’m okay. I didn’t even cry! But I caught what she’s got, and now brushing my teeth takes FOREVER! Mmh-mmh.. still brushing, just a sec.. other jaw…”

: “About your dad…”

: “Did you see him? He left to get help, he said.”

: “I haven’t seen him.”

: You can tell him his dad is “gone for good” or that he attacked you, but this will stop you from recruiting Joel.

: “Pprrth! Alright, that’s the first three rows done. I’m halfway there.”

: “About your mom..”

: “My sister bit her a lot. She’s been spending a lot of time in the bedroom. The door knob is broken, though. It was always loose.”

: “What happened to your mom?”

: “She was the first to get bitten. She was nursing her when it happened. She’s got a lot of teeth all over her now. She’s scary!”

: “I’m almost done. Just.. aaanh! Hath to.. heach those heeth that gwew in my thwoate..”

: “About your brother…”

: “As bad as I got it, Ben got it way worse. He got too close and she jumped on him and bit him a LOT. He almost DIED! But he’s all better now. He’s in our bedroom right now if you wanna see him.”

: The logical thing to do at this point would be to hug this poor, perfectly normal child. Really though, I would’ve shot him the second I knew he was infectious.

: The bear’s name tag says Fuzzy on it. If we use it..

: “Fuzzy… hhh… you got him…”

: If you don’t have the bear, you can run from the fight to get it and come back.

: We need to hug this child, which makes total sense. It’s not like he’s a highly infectious tooth zombie.

: If Sam is low enough on HP, Joel will kill and eat him. I’m not sure why it is that this doesn’t cause Sam to get infected.

: He gives us the doorknob. We need to see his mother before we can recruit him.

: If you look in the hole, you can see Joel’s sister.

: The parents’ bedroom has a safe in it, which is the only reason to come here.

: This rifle is how we’re going to take down the Rat King. It’s our first two-handed firearm, which means Sam couldn’t equip it if we hadn’t fed the rat baby to the wall.

: Speaking of which, if you’re going to use Joel, the rat baby is the only way to upgrade his weapon.

: There’s an army man toy down here. If you plan on doing the superbosses in here later or want all the video games, you’ll need this.

: I get bad RNG again and Madison boxes us in. She’s another superboss if you leave her alive.

: Thanks, I hate it. This is that one “mouths for breasts” fetish taken to an extreme.

: We can steal Madison’s handbag and take that door into the kitchen.

: The kitchen has some food and a frying pan in it, as well as two bottles of vinegar. We can now make herbicide.

: Once you try to leave, you get attacked by Baby Teeth. This is fairly easy to avoid - you just go around the table.

: Baby Teeth does count as a boss fight for points. She’s strong against slashing damage (which means Leigh won’t work) and weak to piercing for some reason.

: If you managed to get through the Grinning Beast fight without breaking the pool cue, you can use the same strategy: Leigh and Papineau throw forks, Sam uses Impale.

: If the pool cue broke.. she’s not really worth fighting.

: Killing her gets you the jawbone club, which sucks.

: It’s two handed, has four safe hits.. but decreases accuracy by 10%. Most bosses are heavily stun resistant or outright immune.

: On my reload attempt, a miracle happens. We get the All-Seeing 8 Ball from a trash can. This thing is one of the best items in the game. I’ll show what it does later.

: Touchy then drops a fingernail bomb, which does 80 piercing damage and has a high chance to cause bleed. I’m saving this for next update.

: I probably should’ve saved before I came in here, because the Baby Teeth fight didn’t go so well - Sam missed both times with impale, all three forks missed, and I had two weapons permanently break.

: We can tell Joel to come with us, at which point he’s recruited. I am never going to use him.

: Joel can’t equip weapons other than his bear. The only way to upgrade his gear requires the Rat Baby and another party member who is only obtainable as a door encounter.

: His gimmick is that he’s Quina from Final Fantasy 9. If he lands a killing blow with his weak physical attack, he eats the enemy and gains max HP. All of his skills cost HP to use.

: If you can plan around him, Joel is actually a really good party member. I’d rather have two-handed firearms, and Papineau can just as easily take his place.

: If you have the army man, you can go back to the room where we got the bear and talk to Joel’s brother, Ben. Joel will help you with this if he’s in the party.

: “Yep, that’s my little brother - hhh - Benjamin. He got bit up pretty bad, huh?”

: He’s just missing a head, a neck, and part of a torso.

: I’m not going to show the whole thing, but if you sit with Ben and play with him, you get items based on how well you did.

: The first option we want to pick is to attack the tank.

: He offers us a blue army man, who is the villain. Pick the third option.

: His helicopter crashes, so we move the original green army guy in.

: That poor kid.

: Told you we should’ve burned him.

: I stop and save because the next area we’re going to is the second of this game’s mazes and is full of enemies I don’t want to fight.

: Four and a half hours after the bus crashes, the landlord’s door is forced open and gunshots echo from within. On my first run, I didn’t go as far into here on Day 2 as I did.

: I’m probably going to reload again off-screen because it went.. poorly.

: The landlord is one of those things that doesn’t make a lot of sense.

: This is another scripted fight.

: The “Bloated Attacker” on the right works like Billy Birkin at the start of the game: it has infinite HP until a cutscene plays. We need to kill one of the other hand mutants average Canadian bus passengers.

: The landlord then shoots the one we didn’t kill.

: He comes back and shoots the bloated attacker, which does exactly what you’d think it does.

: And now we know why everyone on that bus is the way they are.

: I keep telling people, you BURN the exploding zombies.

: “Pthth! ARGH! ACK! Huff. Huff. Huff. Damn things! They got in my mouth! ACK! DIE! DIE!”

: The last enemy goes down one turn later.

: “How do I know you ain’t one of 'em?”

: If we answer anything but the first option, he shoots Sam.

: “I don’t know.. I don’t recognize ya. They tricked me into opening the door. This could be another trick. If you’re not one of 'em, then.. what’s my name?! You should know my name.”’

: Wasn’t the door bashed in?

: If you have Papineau (or one other party member only found as a door encounter), he’ll remind you of the landlord’s name.

: Otherwise, there’s two ways you can learn it. The first is when you pick up the money in Sam’s apartment, and the second is the note on the body by where we got the pool cue.

: “Mmmh.. guess you’re not one of ‘em after all. Now quit standin’ there and get me some antibiotics! In the bathroom, you dunce!”

: The only thing we can do is go into his bathroom. Make sure to loot everything in here.

: When we come back, there are ten dead bus passengers and no exit door. The brown drawers have money in them, and we’ll need that to progress.

: You can see that the landlord is hiding in the back. The goal is to find the landlord, pay him some rent, and then the apartment mutates.

: Let’s take that door to the left. The one on the right is the bathroom.

: Two cash drawers, an Old Uniform, a coin collection, and a safe. We want to open the safe now because it’s a pain to get to later.

: The coin collection can be sold or broken open for money. We’re going to break it open on this run. The apartment has enough dollar coins to finish recruiting Audrey without breaking it, but I want to talk to her afterward.

: Loot the fridge and we’re good to go. The drawer on the south wall has nothing in it.

