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.

Summary

Summary

[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

[Timrod]

Summary

: It’s Day 5, and there’s another message on Leigh’s phone.

Sis, where are you? Something’s wrong with Dad. He went out to look for you, but you weren’t at your apartment. He’s sick, and we’re getting extremely worried. It was stupid of him to leave, but we haven’t heard from you in days. He’s not coherent anymore, and his body is changing in ways that shouldn’t be medically possible.

It’s been days, Sis. Please send anything. A text, a call. We are sorry about what we said, and know that we will always support you. Let us know you’re okay. We love you.

: If we go to Sam’s bathroom and try to brush his teeth, we get this scene.

Although you wouldn’t call yourself a model citizen, you’d never stolen anything before. That’s changed. You walk into peoples’ homes and take things from their shelves. You take supplies, valuables, medicine from their cabinets. You even take valueless keepsakes. You look at yourself in the mirror and see a thief. What happened?

: The “valueless keepsakes” part I’m pretty sure is from taking the drawings in the rat baby’s room, which are worthless. This part honestly seems kinda dumb to me.

: “The outside happened.”

: “It’s regrettable, but necessary.”

That’s the way the world is now. You have to take from others to survive. You might wish it was another way, but it’s not. And that makes you a thief. What is this? Why are you doing this? Stop it. You shake your head and snap back to reality.

: As far as I know, that scene has no bearing on anything. It doesn’t really work when most of the people we’re stealing from are effectively dead.

: I’ve also never heard anyone argue that Leon Kennedy is a thief for stealing all those treasures in Resident Evil 4.

: If anything, I could maybe see the argument of “Are we killing people who could potentially be saved?” applying, but even then it’s like feeling bad for the lickers in Resident Evil.

: We’ve gotten enough roaches that they’ve started giving us messages.

The paper is gnawed into a rough rectangle. Letters scrawled by tiny pincers form a message. The writing is hard to parse, like the scribbles of a child. “HELLO HI US WANT LIVE HERE OK?”

: As soon as we leave Sam’s apartment, the Shadow approaches us. You can also see that Joel’s apartment has mutated into a mouth.

: The Shadow leaves us a rose, which is a critical item for getting one of the esoteric bullshit endings. In fact, we have only two days to get one of the items for that.

: Down the hall, this door is now open and there’s a perfectly normal Canadian taxidermist sitting outside. We’ll kill them later.

: Instead, we’ll go to the first floor and visit Frederic.

: Frederic is a reference to a Belgian comic called Philemon, which is drawn by an artist with a really long name who shortens it to just “Fred”.

: It’s kind of funny how I LPed the game with Philemon in it, and now years later I’m LPing a different game that also has Philemon in it.

: Remember kids, always punch him.

: “OH! Hey. Hi. Sorry. I need help. I feel like I’m going mad.. this is going to sound crazy, I know.. but ever since I made THAT painting, my life has been turned upside down.”

: And now he’s moving to Bel-Air.

: “My paintings have come to life. I made a series of portraits, but they escaped their canvasses. Some are prowling about in my home, and a few others escaped out into the hall.”

: “They are plotting something. I KNOW they are. I can hear their thoughts in my head. It’s driving me insane. Here are my keys. You should have access to most of my home with these.”

: “Did you look outside?”

: “Not since this started, but I did look outside a few days before. It’s when I made.. that painting. Something about the sky that night felt compelling.”

: “It’s just a painting of the sky?”

: “Yes. A painting of the evening sky. Nothing more! At least, that’s what I thought. But, later that day, looking at it again, something wasn’t right.”

: He saw the visitor and didn’t mutate?

: “I was having coffee with my friend Fabrice and asked him to take a look.”

: “What did Fabrice see?”

: “I still don’t know. When Fabrice looked at it, he made this horrible noise. He looked horrified. I looked back at the painting, but I still don’t see it.”

: “As I stared at the painting, I heard Fabrice run out the door. He sounded howling mad! Snarling like a beast.. I haven’t seen him since.”

: I think we splattered his brain all over the wall outside and stole his crown. Maybe we should feel bad about that. We shouldn’t.

: “Where is the painting?”

: “It’s in my workshop. Somewhere at the back. Still wet, I imagine. It hurts my head when I look at it, so I turned all the lights off.”

: He’s totally going to attack us.

: “About the portraits…”

: “I painted these portraits, and they all came to life. Some of them got paint brushes and made even more paintings. There were 9 of them in total.”

: “I know one of them is looking at me right now I see myself out of its eyes. It’s hiding in my fridge. Go see for yourself! But be careful, it’s dangerous.”

: Fred’s apartment is a moral conundrum of sorts. There are ten Freds - nine paintings plus the original. Each Fred will give you a reward if you kill all of the other Freds.

: If this Fred we’re talking to is the last one standing, he gives you a paint palette that goes in the ranged slot. It decreases attack but gives you a 5% chance of inflicting a bunch of different status effects (for a total of 35% to inflict an effect).

: This is Wriggly Fred. I wish you could get the reward for killing all the other Freds without killing him, because he’s the best Fred but offers one of the worst rewards.

: If Wriggly Fred is the last one standing, he gives you the Fred Ring and moves into Sam’s apartment, where he helps you cook.

: “Have you seen my ring? That’s the real Fred ring. It has a red gem on it. RED! His wrong is WRONG. WRONG COLOR! And-And-andan..d..”

: That’s definitely the real one.

: Looks like every Fred I’ve ever met.

: “What do you think?! You believe Fred, right?”

: “Got an awful lot of legs for a Fred.”

: This is true. I know a Fred, and he has fewer legs. I think. He could be a centipede thing and I just had no idea.

: “No! This is normal for Fred around here. We use these to walk. Around. With no legs we fall on the ground like a worm. Yes? You know this. We all know this, you are being a silly boy.”

: “I’m not the real Fred. Got too many bits. Fraudulent Fred. Sorry for lying. But! BUT! What if you kill other Freds anyway? For me???”

: “I’m not the real Fred, but if the other Freds are gone, I can be the real Fred then! The final Fred.. fake it till you make it! It’s what Fred always said. I’m a better Fred, new and improved.”

: I really wish there was a way to save Wriggly Fred - it could be that bringing him far enough from the real one makes his consciousness split or something.

: Instead, we’re killing him.

: Wriggly Fred is a non-threat.

: We want to go this way to get a clue about something later.

: There’s a green enemy here called a Paintling. They’re part of one of the Freds, and have to be killed to kill that Fred for good.

: They can poison on hit, which is why we have the Lapis Band. Antidotes are pretty rare in this game.

: We can see a blob of ooze guarding a hat. The hat is a trap.

: In the same room, just off-screen to the north, is a dresser with Scared Fred in it.

: If Scared Fred is the last one standing, he gives you the Coward Boots, which boost your chances of running from battle. We kill him just like Wriggly.

: The room to the right of the entrance has nine paintings, and two of them are restored.

: We can take Fred’s beer stein and his “vintage game console” to sell.

: We also know that the easel has blue paint on it, and that the paint is fresh. This is how you’re meant to find the painting. On Cursed, its location is randomized. On Survivor, it isn’t.

: To get the painting, we need to kill a minimum of three Freds and talk to the Fred in the entrance.

: If we go into the bathroom (the lower door on the right), we run into Tumor Fred.

: Tumor Fred doesn’t talk and can’t attack you. He regenerates HP every turn unless he is acid burned.

: If Tumor Fred is the last Fred standing, he gives you three Tumor Lumps. Tumor Lumps are weak grenades that do flesh damage, which is one of the only ways to do flesh damage at all. They multiply every night, so you can get a lot of them if you do this early.

: Instead, we’re going to kill him.

: Next up is the door in the back. This leads to Fred’s studio.

: Lurking back here is Shadow Fred. Shadow Fred doesn’t have a reward for being the last one standing, and is always hostile. Leigh kills him in one hit.

: Far in the back is a game cartridge. This one kinda sucks, but you use it to unlock the superboss in the Meat World version of Sam’s apartment.

: There’s a door here the key won’t open.

: I bet that’s where the real one is.

: On Survivor, this painting is the correct one. We’ll come back for it in a minute.

: To the left is a door with another Fred and a paintling.

: This is Fred Who Bites. If he’s the last one standing, he gives you the Rage Armor, which boosts attack by 50% and gives you a chance to counterattack when attacked at the cost of being in rage (party member can only physically attack).

: We’ll kill him instead.

: Two hits and he’s gone.

: On the right side of that last hallway is what we actually came here for. The table has a Hunting Shotgun, as well as a bunch of shotgun shells.

: This is Godhead Fred. Godhead Fred has two rewards depending on how you talk to him. I’m not going to do his whole repeating letter thing.

: “WE HAVE TRANSCENDED MORTAL FORM. WE HAVE A QUEST FOR THEE. TERRIBLE DEMONS HAVE GATHERED. THERE ARE NINE. THEY MUST BE SLAIN. PERFORM THIS TASK, AND WE SHALL GRANT YOU A BOON.”

: “WE HAVE SPOKEN. DOST THOU ACCEPT THY QUEST?”

: If you accept, and Godhead Fred is the last one standing, he gives you a Strange Feather, which increases HP and Stamina by 5 and gives 5 Luck. It’s a pretty good reward.

: What if you don’t?

: “You’re just a painting.”

: "Okay. I’m stopping the god schtick. Just don’t tell anyone, alright? The scam is all I got. I mean, look at me. I’m a gatdamn freak. I can’t even put clothes on.

: Calling him out gets you an achievement and changes the reward to $400. Godhead Fred is easily the second best Fred after Wriggly Fred.

: You can ask him a couple of questions, including if he’s the real Fred.

: I saw this, immediately clicked on my Discord, and went “Salty Vanilla, I need my bat as an angel god thing.”

: Godhead Fred dies. I really wish there was a way to save him and Wriggly Fred.

: There’s one other door from the main room we haven’t looked at - it’s the upper one on the right side. This leads to Bright Fred. DO NOT KILL BRIGHT FRED.

: Bright Fred has the best reward of all the Freds. He will heal your entire party once a day - the amount increases with every Fred you kill until it hits a max of 225.

: If he is the last Fred, Bright Fred gives you a Medic in a Jar, which restores 50% HP to everyone.

: Once you kill a certain number of Freds, the Fred in the entrance will give you items. Turpentine is an acid grenade that all the Freds are weak to.

: We’ll take that painting and head to the basement. The remaining Freds will wait for another day. We have a boss gauntlet to do.

: If we go left of where we met Beryl yesterday, we run into the parking garage.

: Near the door, one of the stacks of tires comes alive and attacks. It dies quickly.

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: There’s an enemy hidden in these traffic cones, so we’ll walk past it and head down.

: We’ll dodge this car, which doesn’t count as a boss. We only get into a fight if it hits Sam.

: Down here is the reason we got that car key from the plant apartment. As it turns out, on my second run the Moss Freak didn’t drop the Mossy Hammer and I didn’t realize.

: The car has a double-barrel shotgun and a bunch of shells in it. Putting this on Leigh would be a good idea, but I don’t do it.

: This hole in the wall will be important tomorrow if you plan on getting one of the esoteric bullshit endings.

: There’s a door here we definitely want to use.

: This is Stuart. He was originally going to be a party member until he was cut.

: If you have Audrey with you, he sells parts for her.

: At a minimum, we want the Coffee Unit and the Carbonator. I wind up buying everything, which may cause a bit of an issue when we go to kill Henderson.

: The Coffee Unit unlocks Burning Shot, one of the only sources of fire damage that aren’t a molotov or firebomb. The Carbonator instead unlocks Explosive Shot, which does blast damage.

: The Quad Wheels are for a gimmick build involving boosting Audrey’s agility. They suck. The Spiked Bumper raises her attack and makes her counterattack, so we’ll take that instead.

: To the left of Stuart is this hole. The hole is part of one of the bullshit endings, and is why we needed that rose from the Shadow.

: The game will ask us twice if we want to jump down. Do it.

The ground oscillates like a rolling sea of slick muscle and sinew. Your arm is stuck inside one of many large rubbery tubes that suck air in and out. There’s a mucus-y ‘pop’ when you pull it out. As you struggle to find your footing on the shifting mass, you dig your knee into a large eyeball under you. It winces in pain and shuts tight.

You feel movement near you, though you can barely see anything. You think Charan is offering you a hand to shake. The handshake is bizarre. The enormous, fleshy limb you grasp is cold, with two inch-thick digits. It feels like you’re holding a piece of rotten steak.

Charan is only holding its ‘hand’ up for you to shake. The motion is entirely from you. You’re not sure if his anatomy is too clumsy to grasp your hand, or if it’s just scared of hurting you. Is this even a hand you’re holding, or a foot? This was by far the worst handshake you’ve ever experienced. You would not give this thing a job. With a handshake like that, you would take a job away from it if you could.

: That’s harsh.

: “Hellol Nice to meet you, Sam!”

: Charan is a Version 2.0 addition, and according to the Steam achievement stats, fewer than 5% of people have ever talked to him.

: “We can have a chat while you’re here. I don’t get to talk to people very much. Folks tend to flee when they see me approach. It’s.. understandable.”

You feel the gaze of hundreds of eyes. The breathing tubes seem to line the creature’s back like a strange dorsal fin.

: “I can help you climb up whenever you like. Just ask. I’ll be moving on from here in a few days. I’ve just been resting in this hideout for a while. It might be difficult for you to get back out when I’m gone. I mean, maybe there’s a way out that I’m blocking. I do take up a lot of space.”

: Charan is blocking an optional boss guarding one of the things we’d need for the “Mask” ending. Let me briefly explain how that works.

: For the Mask ending, you need to find four “Strange Offerings” that aren’t depictions of the Visitor. Each one is guarded by one of those giant shade enemies.

: The first one we can access is in the pit Charan is blocking. The pit closes on Day 8, and the only way to get in there is to give Charan the rose.

: “Who are you?”

: “Well, I was a librarian. Um. I haven’t figured out what I am now. Can’t really fit into a library anymore.”

: “You could carry the library with you.”

: “Mmh.. Charan, the walking library.. that has a pretty nice ring to it.”

: “What happened to you?”

: “I grew. I haven’t finished growing, even. I.. think I grow about fifteen meters every hour. It was very overwhelming at first, but a few thousand legs are a drop in the bucket.”

: “What’s the outside like?”

: “It’s very pretty, but horrifying too. And scary. It’s kind of a nightmare. There is so much suffering everywhere, it makes your head spin when you stop to think about it.”

: “We’re surrounded by the unthinkable. And some of us have become unthinkable, ourselves. I never thought I’d see the world end like this. I see about a thousand horrible things that break my heart as we speak. I’m trying to help where I can, but.. it’s a lot. You know?”

: “Tell me about your boyfriend.”

: “Well… he’s funny. And charming. Has a temper. He likes speculative fiction and plays volleyball.. oh! And he’s avoided exposure so far, so he’s still fully human. So he’s been holed up inside since this whole thing started. We don’t want to risk exposure.”

: “I feel so powerless! We don’t want him to risk exposure, but also, I am way too big to fit inside his tiny apartment.”

: Let’s show him the rose.

: “…whoa. That rose is beautiful. It’s real?! How did you get a flower like that? All the vegetation outside is mutated and crazy. There isn’t a single normal flower around. This is a perfect rose! Would you really let me have this?!”

: “Incredible. Thank you so much. I don’t know what I could give you in return, but I will remember this! I think I’ll leave a little early so I can give this to him. It might start wilting soon. Need to be quick about it. Yes, I’ll leave tomorrow.”

: This is why you want to talk to Charan and do the Shadow sidequest. The Azure Greatsword is one of the best weapons in the game.

: Like the regular Greatsword, it has multiple break states and has safe hits on each one. Judging by the description, it sounds like it’s probably a reference to the Moonlight Greatsword from the Souls games.

: If we keep going north from Stuart’s room, we run into the Cop Car. It does count as a boss, but we’re not fighting it.

: That’s because just north of it is a SWAT van, which we’re going to fight instead.

: The SWAT Truck is a difficult fight.. unless you have that super explosive from the sewer.

: The main body of the truck only has 600 HP, but…

: After one turn, it lets out its three tongues. The protestor on the right is unfortunately beyond help.

: Papineau cleaves with the Azure Greatsword and does a shitload of damage. The left tongue will block all damage to the main body until it is killed.

: Between Papineau and the Super Explosive, the tongues die off. The main body has max bleed stacks and acid burn, and dies not long thereafter.

: This gets us the Chobham Armor for Audrey, which would be best in slot if not for something the APC in Henderson’s apartment drops. It makes Audrey a super tank with some of the highest possible defense in the game.

: At the far north of the garage, we can walk through the flesh spaghetti to find some items.

: There’s a flamethrower and some gasoline here. We want both, but taking them will make that red car come alive. The car can be dodged, but we’ll kill it instead.

: This is the Hellride. It’s weak to fire and acid.

: Oh sure, let me just get in my Hell Car and drive right out of Hell.

: After a few turns, the Hellride eats you. This is where the fight really begins.

: We now need to kill the commuters inside, who are weak to bullet damage. They only have a few hundred HP.