: Every time we pay the landlord, he mutates. I think this is how landlords normally are.

: This is the second stage of the apartment. There are now enemies inside. We can see the basement key, but can’t reach it.

: The door on the left now leads to this room, which has a tonic, some cash drawers, a chessboard we can sell, and some coins.

: Scout tells us about secret equipment caches. I only know of two, and I don’t think there are many more. He gives us a radio we can use to contact him for hints.

: There’s a dollar coin in this crack in the wall, which counts as a hidden cache.

: This room has a detonator (up top) which is important for a sidequest. We do not want to fight that enemy.

: That enemy is called a Heavy Armored. It’s the one on the right. They have a lot of HP and have a shotgun that hits the entire party. They can fire it twice in one turn.

: We come dangerously close to getting attacked, but manage to grab the war medal before we do. It boosts Luck by 10 points and makes you immune to panic and fear.

: The second time, we need to pay $150.

: Doing this unlocks the exit, which means we can go get Audrey… but we’re pretty close to the basement key.

: This room is new, and introduces us to another enemy we don’t want to fight. See that thing over on the left? That’s a Gatling.

: We take the items, and then get in a fight with the lone enemy nearby.

: This is a Soldier. They’re the weakest enemy in the war zone. Like most of the hand enemies, they’re weak to slashing.

: It’s a hand grenade.

: The grenades attack for pitiful damage but eventually explode.

: Going north from this room puts us in a maze.

: This is the trench area. It’s a big, open map that loops around. This is why I say the landlord makes no sense: he’s clearly supposed to be a reference to Vimy Ridge (a WWI battle) but all the WWI vets were long dead by 2025.

: There’s an APC roaming around. This thing is a boss, and should not be fought without Audrey.

: This room has more coins and some shotgun shells on the bottom, and vendor trash and a bat on the other side.

: It also has a crack in the floor that gives you $50. This is the other hidden cache.

: This time, the landlord wants $300. The safe thing to do would be to do this at the start of Day 4.

: That bottom door is new, and it’s the one we want to take.

: Some of these corridors are landmined. If you hit the confirm button fast enough, you can disarm them before they attack.

: There’s a reward if you manage to disarm 12 of them, but it’s not really worth getting,.

: We sneak past this Gatling, which is a bit annoying to get past.

: This puts us back here. We need to take the door on the right.

: This part is the most annoying. We have a Heavy Armored on a very thin platform with no easy way to reposition it.

: And that’s the basement key. There is one more stage to the landlord’s apartment which costs $600 to enter.

: On the way out, I get hit by the Heavy Armored, which comes with a Bayonet. Bayonets are Soldiers but limited to melee only.

: We leave with only Leigh alive. This thing is Milledoights, which counts as a boss. We’ll come back for it later.

: Elbows is now occupying the staircase. He’ll eventually reach the third floor, and is annoying to dodge here.

: If we go down to where Audrey is, she’s asleep.

: The writing on the can is smeared and misprinted: “im sorry im sorry i hope didnt freak you out i dozed off and turned back into that thing so glad you still want to talk after seeing that!”

: “Don’t worry, you’re fine!”

: It continues on the back, even more smeared: “id give you a discount if i knew how but i don’t know how please keep talking to me theres nobody here but rats and t hey dont have any change.”

: “That sounds lonely.”

: It continues along the bottom, barely legible: “i think im going to run out of advice cans and i dont know how ill communicate after those are all gone i might be unable to im really scared.”

: “I’ll find a way to help.”

: We now have the option to examine Audrey. What we want to do is go to her left side and examine.

: “Audrey, can you scooch forward?”

: Another trip back down the stairs (dodging Elbows) later…

: On Survivor, Mutt will give you Audrey’s key for free. On Cursed, he forces you to buy it for $150. It counts as a “special item” and will be more expensive if you bought anything else from him.

: If we look at Audrey’s coin slot, we can find..

: The hole for the key. Use it, and Audrey will run off.

You unlock it. The vending machine’s door opens. Instead of machinery, the insides are filled with fleshy tubes and pulsating organs. Clusters of eyes open inside, visibly recoiling at the light. Long, worm-like protuberances squirm away. There are teeth everywhere. Tendrils extend from the depths of the machine and grasp at the door, slamming it shut.

: We duck into Ernest’s and buy another can.

: “Thank you! I can restock whenever I want now! It’s a huge relief. I filled my advice can stock with as many blanks as I could fit. I brought you some energy drinks as thanks. I found those in the storage, and they don’t fit my trays anyway.”

: We get six energy drinks, which are one of the best stamina restoratives in the game.

: If we put another dollar coin in, we can now ask her to join us.

: “Yes. Please. I hate being out here. I trust you. I’ll do whatever I can to help out. I can’t wield weapons, but I can do a mean running tackle.”

: Two seconds later, the Rat King shows up and the party barely escapes.

: Let me talk about Audrey for a bit. Audrey is a super tank. She has one of the highest HP values in the game, apart from a fully farmed Joel. The downside is she only gets half the benefit from healing items (including food from Sam’s oven).

: She also can’t equip anything apart from special equipment that drops from certain bosses, who will only drop them if she is in the party when they’re defeated.

: Audrey starts out incredibly weak, but by the end of the game she is potentially the strongest character. We’ll take on the APC, but not in the next update.

: Back in Sam’s apartment, we have just enough time to play one game of Madwheels before Sam needs to sleep.

: We can ask Audrey about herself, but each question costs $1. I’ll go through them all.

: “What happened to you?”

: “I was taking a can from the vending machine. The window at the end of the hall wasn’t covered, so I got exposed.”

: “Do you eat coins?”

: “Yes. It’s gross, I know. I can taste them, too! It’s awful! Have you ever tasted a coin?”

: No.

: I have, and I really wish I hadn’t. I did a dragon spa retreat once and all the rooms had piles of coins for a bed.

: I wonder if edible currency could work.

: “Tell me about you.”

: “Uhhh, sure. I was a 32 year old woman with too many pets, a nicotine addiction, and a job delivering packages on a bicycle. Now I am a box with teeth.” There is a drawing of someone throwing their hands in defeat. “I am moving on up.”

: Audrey also has one bit of dialog if you try to recruit her without enough friendship, and it’s kinda heartbreaking.

: “Thanks for the offer, but.. look at me. I don’t belong in a home. I belong out here in the hallway.”

: If you get her REALLY early, she has dialog lines about the corpse in the basement stairwell, along with the picture from Henderson’s bathroom.

: “Oh my god. I think this was my neighbor, Kurt.”’

: “Henderson’s so young in this picture. This must have been a long time ago. I’ve been here almost 15 years and he’s never looked like that.”

: Next time, we’ll recruit Ernest. We’ll also kill the Rat King, get our first offering, and recruit Lyle.

: Francis Coloumbe did bespoke pictures for some of the achievements, so let’s show some of those off.

: This one’s for recruiting Audrey.

: This one’s for recruiting Papineau.

: This one is for recruiting Joel.

: This one is if you save the Rat Baby.

: And this one for Leigh.

: This one is for getting run over by the bus, which happens if you stand in the wrong spot when it arrives.