: We then need to fight the Steering Wheel, Rearview Mirror, and Windshield Wiper. They also have a few hundred HP each, but Papineau’s cleave attack and Sam’s shotgun kill them quickly.

: Once they’re dead, we have only a few turns to kill the Hell Mouth, which has around 400 HP.

: The Hell Mouth hurts a lot, but it dies just the same.

: It gives you five Tonics, which help with all the damage it does.

: The Hellride drops Demon Plating for Audrey. I should mention that boss drops for Audrey only happen if she is in the active party when they die.

: It’s funny that they think people would drive 90s-looking sedans in Hell. I drive an Escalade.

: If you go to the right of the Hellride, there’s a hidden passage. This only really applies to the Unity ending.

: This is the Hellsword. The Hellsword is the best weapon in the game.

: It does a ton of damage, but reduces max HP and stamina. There’s an optional boss that isn’t the Furnace I might use this against.

: Across from where Hellride was is the end of the parking garage.

: Let’s ignore that giant tongue grabbing a guy from above.

: “Gaston? Gaston! Is that you? It’s me, Papineau! We’re coming for you!”

: “We’ll find a way up there, Gaston! Don’t worry!”

: South of Gaston is this door. Keep this door in mind. The door to the right is a shortcut that comes out near where the SWAT Truck was, which is why we took it out.

: The elevator is down here, and we can go right inside. I’m sure nothing bad will…

: Oh.

: The fourth floor is a hidden area that you need a “password” to get to. To get it, you’d need to do the pipe sidequest.

: This is the Elevator Thing. It has 1200 HP and no weaknesses.

: It starts by paralyzing Sam before Sam can get Nitro Boost off. That’s not good.

: There’s elevator music playing in the background that gets slower and warped with each passing turn. On turn 4, the elevator will crash.

: Everyone needs to guard because the fall can instakill Sam.

: Not that it helps much, because the Elevator Thing kills him anyway.

: The fight lasts long enough that Leigh gets knocked out of Grinning Beast, but the Elevator Thing is bleeding and has acid on it.

: Leigh gets her final skill. Remember how she could “bite again and again” when we fought her? She can do that to enemies now.

: To save Gaston, we need to head to the ground floor. To the south is a shortcut that allows you to get to the main part of the ground floor without using any discs, which will allow us to get a very powerful weapon.

: We unlock everything and find some fridges. The south door is the back door to Mutt’s - you can kill Mutt and take all his stuff for free if you want.

: If we head north from the elevator, we find Gaston. There are two ways to fight this upcoming boss. You can fight it here, or you can go back to the basement and fight it down there.

: Fighting the basement version doesn’t count for ranking points.

: This is the Garbage Worm. It has 1400 HP, and like the Elevator Thing has no weaknesses.

: It has a multi-hit attack that causes bleeding, but because Audrey has the Spiked Bumper on, she’s counterattacking every hit.

: We get bad RNG and Leigh attacks Papineau.

: Gaston will mutate as the fight goes on. After four turns, he starts attacking.

: He’s one turn away from fully mutating when we kill the worm.

: The party is badly injured.

: If you go back down the elevator, Gaston’s key ring is on the edge of the.. I think it’s meant to be a dumpster. This unlocks all the janitor’s closets, and is how you’d get Papineau if he’s in there.

: “This.. this was Gaston’s.. the chief custodian.. tabarnak..”

: We’re going to head back to the apartment and heal as much as possible, because we have a mandatory boss fight that we have to do first thing tomorrow.

: While cooking, we get this guy at the door. You remember how we kept telling the astronomers that we want to kill the Visitor? This guy is the next step in that ending.

: He sells video games. Of these, Octocook is the most important. It unlocks a skill called Octostrike that allows Sam to hit 8 times with his melee weapon.

: We also want to get Massacre Princess. This is the second step in what’s called the “True Final Ending”. We’ll be really short on cash but there are safes we can open and we still haven’t done the taxidermy apartment.

: All the Japanese this guy speaks is hilariously wrong. “Gyakusatsu” is another word for a gyaru.

: He’ll offer us $200 for it. Nope.

: If you know even the barest minimum of Japanese, you know this is wrong. “Neko no Shoben” translates to “Cat Piss”.

: There’s an achievement if you trade for the katana, but we want Massacre Princess.

: The Gamer can show up at random as a door encounter, but given that he showed up on my first playthrough right around this time (one day after telling Beryl you want to kill the Visitor) I think it might be scripted that he’s guaranteed to show up if you’ve done all the steps for the True Final Ending.

: We can also open the janitor closets now, so let’s open the one on Floor 2.

: Inside are some cleaning products, another pair of rubber gloves, a gas mask, and a free herbicide.

: People thought the gas mask protected against something we’ll probably see next update, but it doesn’t.

: We can use the herbicide to open this door in the back of Lyle’s apartment.

: Inside is an enemy I have no intention of fighting and a bunch of raw beef.

: This door is a trap. It leads to Meat World, but you need a key for it. You only get a handful of those, and this entrance is useless.

: Space Truckerz gives Sam a kind of garbage skill.

: What we really came here for is this. If you recruited Lyle and you have three other party members, you can use the tabletop RPG book to play a game with everyone.

: The game takes.. I think six sessions, and you can only play at night. There’s an achievement for starting it and a different one for finishing it.

: My recommendation is that if you want to see it, you can do it while going for the True Final Ending, since beating Massacre Princess takes like a week.

: We finish the night by playing Wizard’s Hell.

: “I don’t get it. What did the wizards do?”

: Here’s an updated score sheet. I realized I forgot a few things last time.

Bosses Defeated: (100 pts)

• Grinning Beast
• Stargazer
• Baby Teeth
• Rat King
• Rat Chimera
• Crawler
• Sewer Beast
• Enforcer
• SWAT Truck
• Hellride
• Elevator Thing
• Garbage Worm

Total: 1200 points

Party Members Recruited: (200 pts)

• Leigh
• Papineau
• Joel
• Audrey

Total: 800 points

Party Members Recruited: (Not Counted)

• Ernest
• Aster
• Lyle

Total: 2000 points

: While I was healing the party, I got a couple of conversations.

You’re not sure, but did Audrey’s paint become just a little bit more red? A can plunks down into her delivery compartment.

: “Hoo-eee! No skin off my back! You gotta do what you gotta do, right Colonel?”

: “That’s awfully forgiving for a guy who almost lost a limb!”

: “Things were different back then. I had to do unpleasant things to survive. I’m sorry that… well…”

: “Aww, don’t sweat it! Hey.. got any beer in there?”

Leigh pauses momentarily as she passes the sleeping Ernest. She turns towards him and stares for.. seconds. Her hand slowly moves toward his neck - hovers just above it. Her eyes glint menacingly.. and then she shakes his shoulder. Ernest leaps off the couch and yelps in surprise.

: “Jeez louise, Lady! You scared the livin’ daylights outta me!”

: “Food is ready.. heh.. heh.. heh…”

: Next time, we’ll go into the basement to solve a power outage before turning our flamethrower on some perfectly normal Canadian mushrooms. We’ll also meet this game’s Ralsei.

[Timrod]

[Timrod]

Summary

: I changed up the end of Day 5 a little. Instead of going for Lyle’s D&D set, we finish Wizard’s Hell.

: And as it turns out, that was the correct thing to do, because it gets us a door encounter I didn’t see on my first playthrough.

: Meet Xaria and Monty. They are a reference to Baldur’s Gate 1. In BG1, one of the first recruitable party members you could come across, even before Jaheira, are an evil wizard named Xzar and his halfling thief buddy Montaron.

: Xzar and Montaron are both working for the Zhentarim and are chaotic and neutral evil, respectively. In BG1, you had to recruit them as a group - if you got rid of one, the other would leave.

: As soon as you let them in, they take over Sam’s bedroom and start blasting music. I should mention that just like Xzar and Montaron, both of them have to be in your party to use either.

All this wizard torturing has awakened a latent skill within. You have learned Painful Stab. You wonder if you can take your Wizard Hell even further. There seems to be no end to the possibilities..

: Painful Stab works as a companion to Nitro Boost. It inflicts the Pain status, which is pretty rare. Pain reduces enemy hit chance by 20% and does 10% of their HP in damage at the end of each of their turns.

: Combined with Nitro Boost and the base 5% evade chance, this gives a total of 55% evasion. If you manage to blind the enemy, that goes up to something like 95%.

: It’s Day 6. We have the final message on Leigh’s phone today.

Nobody’s heard from you in days. Your family has no idea where you are or if you’re okay. You’re not picking up anyone’s calls. I’m coming to your apartment. I know I violated your trust and we haven’t spoken in a month, but I still care deeply. I’m sorry for what I did. If something happened to you, I need to know. I love you, Leigh.

: One thing I can’t easily capture is that once you kill the Elevator Thing, the power starts flickering, and it gets more frequent as time goes on.

: Oh, and there’s a knock at the door.

: If they made him evil I’m done with this game.

: This encounter is meant to happen on the same day you meet Pierre, but I think it got bumped because we killed the Elevator Thing.

: “I was trying to sleep, and I just remembered where I heard your name. I’ve been getting your mail. I have a whole pile of it. Here, it’s yours!”

: “But, erm.. while I’m here..”

: The game won’t even let you pick the greyed-out options this time.

: “YES.”

: “I… I want to think that no matter how much I change, I can still do this. I can still make people smile. Even if I don’t look remotely human.”

: “I DON’T LIKE CLOWNS.”

: “…What do you mean? You don’t like clowns?”

: “I’M TERRIFIED OF THEM!!”

: “…That’s it? You’re afraid of clowns? Why? What’s wrong with clowns?”

: “Nightmares about you since childhood.”

: “…Okay. I get it. I guess… I can’t make everyone smile. Some people just hate clowns.”

: “Well, at least I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I thought some scary piece of me was sticking out from under the disguise or something. That’s a relief. I can NEVER show my true form. It’s HORRIBLE. Would ruin all my good work in an instant. Nightmares for everybody!”

: Pierre really should’ve been a recruitable party member.

: “Sorry for bothering you at this hour. Oh. Uh. If you can build the courage to do it.. come see me in my room. Maybe I can help you with your fear of clowns.”

: The roaches give us a hint about how we’re meant to recruit them. What you have to do is cook food and not eat it, which causes them to multiply.

: In Sam’s bedroom, we find the Shadow. This is meant to happen immediately after Sam wakes up, but because Sam isn’t sleeping in here anymore, it doesn’t.

: Is that the Doom box art on a poster?

: We need to be careful with options here. Picking the wrong ones is a game over.

Hey plant. How are you doing today? You look very nice! Is that a new bud? Yeah, I noticed! It’s growing well. Soooo uh, I wanted to tell you something.. uh.. no, never mind. It’s silly. Uh. Good day.."

: Someone needs a girlfriend.

: We’ve now recruited the Shadow, who does count for points as far as I know. He will give us a random item every morning.

: As soon as we get a few steps from Sam’s apartment, the power cuts out. Remember that door I said would be important? We need to go there.

: If you don’t head there immediately, the food in Sam’s fridge starts going bad. I reload here because I forgot to talk to Leigh.

: “So you’ve been reading my phone, huh? Heh heh.. I didn’t think you were so underhanded, Sam. I threw it away. I don’t need it anymore. That’s the life I used to live. I’m someone else now. The person I always wanted to be!”

: “LIAR” is looking for you.

: “…Liar? You mean.. heh HEH! Should’ve taken the hint a month ago! Not interested! I’m not Leigh anymore! I’m the Beast! Heh heh heh.. I wonder what he’d think of the Beast. Maybe I should tell him it’s over for good.”

: If we head to Leigh’s apartment, which we have time to do, there’s a perfectly normal grasshopper outside. We’re not going to fight it.

: Leigh’s apartment is slightly less of a hole than it was.

I guess you’re gone now. I don’t know whether I’m writing this letter to you, or to myself. But I have to get it out before I’m gone too. I was stupid. What I did to you was the worst mistake of my life. Worse than coming here. I’m sorry. I hurt you badly. And I deserved the silence. I just wish there was a way I could have made it up to you.

I bought this ring for you before I ruined everything. I wanted to give it to you, but I blew everything up. Even when I’m gone, I won’t forget you, Grasshopper.

: This is why we didn’t kill the grasshopper outside. It doesn’t change anything, but at least we didn’t kill her ex.

: “It sounds like you meant a lot to him.”

: “NO! Leigh meant a lot to him! But I’m not Leigh! I’m the Beast! I’m.. I just wanted him to say he was sorry.”

: This part is bugged. Option 2 was supposed to give you an alternate reward where Leigh becomes an even bigger Canadiens fan at the cost of being insane the whole time. If you do that, you get the insanity without the benefits.

: “You can be both Leigh and the Beast.”

Her arm gradually lowers and she takes a step forward. She’s quiet for a moment, playing with the ring in her palm.

: “I’m going to call Mom. Tell her I’m the Beast now. That should stop her looking for me. Let’s get out of here, Sam.”

: Martin’s Ring is a Leigh-only accessory that boots all her stats and removes the insanity when she transforms. She is now the strongest party member in the game.

: Where’d that body go?

: We can see a white tail running through the basement.

: This is the Olm. It is one of the two bosses we’re required to fight to get the power back on. It has 900 HP, and like the Elevator Thing and Garbage Worm has no weaknesses.

: It’s a very straightforward fight - it has no special attacks and goes down to a combination of bleed and acid burn.

: I should mention that I was wrong about something in the last update. The Elevator Thing doesn’t count as a boss for score purposes, and neither does the Olm.

: I then accidentally run into the Cop Car trying to get to the shortcut we opened last update. It does not go well.

: While the Cop Car counts as a boss, the item we get from it is trash. The chrome plating makes enemies more likely to attack Audrey, but doesn’t give much in the way of stats.

: If we could combine it with the chobham armor, that would make it worth using.

: We also run into a Shrimp and a Wirehead, who aren’t much of a challenge.

: The door I showed in the elevator room leads to the electrical room. At random intervals, the floor will electrify.

: The second room makes it difficult to evade enemies, so I run into the Husk and another wirehead. The Husk has a lot of HP and is presumably voiced by Keith David.

: The final room is very likely to trap you on that damage floor at least once.

: This is the Electrophage. It counts as a boss. I ran into a bug here: if Leigh dies while she’s transformed, she gets put into a glitch state. Her portrait shows her as being transformed, but she isn’t.

: It has full-party attacks that cause both burning and paralysis, along with 1500 HP. Fortunately, it’s weak to fire, acid, and slashing damage - all of which we have.

: Leigh gets a pair of crits for nearly 500 damage and kills it.

: And now we can restore the power. I’m reasonably certain we made it in time to stop the food from spoiling - you have four hours or so from the moment the power goes off.

: After we have some soup, our next destination is down here. This area is pretty easy, and like Fred’s apartment we don’t actually need to kill the boss here.

: By the way, don’t touch those white sparkles. They make the screen go trippy, and if you get hit by too many, Sam gets taken over and involuntarily walks toward the area boss.

: We need that key on the table, but we don’t know why yet.

: Is that a clicker from The Last of Us?

: The clicker dies in a single hit from the flamethrower, which makes this area a joke.

: “N-no.. Roderigue was a valued ally in the fight against chaos…”

: The convenience store has an item we need to finish the game.

: We have two more clickers and a… moth?

: I don’t trust him. Insect furries are all horrible.

: “I was almost one dead bug, huh? Oh! By the way! My name’s Phillippe! Pleased to meet you! I really want to leave, but I CAN’T! Sigh.. I need to be a STRONG moth for my friends trapped here.”

: “Hey, hey, I’ve got an idea! Maybe I can tag along with you? I’m a POWERFUL BUG! The STRONGEST! Look! I’m BIGGER than other moths by at LEAST two times!”

: Phillippe is this game’s Ralsei, and I have a feeling he exists primarily for the Deltarune theorycrafters who insisted that Ralsei was going to turn on the party and was secretly evil.

: “You’re a moth?”

: “YES! I am! You already know about moths? Heyyyyy!! You’re well traveled! You must know a lot! I like smart guys! I am a moth!!”

: “Look at these wings! Zoom! Vroom! Not so useful when the outside is so icky, but it’s still nice. I got more of the arms too! Four tough guy moth arms! Very strong! Too strong! Good for hugging and brushing teeth while also using a phone!”

: “Can only use one weapon and one gun at a time though. Because of regulations. You know. Don’t wanna go to bug jail.”

: What a liar. I used to use four swords at the same time until swords went out of style.

: Phil will ask to join the party. Don’t let him. He’ll then wait for you at the entrance but make you promise to save his friends.

: Let’s immediately exit this place.

: Phil will try to offer us healing. Don’t use those items.

: If we tell him we’re not going to save his family…

: We find that Phillippe is actually a fungus monstrosity. He’s very weak to fire.

: This is the tricky part. You can actually recruit Phil, but you need to pick the right dialog options. Francis Columbe originally wanted a much darker route for this.

: Originally, the idea was that Sam had to inhale enough mushroom spores to get brain damage so Phillippe would appear as a moth again.

: “The fungus got into your brain…?”