[Fefnir]

Nice to see that Joel is mindful about brushing his teeth. Being comprised of about 70% teeth is no excuse to treat them as expendable. Even though they might be. It doesn’t seem like they stop growing.

[Timrod]

Summary

: Before we get started with Day 3, I need to do just a bit of errata to Day 2. Let me explain what happened: I got to the end of Day 2 with the basement key, and then realized I hadn’t run into the Shadow after I reloaded.

: The Shadow will only appear in rooms you’ve been to before, so I had to do a couple of laps of the ground floor to get it to show up. You need to run into it on Day 2 if you plan on getting the best reward from it.

: I also killed Elbows to get him out of the way. Elbows is the first enemy we run into who can constrict - this does damage every turn and reduces attack. He dropped the armor I was looking for.

: The floral shirt (which Sam is wearing) is a straight upgrade to the denim vest and also protects against Panic and Fear. Other than having the shirt and not having the basement key, nothing else has changed.

: There’s a degree of randomness to what time Sam wakes up. I believe it’s somewhere in the half-hour range.

: The phone we found yesterday is charged and now has a message on it.

Daydreamer,

I haven’t heard from you since all of this started. I’m getting nervous. Please message me or your mother as soon as you can. Your sisters are here with us and everyone is safe. We’ve seen things that simply cannot be explained, but we haven’t looked outside. I’m sure you’ve seen things too.

We all love you, and we’re worried. If the silence is about the way things ended at Sunday dinner, we’re sorry. We will make it up to you. Please stay safe.

Dad

: Sleeping restores some HP and stamina, but we need to eat anyway.

: Cooking a new dish boosts Sam’s cooking level, which increases the amount his food heals for.

: “Little boy.. Joel… heh heh heh.. do you like to play hide and seek?”

: “Umm.. hhhhh… y-yeah, I guess?”

: “Heh heh heh.. me too. Let’s play. You hide… I’ll seek!”

: “M-maybe some other time…”

: “Mmmhmmm! Some other time, then! Heh heh heh…”

: Occasionally you get conversations when the party eats. Leigh seems menacing, but she isn’t really.

: If we talk to Sam’s plant, we have the option to move it closer to the light. This causes Sam’s plant to mutate if we do it, but it doesn’t mutate into a boss fight or anything.

: We then finish Madwheels '97, which gets Sam one of his best skills: Nitro Boost. Nitro Boost is how we’re going to open every major fight until the end of the game.

: If we go outside, this door is now open. This is Edwin’s apartment, who we learned about from that note in the rat passage. I’m going to do this and reload because like Henderson’s apartment, there are multiple enemies we don’t want to fight.

: Looks like a normal Canadian apartment so far.

Edwin’s notes, dated to about two months ago. The handwriting is skewed and there are many crossed-out passages.

The mysterious Visitor was really a wish-granting shooting star. Every night, I feel like I can see more and more of the universe. I have seen colored UV images before, but the real thing is indescribable. Unfortunately, it has come at a great cost. Speech has become difficult. My hearing is worsening and my arms grow clumsy. I’ve also become very sensitive to light. I can live with this. All I want is to see what’s out there.

: He dropped acid and wants to feel special about it.

: The bathroom has eye drops on the table next to a jug of vinegar. I’m not sure why you’d keep vinegar on your bathroom counter.

: We loot all of Edwin’s toiletries and move on.

: Any door we leave will be mysteriously opened a few seconds later. I’m sure that’s normal.

: The bedroom has a metal bat and a safe in it. We can’t open the safe because we have no keys left, but it’s close to Sam’s apartment and easy to access for when we do get keys.

Edwin’s notes, dated to about a month ago. The handwriting is very clumsy and hard to parse.

Every night makes new eyes, and each new eye is a new world to see. Light gives funny feeling now, like Im not there when its bright. No more headache, just gone. Mouth and ears gone. No more real hands, can barely hold pencil. Just eyes and legs. Move and see.

Was looking out at sky again, but then lightes go on. The neighberr was at the door. Checking on me. Door was open. I moved to him but he see nothing. I see nothing either, too bright. I turn off the light and we look each other. (The rest of the notes are torn off.)

: They really want us to turn the lights off.

: This room is a little counterintuitive if you plan on finishing the game in the fewest days possible. As you can see, there are two discs here.

: Pluto has five moons, all named after figures from the Greek underworld. There’s Charon, Nyx, Styx, Cerberus, and Hydra.

: This chart is one of the two places you can find out how many moons each disc has. It doesn’t tell us about Pluto, but that one’s easy enough to look up.

: This disc is the one you want to be careful of if you’re speedrunning. This is the Void Disc, which has a value of negative one.

: With the Void Disc, you can bypass a disc requirement for one of the major plot bosses. For the ending we’re going for, we need all the discs, so this doesn’t affect us.

It seems like a ledger of borrowed equipment.

Jan -
Feb - Sybil - Apt 12 - Telescope 3 (LATE)
Mar - Beryl - Apt 15 - Telescope 2 (returned)
Apr - Jasper - Apt 26 - Telescope 1 (returned)
May - Vincent - Apt 37 - Slide Projector
Jun - Lambert - Security - Planet Slides
Jul -
Aug -
Sept - Lyle - Apt 21 - Zoom Lens
Oct -

: Hold on a second. Sybil isn’t in Apartment 12. Isn’t that the one with the gunk blocking the door on the first floor?

: All the more reason to kill her.

: Apartment 15 and 26 don’t exist. We’ve been to 37 and 21.

: This telescope is the source of a non-standard game over and an achievement. You can point it outside and look through it, which would cause Sam to see the Visitor.

: If you point it outside, it makes an image on the floor. I’m not sure why Sam can look at this and not mutate.

You have this Blank Disc. Maybe you could put it down there and capture the image..

: This game takes some liberties with how astrophotography works. Normally what you’d do is buy an adapter for the telescope that allows a camera to attach directly to it.

: We need to turn off the light to capture the image, but there’s one more note we can read.

When I saw him I knew he had to die

not ugly. Ugly is not right word. bautiful but wrong. Tried to tell him why I was curshing him, but mouth is telescope lens!

It he saw what he was, he unerstand. He just don’t kwow. Not his fault

The next one was loking for him. He was also all wrong. Grabd him and made him dead too. I think everone all like that. Makes me sick and sad. How they live like this? How? I can help let me help I can make you right just turn off light and I take yu with me.

: I think it’s time we put Edwin down. Clearly, life in Montreal has driven him insane.

: If you read all the notes, the game will spell it out for you. This is where I get some bad RNG.

: Meet the Stargazer, which is a perfectly normal (if very insane) Canadian amateur astronomer. Let’s kill it.

: Nitro Boost gives the entire party 30% evasion and boosts Agility by 30%, which increases the damage of certain attacks. Your base evasion rate is 5%, so this makes it 35%.

: Stargazer resists pierce and slashing damage, but we still want Leigh to use Grinning Beast because it makes him bleed when she hits.

: I didn’t do that here because I want to show off a couple of enemies I’d normally dodge.

: Audrey gets her first skill, Can Shot. Can Shot does damage based off her Ballistics stat and has a chance of inflicting Acid Burn, which increases damage taken by 25%.