: "I thought you had caught on. NO, _{you idiot!} There was NEVER a Phillippe.

: “Don’t worry Phillippe! I’ll save you!”

: “Don’t worry Phil. I don’t believe his lies.”

: “You’re my only friend, Phillippe! I’ll find a way!”

You’ll find a way. It’s so unfair.. you MUST bring him back.

: And now we’re on the path to recruiting Phillippe. If you miss him, it’s no big deal - he’s the final person on the list of party members who don’t count for points.

: We’re unlikely to see him in action since he takes multiple days to regrow and we’ll have finished the game long before that.

: That’s a problem this game has - a lot of the party members you either get so late into the game that your party is already set in stone due to the level difference, or they’re random.

: Back in the Fungal Lair, the next room is a one-way door puzzle. Stepping on the lowered mushrooms toggles all the blocking mushrooms from being raised to lowered.

: I’m going to reload this because these encounters are pointless, but I want to show them off anyway.

: Sylvain is guarded by the Spore Torso, which is a tougher Infected. I had some really bad RNG here and both the Azure Greatsword and Sewage Blade broke.

: Sylvain will give us a hat, which you shouldn’t equip.

: He’ll also introduce us to a trading card game we can’t play because we don’t have a deck.

: I know he’s a mushroom, but did anyone think they were going to introduce a card game this far in?

: I’m surprised the developer named this guy Sylvain without making him a reference to Sylvain in Fear & Hunger, who is effectively Slaanesh from Warhammer 40k.

: This is what he looks like if you leave the lair early. Any of the fake survivors will join Phillippe in combat.

: We go through the maze, and on the right side is this dead end. This has one of my favorite encounters in the game in it.

: The game lets you wander around trapped for a bit until the mushroom wall turns into this.

: “I HAD THE SECOND WORST RATED ACT IN THE LAST COMEDY SHOW. WILL YOU HELP ME?”

: The Laughing Mold counts as a boss for ranking points if you fight him. I’m not sure if you still get the points if you talk your way out of fighting him.

: “…uh, alright. Go ahead.”

: “OKAY. HERE GOES. AHEM. WHY ARE YEASTS ALWAYS SO HONEST? NO CAP.”

: I don’t get it.

: I think it’s because yeasts don’t have a traditional mushroom structure.

: The game pauses for a minute and a slowed-down laugh track plays. This happens every time the Laughing Mold tells a joke.

: “What the hell was that noise?!”

: “LAUGH TRACK. I MAKE THE SOUND MYSELF. THIS BODY IS PERFECT FOR COMEDY.”

: “WHY DIDN’T THE MUSHROOM HAVE ANY FRIENDS? IT WAS SPORING.”

: “WAS THAT ONE TOO LEWD?”

: “Sporing. That’s funny!”

: “OKAY. JUST ONE MORE JOKE. THEY SAY NO TWO MOSSES ARE THE SAME. THERE’S NOBODY LICHEN. THAT’S MY BEST ONE, I THINK.”

: “Hah. Now THAT’S funny.”

: “I CAN TELL YOU’RE LYING. I WILL MAKE YOU TRUFFLE OFF THIS MORTAL COIL.”

: “Okay, that got me.”

: “OKAY. SO WHAT DO YOU THINK OVERALL?”

: “OKAY. THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME. I NEED TO WORK ON THIS A LITTLE MORE.”

: We get a free Elixir from him, and once we beat the boss here he’ll move to the camp in the basement.

: Down here is the Neptune Disc. This and that key are all we really need from here - we could leave right now.

: Neptune has 16 known moons. The last one was discovered in 2021.

: Jean-Pierre is up by the door, and guarded by another enemy that doesn’t like being set on fire.

: He gives us a “Greatsword” which is actually made of fungus. If you use any of the items the mushroom people give you, you take stat penalties.

: Jean-Pierre tries to sell us on a weapon crafting system, but all of the items require something that doesn’t exist in the game.

: The Magnum does exist, and we’ll get it before the end of the game. If we leave, this is what Jean-Pierre turns into.

: I forgot to get this last fake survivor, but she’s a carpenter who claims she can expand Sam’s apartment.

: If we continue down here, we have yet another boss gauntlet.

: This is the Guardian, which I believe is meant to be one of the SWAT guys from that van. It has 640 HP and has all the moves Sam has when equipped with a piercing weapon - including Impale, which has a 45% chance to instakill.

: Its main attack is firing its magnum off, which it does three times.

: It’s not much of a threat. On Cursed, it has two fungus zombies that show up with it and make the fight a bit more difficult.

: The Guardian also has a drop for Audrey. It’s kind of useless - if you want damage resistance, the chobham armor is a much better pick.

: At the very bottom is the area boss. This boss changes depending on whether Sam is spored or not - if you are, it’s better to try and wait it out.

: This is the Spore Mother. If you’re spored, she looks like this.

: There’s no point using Nitro Boost here, because none of her attacks can miss. Here, we get some phenomenally bad RNG.

: This attack hits the entire party and has a 50% chance to charm. She hits everyone and gets the charm off on the entire party.

: The good news is that every turn past the first one, the Spore Mother has a chance to do nothing. Once we do enough damage..

: She reveals her true form.

: Where did she find ten identical-looking guys wearing the same outfit?

: When killed, she drops a Stimulant and a Mycelium Cloak.

: The cloak would’ve been useful against the Electrophage.

: If you haven’t fought Phillippe, he’ll be dead outside along with any of the other fake survivors. All the items they gave you will revert to useless fungus blobs.

: By the way, all those mushrooms can be picked up. They heal for 4 HP and 2 stamina but cause poison - you can prevent this using the Lapis Band.

: Oh, right. In the last room, there’s a hidden passage in this wall that leads to a superboss. This is the boss you’re going to want to use the 8-Ball on.

: We’re not doing it today - I want to get Audrey’s best equipment first. Just remember that this is here.

: I save and heal, and now it’s time to handle this apartment. We’re still short on money to get to Henderson’s final form.

: The taxidermy apartment has a lot of stuff we can sell in it, like this eagle.

: Or this thing, which also sells for a bit.

: Just below the bear, there’s a door which leads to even more money - there’s an ouija board on the table we can sell, money on the other table, a granola bar, and..

: “This.. is grotesque. I sincerely hope this is just a Halloween decoration.”

: Once we take the head, the taxidermy thing from outside will move here.

: We can raid the bathroom before that and take some healing items.

: The enemy in here is Needles, which is weak to slashing and has a 12-hit attack that deals somewhere around 10-12 damage per hit.

: On the right side, near where the weird taxidermy thing is, we find the kitchen.

: Normally I try to dodge the enemies in here, but this is Scissors. Like Needles, it’s weak to slashing.

: The shrunken head is a key that fits in this door.

: The moment we step past this door, the taxidermy thing becomes hostile.

: The patchwork hat is actually pretty good - it gives a significant HP boost and resistance to bleeding.

: The next room has a bunch of fucked up taxidermy mutants we’re staying away from.

: It looks like somebody went hunting on Furaffinity.

: There are a couple of rooms branching off to the left and right. This one is the lower door on the right, and has another enemy and the Needle Gloves.

: The Needle Gloves give a small chance (I believe it’s 12%) to apply bleed on a regular attack. I put them on Audrey.

: On the left is another room with a Patchwork Jacket. Like the hat, it boosts HP (by 50 to the hat’s 25) and provides 50% bleed resist.

: Also on the left is the Patchwork Club, which is a decent pierce weapon. We’re about to get a much better one.

: And finally, there’s the Patchwork Boots. The idea is that you can take a character like Papineau who has a skill that does damage based on his HP and give him the Patchwork items to boost that.

: On the way out, we run into Taxidermy. Taxidermy is a multi-stage boss fight and is MUCH harder on Cursed.

: Its initial form has 600 HP, and once it’s brought down around half it starts unraveling.

The wire is pulled taut. It seems to connect the monster to every other taxidermy sculpture in the room.

: The moose in the center has 500 HP, and the bear and rhino have 250. We want to kill the moose first.

: The moose primarily does corruption damage - even though this attack is called Pain, it can’t actually inflict the Pain status.

: This is the final stage. Once the moose head opens up, it starts using a full-party corruption damage attack that does a percentage of current HP.

: A grenade, combined with Pain and the stage 3 bleed debuff is enough to kill the moose. The other heads don’t last much longer.

: On Cursed, Taxidermy has two extra heads in its final form and is much more likely to use an attack we haven’t seen. If it kills a party member, it can take control of them.

: It drops the Great Needle, which is a pretty good pierce weapon, as well as a Suturing Kit. The kit has 10 charges and works like a First Aid Kit, but only restores 20% HP instead of 50%.

: Audrey gets a Rhinoceros Hide, which I’ve never used.

: On the way back, I open Edwin’s safe with our key. The gold locket is an accessory that reduces incoming crushing damage.

: Since we’re already up here, let’s do this apartment. If you have Xaria and Monty, Monty can get you in here for free.

: This apartment has ice blocking off most of the rooms. The only way to melt it is with ice melt salt. Each jug can melt four blocks of ice.

: If you haven’t unlocked the janitor closets, there’s a specific route you need to take. One of the janitor closets on the ground floor has more salt in it.

: We start by going to the right, which uses one salt charge but gets us four more. The enemy on the ground there is something we’ll see later.

: Now we head to the left, and melt this ice block.

: The enemies are a Tuque and a Trapper Hat. These would be a threat if we came here on Day 1 or Day 2, but at this point they die before they can do anything.

: We go through the door and melt both of these ice blocks while dodging the enemy.

: This gets us some bleach and another four salt charges. We now have enough to get to the boss.

: Before I get this block melted, the enemy nearby attacks.

: The Balaclava isn’t any more of a threat than the Trapper Hat was.

: Our third wrapped gift is in here, and it’s an explosive. I could have used that back when we were fighting the SWAT Truck, but we can put it to use in Henderson’s apartment.

: The next room is straightfoward - we can melt all the ice in here.

: More loot for selling. By the end of this update, we’ll have enough money to fight Henderson. I’ll do that next update, when we’ll also finish the game.

: In the middle is Pompom, who is a threat if you come here early. Pompom uses cold-based attacks that have a chance to freeze - freeze is effectively a stun.

: Certain armor pieces, like the jacket we found in the sewer, have cold resistance. Papineau’s jacket is one of those.

: Killing Pompom allows us to access a video game cartridge and another stimulant.

: And finally, we can get the Mercury Disc. With this, we have all the planet discs except Jupiter.

: Mercury doesn’t have any moons.

: Now that we’re loaded down with loot, it’s time to sell it. Let’s get rid of the Crawling Hand while we’re here.

: The Crawling Hand has 420 HP and two attacks. The first is a four-hit attack that has a chance to stun. The second is a grab that drains a lot of HP if it hits.

: We don’t even give it the chance.

: I decide to take Milledoigts out as well. Milledoigts has the same four-hit stun attack that the Crawling Hand does, but doesn’t have the life drain. It has 480 HP.

: We still have time before Sam has to sleep, so let’s visit our friend Pierre.

: “Oh! Here you are! I’m glad you’re giving this a shot! I think maybe I could help you a bit. So, are you ready?”

: “Yes.”

: “Okay. We’ve got some work to do. Let’s get started. Here. Take this. This is a drawing of a clown. Here. Look. Take your time. You’re safe. I am a friendly clown.”

: “Oh my. I could see the blood draining right from your face. You really are terrified. I want you to keep it! In your pocket. I think it will help. Keep it with you. Face your fears.”

: We have enough time to play one game, so let’s play Octocook. I should talk about that last cartridge as well.

: The unlabelled cartridge is in a room behind Jasper on the ground floor. To get in, you need to take the discs out of the ground floor lock and use the elevator.

: The outside lock needs the Earth and Uranus discs, while the second lock in this room requires the Sun and Mars discs.

: In the corner, there’s a machine that will tell you the value of any disc you put into it. This is what happens if you put in the Negative Disc, and how you’re meant to find out what the Negative Disc’s value is.

: In the back is the Unlabelled Cartridge, which takes you to Glitch World if you use it on the console in the Meat World version of Sam’s apartment.

Octocook is a cute kitchen multi-tasking game about an octopus in a kitchen making sushi. It seems like a nice, lighthearted distraction from the end of the world. The game is fairly simple. The octopus manages orders in a kitchen. Each order corresponds to a button - you have to press the buttons in the right order or else you mess up the food and have to s tart again. It’s not too hard, but fun.

Xaria watches with her arms crossed, a sour expression on her face.

Bosses Defeated: (100 pts)

• Grinning Beast
• Stargazer
• Baby Teeth
• Rat King
• Rat Chimera
• Crawler
• Sewer Beast
• Enforcer
• SWAT Truck
• Hellride
• Garbage Worm
• Electrophage
• Guardian
• Spore Mother
• Taxidermy
• Pompom
• Crawling Hand
• Milledoigts

Total: 1800 points

Bosses Defeated: (Not Counted)

• Elevator Thing
• Olm

Party Members Recruited: (200 pts)

• Leigh
• Papineau
• Joel
• Audrey
• Xaria
• Monty

Total: 1200 points

Party Members Recruited: (Not Counted)

• Ernest
• Lyle
• Aster
• Phillippe

Total: 3000 points

: The Laughing Mold has a bunch of extra dialog. Let’s say you answer this every time it asks you how its jokes are. When you get to the “truffle off this mortal coil” bit…

: “MAKING FUN OF ME. I WILL MAKE YOU TRUFFLE OFF THIS MORTAL COIL.”

: “I DON’T THINK YOU TOOK THIS VERY SERIOUSLY. YOU REALLY WERE JUST LAUGHING THE WHOLE TIME. EVEN ON THAT AWFUL LICHEN JOKE. WERE YOU JUST LAUGHING SO I DON’T KILL YOU?”

: If you answer that way every time, he gets suspicious.

: “MOST OF THESE WERE NOT EVEN MEANT TO BE FUNNY. WHAT IS IT THAT MADE YOU LAUGH?”

: “The monotone delivery works.”

: “OH REALLY? MHHHHH. I THOUGHT THIS SPEECH WAS AN IMPEDIMENT. BUT MAYBE THIS MAKES IT FUNNIER. I SHOULD LEAN INTO IT. THANK YOU.”

: “The absurdity of the whole situation.”

: “OH. MHH. OKAY. NOT SURE I CAN DO THE AMBUSH SCENARIO IN A THEATER. BUT SURE, OKAY. THAT MAKES SENSE. OKAY, YOU CAN GO.”

: “I am a fungus nerd.”

: “OH. LIKE. A WEIRDO.”

: Pause for the laugh track.

: “OKAY. SURE. THAT MAKES SENSE. GUESS THAT’S WHY YOU’RE HERE. THIS MIGHT BE THE NICHE TO FOCUS ON. FUNGUS NERDS. THANK YOU.”

: This one actually did get me when I did it on my first playthrough.

: “You just look funny.”

: “I DO? I THOUGHT I LOOKED HORRIFYING. I DO HAVE A LOT OF GOOFY GRINS. MAYBE I SHOULD TRY A MORE PHYSICAL ROUTINE. WOULD I MAKE A GOOD CLOWN, YOU THINK?”

: “I think so..”

: “IMAGINE IF I HAD SOME MAKEUP ON. A FEW RED NOSES. MAYBE THAT COULD WORK. THANK YOU.”

: Sadly, this doesn’t lead to a Laughing Mold/Pierre scene. I almost feel like @-ing Francis Coloumbe on Bluesky and asking him to add that to the final patch.

: I did look up the game on AO3 and there are a number of fics but none of Pierre. They are almost exclusively Phillippe/Sam gay sex fics, which is kinda fucked up. You’ll understand when we see Phillippe’s dialog post-revival.

: There are a few Fred ones as well, including several where he literally fucks himself.

: I really like this scene though. The fact that the mold catches on if you’re being insincere feels like the kind of thing that should’ve been in BG3.

: If you go back to the camp in the basement, you can find the Laughing Mold there once the Spore Mother is dead.

: “THESE GUYS ARE A GOOD CROWD. THEY HAVEN’T BOOED ME YET. DO YOU THINK I WOULD LOOK FUNNIER WITH A LITTLE HAT?”

: I think he’d look funnier on fire and with a couple of bullets in him.

: “You talkin’ to me? Heck yeah, I’m the toughest guy around, huh huh.”

: “I LIKE tough guys, heh heh… wanna wrestle, tough guy?”

: “Uhh… I dunno… I mean, I’m kinda busy…”

: “Didn’t feel like going to class so I burned the school down. Got this scar in the process. Pretty badass, huh?”

: "I guess… "

: “How’d your face become teeth?”

: “My baby sister bit me..”

: “Nice. Looks killer, huh huh…”

: There’s a chance that when Xaria and Monty show up, something else happens. The chance starts at 3% and increases with each passing day.

: This thing is called the Limb Thief, and has absorbed Xaria and Monty. You can only learn his real name if you play D&D with Monty in the group: his name is Guillaume.

: He can drain stamina and cause status effects, but only has 300 HP.