: If you’re quick enough, you can dodge Stargazer altogether. The only problem is that his apartment changes when the lights are off.

: This is Meat World. Meat World is a big dungeon that is part of one of the endings I’m not doing. It’s a boss gauntlet where you have a limited amount of time to kill everything before it respawns.

: Next door is a familiar-looking room. This is the Meat World version of Sam’s apartment. Don’t ask me how this makes any sense.

: Sam’s TV and video games are here somehow, but we can’t use them. There’s a specific cartridge that you can only play here that leads to one of the hardest bosses in the game.

: That boss doesn’t count for points and so I won’t be bothering with it.

: There’s an item we could get from Henderson’s apartment that would let us blast this open and go out the door to Meat World proper, but we’re not doing that.

: If we go into Sam’s bedroom, we find this thing. It’s called Confusion.

: Confusion is pretty clearly based on that one thing from the movie Labyrinth, or alternatively that one character from Aaah! Real Monsters.

: We don’t want to fight it because it can potentially kill Sam in one turn.

: The next room has this thing, which is called Stretchface.

: Stretchface has the same gimmick: he has the “bite again and again” move that hits three times for a shitload of damage.

: Once we reach Edwin’s living room, we can use the Void Disc on the reflection.

: The Negative Disc has a value of -10 as opposed to the Void Disc’s -1.

: On the way back out, a new enemy appears in the meat version of Sam’s living room.

: “Ah. Here you are. I’m glad we finally meet. Face to face, I mean. I’ve been here with you for a long time. Ever since I was.. remade.”

: “I think sometimes you feel me. You feel my presence. You feel my touch. My breath in your ear. My back brushing against your legs.”

: “Do you like it? When my spine tickles you. When you sleep, I like to crawl in with you. I hold you close. Think of me as your guardian angel.”

: Meet Spine. Spine is a perfectly normal other-dimensional Canadian woman who lives in Sam’s apartment. You know those messages we were getting? That’s Spine.

: “Maybe if I remake you like me, we can be together. For real. Wouldn’t that be nice? We could live here instead. Not in your place, where the light is too bright. It’s a bit different, but you’ll get used to it. Once you can see what it’s really like.”

: Spine is a fan-favorite character and has her own sidequest, but we’d need to beat her in combat first. She’s about as tough as the Rat King, so we’re not doing that.

: If you defeat her, she can be talked to and eventually kills Sam. She can also be a party member if you go into Meat World alone.

: I hate the entire concept.

: What, you wouldn’t fuck the horrible flesh mutant?

: I press forward anyway and heal everyone, then craft as many molotovs as I can. Things are about to go very poorly.

: We meet the Shadow outside. He doesn’t want anything this time.

: I throw the rifle on Sam and hope for the best. It does not go well.

: The first thing the Rat King does is approach and then command you to kneel. If you do..

: He barfs ichor on you that has a chance to charm. Thanks to some EXTREMELY bad RNG, he hits everyone.

: I also mis-click and use a Fingernail Bomb. Don’t do that. You want Sam firing the rifle and everyone else throwing molotovs because the Rat King is weak to fire. Leigh should go Grinning Beast.

: The Rat King will mark a target, and on the next turn bite for a shitload of damage.

: Sam died to Leigh, and without his rifle this fight sucks.

: Papineau reaches Level 8 and gets his best ability. Share Lunch is usable once a day and restores 30% HP and stamina to the entire party.

: If you kneel, the Rat King gives you his crown when he dies.

: It’s a really good item. It boosts stats and allows you to speak to rats. Let’s reload and hope I get better RNG this time.

: I do not. Oh well, let’s press on.

: The first thing we want to do is go back to the room with the pipe in it. Remember how I said not to kill those rats?

: If you have the Rusted Crown, you can talk to them, and one of them is a trader. Elixirs work just like in Final Fantasy - they are a full heal that can be used in combat.

: We also want that grenade and the Sewage Blade, which is going on Leigh and probably not coming off. The Sewage Blade has a chance to cause Acid Burn on attacks, which transfers to the Beast’s claws.

: If we look at Ernest’s apartment, we get a scene I think is really stupid.

: You can see Colonel Squeakums standing on a human corpse. I’m going to do the crown version of this scene, but know that if you don’t have it, you can’t understand him.

: “You…! He’s.. he’s gone…”

: If you don’t have the crown, you get different options, and Attack is at the top.

: “The labyrinth rats.. I fought back, but.. there were too many of 'em…”

: “What happened?”

: “He wasn’t tryin’ to cause any trouble, really. We were just hungry. We didn’t realize how deep in their territory we’d gone.. I.. I’m okay. But Ernest.. they took him.”

: “He was just lookin’ for food. He didn’t mean to go on their turf. They.. they took him to the lair.”

: If you don’t have the crown, Col. Squeakums goes to this sprite and the game leads you to believe he’s going to attack you.

: “Lead me to the lair!”

: This encounter happens one day after you reach the ground floor. If you don’t do it on the day it opens, Ernest dies.

: “Okay, follow me! We gotta be quick! They’re gonna…”’

: Squeakums leads us to a hole in the wall, which he then opens up.

: They don’t have to be racist about it.

: The rat swarm hits the entire party for a ton of damage.

: It’s funny because rat furries are usually submissive types.

: Fortunately, we’ve got backup. While in Rat Hell, we have access to Ernest’s main form of attack. Colonel Squeakums will attack independently of the party and has a chance to blind on hit.

: His damage scales off Ernest’s level, but for this part, it scales off Sam’s. He’s also “cheesed”, which occurs if you feed him a cheese wedge. This makes him attack three times a turn.

: On Cursed, he won’t be cheesed and only attacks once.

: “This way, quick! Th-the arena! It’s up there! They’re gonna kill Ernest in front of everyone! There are two rats ahead. They’re tough, but I think you can take 'em out with a knife or a spear.”

: “The green one’s got poison.. acid, but he can’t take the heat, if you read me. The lantern one’s a pyro, but acid will do him in. I think you’d better be prepared for more of 'em, too.”

: Rat Hell is a boss gauntlet, though only one enemy actually counts as a boss.

: The poison rat barfs acid, and the lantern rat tries to light people on fire. What’s kind of fucked is that neither of them are actually rats: they’re both mutated humans.

: Audrey’s Can Shot kills the lantern rat pretty effectively, and you can toss molotovs at the poison rat for a quick kill.

: “I scouted ahead. We’re halfway there, but there are three warriors blocking the way. I saw the one with the shield protecting the others. Maybe you can try to crush his shield.”

: “The mace guy’s got powerful, stunning blows, so be careful. Try to get at him with a knife or spear.”

: “The one in the back throws nets. He’s definitely the most dangerous. Maybe you can shoot him through his nets. Take him out first.”

: It seems kind of unfair that these people all got turned into LARPing furries.

: Imagine all the shampoo expenses, though.

: This is from my first run where I had bad RNG on the rat king. What you want to do here is toss any fingernail bombs you have, and then toss the grenade from the rat merchant. If you don’t have any fingernail bombs, you can get a second grenade from Apartment 12 if you use an herbicide on it.