: Speaking of fucked up Xaria and Monty, at one point there was supposed to be a thing at the end of the game like LISA The Painful where you had to fight mutated versions of your party members.

: This is what Xaria and Monty would’ve looked like.

: Finally, some achievement pics. This one is for recruiting Phillippe - the achievement is called “He’s real, god damn it!”

: This one is for bringing Phillippe back once the Spore Mother is dead. It should give you a pretty good idea of how Phillippe feels about this.

: This one is for recruiting Xaria and Monty. There’s a throwaway line from Phillippe later on (which I don’t know if we’ll see) that confirms that Papineau and Xaria are actually blue - that’s not the lighting.

: Next time, I’m going to do a side update to show what’s in the pit under where Charan was, as well as a side area we’d have no reason to visit on the best end route.

[Timrod]

Summary

: This update is going to be about a bunch of rooms I skipped on the current route. Most of them are only ever useful on Cursed.

: First, let’s check out this apartment that I intentionally skipped over on the way to the sewer. On Survivor, this room merely has a difficult enemy and some vendor trash.

: On Cursed, it has a three-stage boss fight that has to be completed to open the door to Steve’s room.

: This is the anime apartment.

: We can take their manga and “vintage game console”, along with some off-brand pocky and an energy drink.

: You’d think for a weeb they’d have shelled out for an imported Famicom.

: Meet Antoine. He is a reference to Kamen Rider, and is kind of bullshit if you encounter him before the sewer. His opening attack vomits acid and hits extremely hard.

: He also has the Kamen Rider Yanma Kick, which has an 80% chance to paralyze. Antoine is more of a threat than several of the bosses that come after him.

: He’s weak to slashing damage, and Leigh kills him. On Cursed, however..

: These are Esther (the mantis) and Noah (the centipede). Once you get Antoine to 1 HP, Esther comes in and eats him. These two have the Ornstein & Smough thing where if one dies, the other powers up.

: Noah and Super Noah merely hit for a lot of fire damage. Esther, on the other hand..

: Super Esther has a multi-hit attack and can also inflict poison and infection. Infection doesn’t do much unless it goes untreated.

: Antoine has a chance of dropping the Yanma Belt (12.5%) and a Scarlet Scarf (25%). The belt gives you the Yanma Kick skill, which is honestly terrible. It costs 24 stamina and doesn’t do nearly enough damage to justify its cost.

: The scarf boosts agility by 20% and gives you a 30% chance to counterattack. It’d be potentially useful for that one Audrey build that uses agility.

: Yanma Kick is also bugged in that you can use it outside of combat.

: The north part of the apartment has more manga, some shuriken, an anime figure, and a trilby. The trilby is slightly better defensively than the Rat King crown, but it’s not really worth getting.

: The other apartment is the one right across the hall. On Cursed, one of the planet discs gets moved in here.

: On Survivor, the bathroom (the door right next to the TV) is unlocked and has bandages in case you need to feed Steve. On Cursed, it’s locked and needs three keys to open.

: This thing on the table is a pillbug named Clyde. On Survivor, he has a multi-target SMG attack and isn’t too difficult. On Cursed, however..

: He’s accompanied by his four kids. One of them uses a piercing attack that causes bleed, one uses a skill that lowers your defense, and the third spams explosions.

: The baby can’t be attacked until after the other three are dead, at which point she transforms.

: This is the Angel of Death, and is generally one of the most bullshit boss fights in this game. She attacks for a ridiculous amount of damage and will likely oneshot Sam if she hits him.

: She drops her bat, which has a skill that deals FOUR TIMES your character’s attack and also inflicts burning and stun for only 10 stamina. The only problem is that Papineau doesn’t have his attack-boosting gear on Cursed so it’s not really useful for him.

: Next, let’s take a look at what happens if you go back into the hole where Charan was once he leaves.

: We need to jump back down the hole, only this time Charan isn’t there to catch us.

: This is why we need the First Aid Spray.

: It’s really dark down here, and the corridors are very narrow which makes it hard to avoid the enemies.

: You know, I wish I had known this existed because this is what my bat mascot would look like. I only briefly came down here on my first playthrough.

: This is the Moaning Shade. It can go through walls and moves faster than the party does - as far as I know, there’s no way to dodge it.

: The Moaning Shade is part of a series of pretty similar fights. It attacks four times per turn, and the last attack will always be Taste, which has an 80% chance to paralyze.

: Painful Stab and bleeding are an absolute must here, since it has 1200 HP. Like all the shade enemies, it’s weak to fire - but Painful Stab is probably a better idea than bringing the flamethrower.

: At the end of the hall behind the Moaning Shade is this painting. This is one of the four offerings for the Mask ending.

: For the next area, remember how the Elevator Thing was trying to get to a nonexistent fourth floor? To get there, you need to go to the Ground Floor, then floors 3, 1, and 2 in that order.

: The way you’re meant to figure this out is by doing the quest for the pipe. If you do that, the guy in the occupied bathroom stall on the ground floor dies, and there’s graffiti inside that tells you how to do it.

: The elevator music turns into the fucked up version that plays when fighting the Elevator Thing.

: Floor 4 is big and takes a lot of time to explore, which is why I’m not coming here on the main save.

: The first room is a hallway made of blood with some enemies in it.

: Blood Body works a lot like Tumor Fred - it regenerates every turn, but not to the extent Tumor Fred does. It only has 240 HP and a weak physical attack.

: The blood hallway leads to a subway tunnel.

: We’re pretty much forced to fight Dark Glow, which attacks by draining HP. I should mention that everything on this platform is weak to fire, so the flamethrower is a good idea.

: This garbage can has a metro ticket, which we need to go further in.

: We now need to go on the subway track. There’s a timer that starts as soon as you enter this room, and eventually the subway will come and kill you.

: The middle rail is the electrified third rail and will damage you if you step on it. We need to follow this blood trail.

: The tape can be given to Beryl instead of her real offering, which we’ll get next update. I probably could’ve done that last update, but figured I’d leave it.

: If you go north instead, you can find a party member. He’s probably not worth recruiting - you need to unequip everyone and then touch the third rail until you’re at 1 HP.

: Because I’m not using this save, I’m going to kill Marc-Andre. If he joins you, he’s kind of useless - he works like Colonel Squeakums, except he has a chance to do stupid shit like stun Sam for a turn or use your healing items on the enemies.

: Eventually he gets some pretty decent attacks he can randomly use.

: Behind him is another First Aid Spray and a fire axe.

: Once we go back to the platform, the Hanging Shade is waiting for us. It has 1000 HP and attacks four times a turn - the final attack is a curse that can inflict a bunch of different status effects.

: Once we get past that, there’s a second shade blocking the exit.

: The Stumbling Shade is more of the same - 1200 HP, four attacks, the final attack is a single target shadow damage nuke.

: The third offering is in Glitch World, which is accessed using the unlabeled cartridge on Sam’s TV in Meat World.

: Glitch World is where you can fight a superboss, but to do it you need to have played Honko’s Grand Journey to completion and there’s no reward for it - it doesn’t even count for ranking points.

: If I do Glitch World, I’ll probably do an entire update on it since it takes a full day to explore.

: This is just the first area, and it doesn’t show that there are colored locks you need keys to open. The inside is non-euclidean kind of like the war zone in Henderson’s apartment.

: The fourth Mask offering is in Henderson’s apartment, so we’ll see that next update.

[Timrod]

Summary

: It’s Day 7, and we’ve gotten a pretty good roll for time.

: And oh look, Phillippe is growing back.

: “Yeah. We both won!”

: “Both? What? Is.. is she dead? The, uh, princess.”

: “She’s dead.”

: “But.. why am I alive? Y-you RESCUED me? WHY?”

: “I couldn’t leave my best buddy behind.”

: “You GENUINELY still believe I’m real, huh. Incredible. The spores should have cleared out of your system by now.”

: “I thought you would have snapped out of it. I thought there was no way you were actually THIS stupid.”

: “I believe in you, Phillippe. We will pull you through.”

: “I feel bad for you. You’re so INCREDIBLY naive.”

: “I am NOT Phillippe. Phillippe isn’t real. He was NEVER real. I made him up.”

: We’re torturing him and it’s hilarious.

: “It’s okay, mushroom. You can be my friend too.”

: “What are you talking about?! I improvised the whole thing on the spot! To TRICK YOU! It’s so FRUSTRATING that you haven’t come to your senses yet!”

: “You brought me back HOME! You brought me HERE! You are SO stupid! It’s almost CUTE how trusting you are. I thought it was the spores talking before, but now I realize - it’s just YOU.”

: “You got me real good!”

: “You’re in DANGER, you DENSE MOTHERFUCKER! I’ll EAT YOU. It’s MY PURPOSE.”