: We now have a choice. The boss on the left is fought with the full party and Colonel Squeakums. The one on the right is a duel, which has less HP but you don’t get Squeakums to help.

: The Rat Beast is the easier of the two fights. It’s stunnable, Squeakums can blind it, and it is VERY weak to guns.

: And I get the cheevo for killing it. I did the other boss on my first run.

: This is the other boss, the Rat Champion. It attacks four times and causes bleed, but only has 140 HP and is weak to acid. I took him out with Audrey.

: “I"m.. I’m free. I’m free? I’m FREE!!! HOO-EE, WORLD! I’M FREE!!!”

: “You’re a weird guy, Ernest.. but I couldn’t let those bullies get away with it!”

: “I.. I… hoo-ee, Sam.. I didn’t think think nobody remembered ol’ Ernest.. I never.. I dunno how to say this…”

: “I didn’t.. used to be the guy you see right now. It’s tough out there alone, and I guess the Ernest I used to be became.. became this Ernest.”

: “I guess this ain’t the world I’m used to anymore. Maybe I can’t go it alone. If.. if you’re willin’ to accept me, I’ll do whatever it takes to pay you back.”

: “I’ll wait for you at your place.”

: We’re done with combat for the day. It’s time to head back to Vincent’s apartment.

: Vincent’s bathroom has a Gawker in it. This is a fourth-stage evolved Onlooker. This room is meant to teach you about running away, so we’ll grab the items and leave.

: We want to head into this room down here now that we have the Negative Disc.

: This room has another game, which we can play now that we’re done with Madwheels '97.

: A hell for wizards? Where would it even go?

: This is the projector that Edwin’s register mentioned. It has two modes. One kills you, and the other is progress.

: It’s currently in forward projection mode. Let’s see what happens if we turn it on.

: We get a picture of a golf course. I’m not sure why Vincent would be using slides for this and not the internet.

: We need to tilt the head down, put the photo paper from Lyle inside, insert the Negative Disc, and then turn it on.

: If you forget to tilt the head down and have the Negative Disc inserted, Sam dies.

: We need one other thing from Vincent, and that is his guinea pig. Her name is Cinnamon, and she’s a required item to finish the game.

: She’s going to die, isn’t she.

: We now have a depiction of the Visitor on film, but we can’t use it directly. If you read the description on the Negative Disc, it says you can’t make out what’s on it.

: Let’s give it to Lyle, since he’s already mutated and has a dark room.

: We’ll squeeze in a play of Wizard’s Hell before bed. It gives you probably the second best skill after Madwheels.

You’ve never heard of this one before. It seems like some kind of management game, with wizards in hell? Leigh doesn’t know this game, but she seems to perk up as she realizes what it’s about.

You’re not doing so well. You build a lot of torture chambers, but don’t have enough demonic workforce to man the devices. The demons are on strike.

Leigh is transfixed by this game. She keeps asking you questions about what you can do in it, but you don’t really know much more than her. You don’t really GET This game yet, so it’s not very rewarding to play. Maybe if you keep at it, though…

: Next time, we’ll get the basement key, make a quick stop on Floor 1, and then do the basement maze.

: You might ask what happens if you somehow managed to kill Lyle before developing the photo.

: Let’s do that for the hell of it, though we won’t get to see his true form. To do that, we’d need to wait until he develops the photo.

: “I s-still have this picture I took of you… maybe it’s time I let it develop. Your soul will move to the photo as it develops. That way, you get to live forever in the picture!”

: “Isn’t that great? I hope you didn’t close your eyes when the flash happened, or you’ll be blind when you’re in there.”

: Why are we letting him live again?

: We have three turns to destroy the polaroid. It resists all damage except fire and acid.

: Sam blows Lyle’s head off with the rifle. Well, one of his heads. Let me show you what he looks like uncloaked.

: That doesn’t make any sense. How is he hiding that giant camera under a sheet without it making an obvious bulge?

: Lyle being able to steal souls through photography is also kind of a stupid plot point.

: We get the key to his dark room.

: The envelope near the door has more photo paper in it. One thing I couldn’t find that’s supposed to be here is Sam’s spare key - you’re meant to find it in here if you kill Lyle.

: You need to keep it in the fluid for it to fully develop.

You look at the picture. You feel drawn in to the image. Your bones shift, your skin peels off. Your teeth fall out of your gums, your eyes burst out of your skull. Your screaming brain crawls out of your mouth, followed by your digestive system, and everything else. Your entire being collects into the basins as an inhuman mass of organs.

The photograph, under your grotesque mass, gains color. You have become one with the developing chemicals. You played a part in bringing that incredible image to life. You grasp at the remaining photo paper with new, misshapen hands of offal and sinew. You will need many copies. They must all see it, see your work.

: There’s a separate game over if you let Lyle develop the polaroid, but it’s not particularly interesting. Next time, we’ll get the second offering and do part of the basement.

[Timrod]

Summary

: It’s Day 4, and today we’re going to do the first half of the basement. I want to make a couple of stops first.

: Leigh’s phone has a new message.

YOOoooOOOo
this is randall from work lol
the nose ring guy

just so you know the shop is closed
pretty crazy whats goin on right??
i just wanted to make sure everything is good with you

kinda sucks not hangin out in the stock room with you
almost miss getting pushed around by the boss now
btw wanna get coffee or something when this is over lol

: Once we leave Sam’s apartment, we see this guy pass in front and walk down toward the end of the hall. This is Look Outside’s equivalent of So Sorry from Undertale, even though he’s not a fan character.

: There are two rooms in this apartment we want to visit. Typically, I avoid the lizard because he’s an annoying fight - I’m going to reload right after this.

: “Oh, you’re.. Sam, right? I’m Louis. That guy from the laundromat. Remember? We talked about video games a bit.”

: "Why are you giving me that look? …OH. Right. The suit. Yes. Umm.. have you heard of Chococroc? You know, the cereal mascot? _{This is my, uh, brandsona.. you know. Um.}

: I want to jam a shotgun in his mouth and pull the trigger so bad.

: We only get to do one response here, but I’m going to post two of them.

: “Looks more like a dragon.”

: “Yeah, well this isn’t Chococroc exactly. This is an OC for the Chococroc world. I call him Fiber Dragon. He’s based on rejected concept art for a Chococroc videogame villain. It’s a bit stupid, I guess. But I like him.”

: Is anyone going to tell him that dragons have wings and without them he’s just a lizardman?

: “You’ll never get my Chocorocks, chococroc!”

: “Hahaha! Your chocorocks are safe, Sam. I can’t really eat them. _{I have diabetes, so I have to be careful about sugary cereals. I only eat them on special occasions. I’m more into the lore, really…”}

: I don’t remember if I talked about this or not, but there was a guy who used to sit at my Pathfinder tables back when I played PFS. I never GMed for him (and thank fuck I didn’t).

: He was an adult My Little Pony fan and kept trying to fuck everything. It was really uncomfortable, really cringy, and I can recall wanting to beat the shit out of him.

: This guy reminds me of him so much.

: “Anyway.. I really had to go out and get some food, so I put this on for protection and went out there. I was thinking, maybe this will protect me. This is very thick fabric. No light gets through. I was hoping I’d be fine..”

: _{"And uh… if I wasn’t fine, maybe… maybe there would be a chance that I would, like… become one with the suit. I wouldn’t mind that. You know? Like. I mean. Obviously it’s not ideal, but I mean…}

: This guy would be on the “Do not buy souls from” list.

: “Erm. Anyway. It worked, I guess. I’m back here with some food, and I’m safe! (Sigh…) That said, uh… I think the zipper’s stuck. I can’t get this thing to open at all. Could you help me? Before my roommates see me like this. I won’t hear the end of it…”

: “Agh! Why was that so painful!? It felt like I was being stabbed! …wait.. you don’t think… I do feel a bit strange. I can’t really tell where my body ends and the suit begins. Do you think…”

: There was exactly one thing Baldur’s Gate 3 did right with dialog, and that was allowing you to start attacking from any choice.

: “I think I can really feel it. I think this is me. Hahaha. That’s great! It’s my dream. I… I feel powerful.. I feel.. hungry.”

: Louis is an extremely straightforward fight. He’s weak to crushing and has 320 HP. The only reason you’d want to bother killing him is if you’re using Joel.

: If you kill him, his body parts split off and you have to hunt them down to get his fursuit. The fursuit sucks for everyone who isn’t Joel - it boosts attack and defense at the cost of stamina.

: If I was writing this, I would have had Louis either not mutate at all because the Visitor sees him and goes “Nah, fuck that” or have him mutate into a different furry species he hates.

: We can raid his fridge and take his money and garbage. There are some forks on the table to the left that are kinda useless at this point.

: This room is another optional thing that has a character who is Louis, But Better.

: This room has a second wrapped present and a chocolate bar. I’m going to reload this present a few times because I want an explosive.

: I know he’s a mutant under that, but I want to hug him.

: None of the dialog choices here matter, except for Attack and Run.

: Pierre is one of the only characters to have different dialog sprites like this.

: “I was starting to think you might be mute! That said, I didn’t understand a single word. That was more of a terrified scream. Maybe we should do charades?”

: “…No, still not understanding a word. Oh my! You look like you’ve seen a ghost. You’re as white as a sheet. Come now, that’s MY thing! Hee hee! Get a red nose from a drink or two and I’ll be out of a job!”

: “Well then, my speechless colleague… what’s your name? Can you give me that, at least?”

: “Did you say Sam? I could barely make it out. Okay! We’re going somewhere. We got a name! Pleased to meet you, Sam! This has gone off to a rocky start, but we can pull through! I’ll get a smile out of you, I swear! Clown’s honor!”

: “…Now hang on.. that name sounds familiar. Do I know you from somewhere? It’ll come back to me, I’m sure. Can I help you, Sam?”

: At this point, Sam will run away no matter what we pick. Pierre has a sidequest that happens over four days which requires you to come back and visit him.

: As soon as I finish with Pierre, Sam ran face first into the Shadow. We only need to find it one more time after this, and we need an item from it for the basement.

: The robe shakes and trembles. Something moves beneath it.

: It opens.. a small hand emerges from the interior of the robe, clutching a small lump of flesh. The pale, clammy hand stretches unnaturally, reaching towards you. It clutches the fleshy lump. It seems like this is a gift.

: We get the option to refuse, but we don’t want to do that.

: It seems happy that you accepted it. The long, emaciated arm retracts back into its robe.

: We have enough friendship with the Shadow that we can simply say “Thank you” and move on. If you didn’t give it the muffin on the first meeting, you might need to give it a random item.

: It appears to be happy about this. It glides back into the dark, until not even its eerie red eyes are visible.

: This is the room I came here for.

: This is Kaeley. If you talk to her, she’ll tell you she got mutated trying to lockpick the bathroom door.

: She runs a minigame where you can use small keys to get through locks that guard items, and also sells keys. The keys go up in price every time you buy one, but go down one step in price every day.

: We’re going to buy two keys. One is for a door in the basement, the second is for Lyle’s safe.

: Before we go get the basement key again, I’m going to stop on Floor 1 and get some items. The first one is in the plant apartment, which is across the hall from the Rat Freak.

: There’s only one unlocked door in the plant apartment that leads to a room with two perfectly normal Canadian plants in it.

: The Moss Freak is weak to fire and acid, and we’ve got that.

: It drops the Mossy Hammer, which is one of the best melee weapons in the game.

: The Mossy Hammer has a 15% break chance, but if it’s not totally destroyed it will repair itself overnight.

: The upper room has a corpse flower that is absolutely not worth fighting, as well as some money you can easily take without fighting it. You can unlock a shortcut back to the first room from here.

: The lower room has $20 in a drawer and this car key. We’ll take this for later.

: Off-screen, I made an herbicide. Let’s open this apartment up.

: We can’t seemingly do anything in here, even though this is supposedly Sybil’s apartment.

: That’s a lot of ordnance for a single lady. I like it.

: What we can do is take 12 shotgun shells, a grenade, and a pistol magazine.

: I go back and save one last time, and Sam has some paranoid thoughts about Pierre.

: The basement now has a boss sitting in front of it. If you get here fast enough (by which I mean ignoring Ernest) you could get into the basement without fighting him.

: Crawler’s really not that dangerous, especially when Leigh gets two crits for 270 damage out of Crawler’s 400 HP.

: Now we’re in the basement. The door on the left has a boss behind it that I’m not going to fight just yet. On Cursed, you have to fight it to progress.

: The door on the right is where the Uranus Disc would be if we were on Cursed, and would require fighting a bunch of enemies to get to.

: Down further, we have the security room, which is locked behind a planet puzzle. This is what I was talking about when I said you can use the void disc to speedrun.

: If you still have the void disc, you can skip a couple of areas and get in here earlier. The puzzle is that you need the two sides to equal each other.

: This door is the only one that isn’t locked. If you don’t have any bandages, you’ll want to go up to the apartment on the right and get some from the bathroom (assuming you’re on Survivor, the bathroom is locked on Cursed).

: If you look closely near the bottom of the screen, you can see Steve. Steve is a perfectly normal Canadian silverfish who will attack unless he’s given bandages to eat.

: Steve is fairly easy to juke. He has a roll of duct tape, which can repair any damaged weapon.

: Down here are three doors. The one on the right needs a disc from the frozen apartment to open and only has a boss behind it.

: The middle door has curative items and a ring in it.

: The Lapis Band is useful if you plan on clearing out the plant apartment, because it prevents poison.

: The door on the left needs the Pluto Disc to open.

: On the right is the Claymore. The Claymore is INCREDIBLY good, and is what Papineau will be using once the Mossy Hammer is depleted.

: The safe on the left is locked by a five-digit code. The only way to get that code is finishing the crossword book. All it gives you is a boss fight and a joke ending.

: We’ll dash down here while Steve is occupied.

: Now we’re in the sewers. Like all sewer levels ever made, the sewers suck and are a huge maze. Let me post the map.

: The sewer has two very difficult optional bosses, the Furnace and the Boiler Beast. The Boiler Beast isn’t worth fighting - it’s meant to be this game’s Mr. X or Nemesis.

: There’s an optional sidequest here as well that we’ll do because it’ll let us clear out most of the items that are down here.

: We’re going to start by going right, and then through this door. We have to loop through the sewers twice.

: We walk by a Pipe Man, who we don’t want to bother killing.

: There’s a waterfall to the left. Waterfalls are one-way passages.

: Next up is this room, which is full of Pipe Snakes. I’d recommend killing these, but I don’t wind up doing it on this run.

: In the next room, we find a giant tick on a pipe. These ticks need to be killed to fight the Furnace, which I might do in a later update because we have the 8-Ball.

: While I was taking that last screenshot, I got ambushed by a Floating Corpse. These have 320 HP and are not worth fighting.

: They resist piercing and slashing, and are only weak to damage types we don’t currently have. They attack by blinding everyone.

: If we keep going, we run into this thing standing on a platform.

: “…hey… you.. Is someone there? I… have you seen my dog, Roxie? I.. I need her. I l-lost her. She’s my seeing-eye dog. She was attacked… please help me find Roxie!”

: There is a 110% chance that dog is either meat paste or a boss fight.

: “What does she look like?”

: “She’s a German Shepherd, but.. I know she changed. She must have changed like me. I don’t know what became of her!”

: “I could barely see anything before, but I can’t see anything at all now. I have no idea what she turned into. But I know she’s still my friend. She sounded scary. She was protecting me and I’m so proud of her. She sounded BADASS!”

: “She must have BIG claws and TEETH! Maybe FOUR HEADS. She sounds SO cool. Like a DRAGON or something. I think have a seeing-eye DRAGON. How cool is that?”

: I can’t believe his dog is ex-yakuza.

: “How do I show her I’m a friend?”

: “She should be looking for help. But.. maybe she’s hurt. Maybe she’s very scared. Let me think. Oh, I have a chew toy of hers. I bet if you show her this, she’ll trust you!”

: The centipede kid is part of the sidequest. To continue it, we need to head north from where he is.

: This room has some decent equipment - the hard hat is a pretty decent helmet that blocks crushing damage, and the boots protect against damage floors.

: “My name’s David and I’m a teacher. I was taking students to the museum.. when everything happened. Things got chaotic and, well, we ended up here. There are monsters everywhere and the kids are gone!”

: “They’re special needs students. Even in normal times they’re vulnerable… please, if you’ve seen any of them..”

: “What happened?”

: “We were taking the bus for a field trip to see some museums. The kids love those.. but during the trip, something happened. Screams everywhere. Chaos.”

: “The streets opened up under the bus. It happened so fast. I don’t know how else to describe it. Be careful. The thing that the driver became… he lost his mind completely.”

: “Can’t you look for them?”

: “They… they run away when they see me. They think I want to hurt them. Something terrible’s happened to me. I don’t understand.”

: “How do I recognize them?”

: “Okay, let’s see… Oliver is non-verbal, but you’ll always find him drawing with crayons. He opens up if you talk about his drawings.”

: “Victor and Florence are probably glued to their game system. I don’t understand these things. I can never get Victor to look away from that screen.”

: “Coralie has been wearing her halloween costume for a full year. She went as a cosmonaut. She’s probably with Thomas. They’re always bickering.”

: “Zachary will be with his seeing-eye dog, Roxie. They’re never apart. Alice has a little crown and fairy wand with her. And Tristan is probably up to no good somewhere. A little trickster, that one.”

: If you look behind David, you can see where he webbed the bus to stop it crashing. Let’s go find those kids.

: We could backtrack from where we found Zachary, but we need to do something up here that will make things.. annoying.

: Before that, we can go two rooms to the left and find one of the kids next to a barred exit.

: “Heya! Ever seen a fairy before? Now you have! Hee hee hee!”

: “Hello, little fairy!”

: “Hello! Hee hee hee! What do you want, human? I’m all outta fairy dust.. but I could use my fairy magic if you like!”

: “David is worried.”

: “David?! But I thought.. I don’t know you! Is this a goblin trick?! Maybe the goblins sent you… you don’t even know my name! I can’t trust strangers like that.”

: She’s got the fairy wand, so this has to be Alice.

: “Ugh.. yeah. That’s my OLD name. Now they call me Princess Mistblossom! Okay. FINE. I’ll go back to David. But! Fairies DON’T do homework.”

: If we go to the right from Alice, we find this lever. This lever unleashes Mr. X.

: Once you go near it, the bars raise and you need to pull the lever to get out.

: This is the Boiler Beast. It can outrun you and follows your path through the sewer. It can also randomly appear in doorways.

: From here, we run down the waterfall and immediately head south.

: This leads us to some VERY powerful items.

: That has to be the dog, right? They don’t put leashes on their kids in Canada anymore.

: We get a Super Explosive, which does 160 blast damage to all enemies. This will be VERY useful against a boss we’ll see next update.

: The thing across from it is a Firebomb, which is made using gasoline. Firebombs do 100 fire damage and cause burning.

: Above the explosive is a First Aid Spray, which heals the entire party for 40% of their max HP. We’ll hold on to that. The red bottle is a Stimulant, which is this game’s Megalixir. It restores 50% HP and stamina and revives.

: As we try to leave, we get accosted by a bus driver.

: The bus driver can bite five times a turn, and can also constrict. It has no weaknesses, but we can dump bleeding, acid burn, and stun on it to make it easy.

: On the way out, I very nearly get into a fight with the Boiler Beast.

: We’re now in the main room where the Furnace is. It’s frozen because of the ticks, and I don’t plan on waking it up yet.

: If we head down from there, there’s two rooms that the Boiler Beast can’t follow you into.

: The first has some molotovs and another tick. We’ll need these.

: Oh! A sewer fridge! I heard about this - they have this law in Canada that says they need one fridge per mile of sewer in case of an emergency when fighting sewer mutants.

: I don’t think that’s a law in Canada. Or anywhere else.

: “No! The shoes are bad. Dude. The shoes are a trap. You hit the spikes if you have 'em.”

: “Hello?”

: “My brother can do it with the shoes. I saw him do it.”

: “Your brother’s a liar. He told me you can kill the boss with a flying saucer. He lied about that.”

: “Hey. Do you hear me?”

: “My brother can beat this game with his eyes closed, dude. He’s really good.”

: “Yeah, yeah I’m suuuuure he did. I’m suuuure he did. That’s what you call SAR-CASM by the way.”

: “The shoes are fine, you just need to crouch-jump.”

: “Crouch-jump? What the hell? You can’t do that.”

: “Yeah! That’s it! You gotta crouch-jump!”

: This kid should be glad this apparently takes place in the 2020s, otherwise he’d never survive TF2.

: “You got it! YEAH! Okay!”

: “Yeah, alright. Okay, I got a bit of time before the next tough bit. What’s up? Is this urgent?”

: One of the party members you can only get as a door encounter has some funny dialog with these kids, but we don’t have him.

: “David is worried.”

: “Ugh. He’s not my dad.”

: “He looked pretty scary. He’s like a big spider now. And the driver is this big monster too.”

: “You sound insane, dude. What are you even talking about?”

: “He was like… spinning a web, and he caught the bus in mid air.. it was kinda dope.”

: These two have to be Victor and Florence.

: We keep going to the left, and dodge some more enemies.

: Wait, what? We didn’t hear about a Charlie.

: This kid doesn’t talk much, but we know by process of elimination that they’re not Roxie, they’re not Alice, they’re not Victor, and Oliver is totally non-verbal so they can’t be Oliver.

: The joke is that Charlie is some random Canadian alligator that Tristan is passing off as a student.

: We find a padded jacket, which provides 50% crushing resistance and 20% cold resistance. Next to it is a bandage box, which we take now that we never need to go past Steve again.

: The exit is just past Tristan’s room. We could take it now, but let’s finish saving the kids.

: West of the Furnace is another boss.

: That’s a Montreal Canadiens away jersey.

: This is the Enforcer. He’s very weak to fire. Enforcers are the guys in hockey who exist to get into fights and get put in the penalty box.

: Put up Nitro Boost and toss the molotovs you found earlier at him.

: Sam almost dies, but that’s another boss down. There’s not really much of a reason to not just run from the Enforcer given that we have no reason to ever come back here.

: He drops a hockey stick, which has the same stats as the jawbone club but without the accuracy penalty or stun chance.

: This kid has no dialog at all, and will only point to drawings.

: We can ask him about his drawings, and then have to guess his name. This one should be obvious.

: From Oliver’s room, we head through the only door to this room, which has a fire axe in it. The fire axe is slightly stronger than the hockey stick.

: That room leads to a second lever.

: Going north from the Furnace brings us to our last group of kids. These two doors are barred unless you hit that second lever.

: She’s kinda cute.

: “And smelly too. Eugh!”

: “You know where the school is?”

: “David is worried.”

: “Is he okay…? Does he eat bugs now…?”

: “I think it’s a trick. The spider ate David and now, it wants to eat us!”

: By process of elimination, these two must be Thomas and Coralie.

: “You’re such a good girl! You’re not hurt, right? Okay! Phew! I’m so relieved! Okay! I’ll go back to my teacher now. Thank you so much!”

: If we go back to David’s room, all of the kids are here.

: David gives us two stimulants and an elixir, which is a nice addition to all of the other items we picked up. Now that we’re done here, we can make for the exit.

: The sewers exit to a camp of normal, average Canadians who aren’t hostile. The mushrooms are the entrance to an area we’ll do next update.

: Musette is the camp’s leader. She’s a retired nurse, and will offer you soup once a day that restores HP and stamina.

: Just north of her is Placide, who is the reason Sam has hot water.

: Placide can see through all of the water outlets, and is the first way you can know this game takes place in Montreal - he’ll say that he’s drawing water from the St. Lawrence river.

: He got mutated when his apprentices attacked him, and then fused with the furnace.

: There are three students here who will play poker with you for pennies.

: This is another way you can know where the game takes place. CEGEPs are a thing unique to Quebec - they’re two-year programs that give a degree needed to enter a four-year college program.

: North of the camp is this room, which has a bunch of junk in it and an NPC who only matters if you’re trying to kill the Furnace.

: The next room leads to the other half of the basement, and our final astronomer. By the way, if you look up and to the left of Audrey, you can see a superboss.

: Which attacks as I try to talk to the astronomer. We stand no chance against this thing: it resists ALL physical damage and is weak only to fire damage.

: “I’m lookin’ for somethin’, but it’s not really safe. Whatcha doin’ down here?”

: “Looking for supplies.”

: Beryl gives us a free tonic.

: “Tell me about the astronomers.”

: “We’re amateur astronomers, I guess. There’s only four of us now.. we’re gatherin’ records, pictures, anything of the Visitor, to try and make meaningful contact with it.”

: “Studyin’ the Visitor is incredibly dangerous. We’ve lost a few good people already. God forbid Jasper is taken from us as well…”

: “Meaningful contact?”

: “We’re hoping we can establish contact in some way so we can like.. talk to it. Have a chat. That’s what this ritual business is all about.”

: “Maybe we can kill it.”

: “Hah. Sure, you’ll just need a big gun. Good luck!”

: Beryl wants a recording of the Visitor from the building’s security cameras - except most of them are interior cameras, so someone would need to verify which one is the correct channel.

: This part is a little bit of a plot hole because of something Lyle is about to tell us. Speaking of which, let’s go meet Lyle and get our photo.

: First we’ll unlock this shortcut.

: “You’re back! Oh, hey! I d-developed your photo! Here! Don’t look at it! I was fine.. I looked at the thing b-before. There isn’t much else it can do to m-me!”

: If you kiss Lyle a second time, you recruit him as a party member. He’s okay if you’re not using Audrey for some reason, but his skill set largely overlaps hers.

: If you look while kissing him, you see his true form and have to kill him.

: We can give the photograph to Aster - this is the offering he wants. When this game launched, I think you had to give all the offerings to Jasper and couldn’t switch them out if you had the wrong one.

: We can recruit Aster now, and I will just to show him off. He doesn’t count as a party member for score purposes and won’t join you for the final boss fight.

: If we go back to the apartment.. what the fuck is Lyle doing here?

: I can’t show it because it’s too late for Sam to leave the apartment again, but if you check the plant outside, Sam’s spare key will be there.

: Nothing left to do but water Sam’s plant (which won’t talk to him because he refused to bring it to the light) and go to bed.

The nightmares are back. Uncannily human faces twisted into a sad frown or happy grin. Like a mockery of human emotion. Or an incompetent attempt at mimicking them. They start harmless, but slowly turn worse. Jovial laughter grows into a mad cackle. Good natured pranks turn cruel and heartless.

Before long, you’re chased down impossible corridors with blaring circus music. Floors, walls, and ceilings are covered in the screaming faces of clowns biting at your toes. You escape the madhouse and find yourself safely back home… but everyone now wears the same clown makeup. Everyone speaks with that mad cackle.

Your family. Your friends. The entire world. They all have the same face. A face just like Pierre’s. You stumble into your bathroom and approach the mirror. You need to see. You NEED to see. The bathroom is dark. You stand in front of the mirror. Your eyes slowly adjust as you begin to take in your features..

You wake up in a cold sweat. For a moment, you think you see the pale makeup of a clown in the darkness of your room. Your heart skips a beat. No. Just a trick of the light on some clothes. You try to go back to sleep, but end up spending the rest of the night wide awake.

: At least Spine didn’t show up. She will - for some reason, having Lyle around doesn’t cause her to go away.

: Next time, we’ll go pay a visit to the painter on the first floor. We’ll also do the other half of the basement, which will bring us very close to the end of this route.

: Here’s a rough estimate of our score, not counting the multiplier.

Bosses: 100 points each

• Grinning Beast
• Stargazer
• Rat King
• Rat Chimera
• Crawler
• Sewer Beast
• Enforcer

Total: 700 points

Party Members: 200 points each

• Joel
• Leigh
• Papineau

Total: 600 points

Party Members (Not Counted for Points)

• Aster
• Ernest
• Lyle