: I’m going to screenshot the rest of the conversation because Phillippe’s portraits are what make this work.

: “The moment you FINALLY realize what’s happening, you’ll..”

: “Oh…! HI! T-thank you so much for r-rescuing me!”

: "I’m b-b-back! It’s me, Phillippe again! _{(please don’t kill me please don’t kill me please don’t kill me)}

: This is the point where Sam should sit next to him and spend hours designing his own moth-sona just to really mess with him.

: “I love you Phillippe!”

: “I love you too, Sam! I’m so s-sorry for being a meanie! That was the ugly no-good stinky fungus parasite in my brain! E-e-exactly like you said! _{(is he actually buying this??!)”}

: “You were completely right. You are SO smart. Don’t l-listen to the mean mushroom guy! Mushrooms are famous l-liars!”

: “I’m just so happy you’re back…”

: “W-wow. Uh… _{(how lonely can a guy be, goddamn)} I think I just need a little time! A-and maybe some food! I’ll be back to f-full bug strength!”

: “I can feel my bug powers returning already! Even some tax and accounting skills are coming back!”

: This is a reference to a line I forgot to show when first talking to Phillippe after rescuing him in the Fungal Lair.

: If you ask him what he can do in a team..

: “You need a strong bug on your team! This is how it is. No strong bug? Not a chance! Need a fighter, a healer, a bug, and the tax guy. I’m the third guy!!! The bug! I’m not the tax guy.”

: “I don’t see a bug or tax guy on the team you got. I can do both, but mainly bug. I did tax once before and they yelled at me on the phone…”

: If you think about it, the Baldur’s Gate 3 party had this. We had a fighter (Karlach), a healer (Pollux), a tax guy (Astarion) and a character who is useless outside of boss fights (Lyselle).

: If I could fit “A quick death would have been more merciful than this” on the header for the update, that would be the name of the update.

: “The mean m-mushroom might come back from time to time.. just ignore him, okay? _{(there is no way I can keep this up forever)}”

: “We’ll get rid of him together!”

: “Y-yeah! We can d-do it!”

: Phillippe is probably the best written thing in this game. Francis Coloumbe nailed it. Trust me when I say it gets even better.

: If we talk to him again, Phillippe will ask us for food. We need to cook something and give it to him - this means it won’t heal the party.

: This is a great use for all those pizza bites and TV dinners you probably have sitting around. What if we pick that last option?

: “Would you like fungicide?”

: “Say what now? F-fungicide? W-why?!?”

: “To get rid of the parasite.”

: “P-please don’t do that! We m-moths are very s-sensitive to chemicals. I would probably d-die! _{(is he messing with me?!?! does he know?!)”}

: “Well… think about it.”

: My headcanon is that Sam absolutely knows Phillippe is evil and he’s doing this purely to fuck with him.

: Phillippe will have a similar response if you ask him to leave the apartment. I wish there was a way to do this with the other fungus mimics.

: Our first destination today is going to be the second floor, which will get us an easy offering.

: The room with the water leaking out of it is only used for the Unity ending, and is a necessary entry portal into Meat World.

: It contains a VERY difficult boss. I’ll show it off briefly.

: When you first enter, you run into Summer, who is a perfectly normal Canadian fish enthusiast. Note the timer up above.

: The entire apartment is underwater, and Sam moves very slowly while exploring it. What happens if the timer runs out?

: You get thrown into a boss fight against Drowning. Drowning has what I believe is the highest HP total of any boss in the game at 3000.

: It is weak to piercing and shock, but is immune to fire.

: Every turn, Drowning does a percentage of current HP in damage. You will need at least one First Aid Spray for this fight. If you have the 8-Ball and are planning on getting the Unity ending, this is what you want to use the 8-Ball on.

: If I was going to do this boss, I’d have farmed to get the roaches as a party member early and wouldn’t bring Audrey.

: Instead, let’s head up here. The door on the far right is also a thing, but only if we have a specific party member who is a door encounter.

: This room has some items, but more importantly has a boss we need to kill.

: This is the Typewrither. It is either a pushover or one of the most annoying fights in the game depending entirely on RNG.

: The Typewrither’s gimmick is that it announces an attack each turn, and will do it unless its tongue is cut off… except that sometimes, the timing gets messed up and it’ll use its special attack right off the bat.

: The special attacks can range from nothing (poisoning the entire party with an 80% chance) to stunlocking you to death without you getting a turn.

: Typewrither (and its tongue) are weak to fire, and the flamethrower will almost always sever the tongue in one hit.

: The tongue forms a new enemy when cut off, and Typewrither gets more annoyed. If you cut off the tongue four times, Typewrither goes berserk.

: It also has a chance to heal itself for 100 HP instead of doing a special attack. You can see here that Sam is sleeping - sleep in this game is a multi-turn disable and doesn’t automatically end if Sam takes damage.

: We get the Loose Manuscript, which is the offering Jasper needs.

: One of the rooms on the right side has a typewriter that has a final page we need to add to it.

: Our next destination is Henderson’s apartment. Optimally, you probably want to do this earlier than I did it if you have Audrey.

: The APC resists most physical damage types and is weak to just about all of Audrey’s special attacks.

: It has a couple of single-target gun attacks, as well as High Lights which has a chance of blinding everyone.

: Eventually, it will summon hand enemies to fight you. These were the enemies I was evading when we first got here, and now they’re piss easy.

: Between the flamethrower and Audrey, we put the APC down no problem.

: The tank tracks are currently bugged. They’re supposed to give Audrey a skill called Ground Anchor, which boosts her ballistics by 50% at the cost of agility, but they currently don’t.

: With the chobham armor these make her nearly indestructible, but we’re not going to use them that way.

: We head back inside and dodge these soldiers.

: This next room has a grenade and a detonator in it. There’s a wall we could blow up to get an upgraded rifle, but it’s out of the way and we’re going to be tight on time as is.

: This NPC is Memorial, who will buy dog tags (a common drop off hand enemies) from you. He has some interesting dialog.

: “I’ve been collecting these dog tags to pass the time. They just.. show up sometimes. I don’t know where they’re from. Maybe people he knew back then?”

: “Who were you before this?”

: “Cashier at a hardware store. Yeah. Is this curse a step up or a step down, you think?”

: “About breaking even.”

: “Mmmh.. you might be right. On the one hand, I’m stuck in somebody else’s personal hell. On the other hand, I don’t have to smile at rude customers anymore. On the third hand, my sanity holds on by a thread. That one really goes for both, though.”

: “What happened to you?”

: “Took the bus early in the morning. It was still dark out. Somebody climbed on and was looking really weird. Clutching his face, moaning, whining. I figured it was some homeless guy having a breakdown, people ignored him.”

: “Then he exploded into dozens of little crawling hands. That got everyone’s attention. The hands went everywhere. Dug themselves into people. One crawled into my mouth. Most of them got on the driver.”

: “Somehow he managed to keep control of the bus even as he turned into a giant goddamn hand thing. World class focus, that guy. The rest is a bit of a blur. My brain was really not meant for all this hardware. I really lost it.”

: I feel like that wouldn’t be a thing.

: We need to give Henderson his final rent payment of $600 to kill him. Good thing we have the money now.

: If I hadn’t had the video game trader show up, I probably would’ve done this several updates ago.

: The final version of Henderson’s apartment is different than the others. The shitty Fextralife wiki has a map on it, but the map isn’t totally accurate.

: The door marked “Sapper Charge Site” is where the rifle is.

: Near the entrance to the tunnels, there’s a room with a free elixir. We’ll want this for the final fight.

: Henderson roams this area, and is pretty hard to avoid.

: The Trench Digger is based off a star-nosed mole.

: It has a couple of gun attacks that do minimal damage and can’t damage Audrey at all if she has the chobham armor on.

: Its most dangerous attack is a two-turn thing where it loads an explosive round and fires it on its next turn. You can guard it to minimize damage, but I just kill it.

: This gets Audrey the Tank Gun, which goes in her body slot and more than doubles her ballistics while leaving her defenses pretty high.

: As soon as you get this, you’re going to want to equip the Carbonator because it gets the most out of a high ballistics.

: And finally, we find what we came here for. This is the Jupiter Disc, and it’s only required for the best ending. If you’re doing the 1.0 ending, you can skip this entirely.

: Jupiter has 97 known moons, but that number is likely to go up. The two most recent moons were discovered in April 2025.

: For purposes of the game, Jupiter has 95 moons.

: Our next stop is over here, which is where we can use the key we found in the Fungal Lair.

: The convenience store is a maze with an enemy in it.

: This is Centifingers. It has a single-target and a multi-target bite attack that hits for a lot of damage and causes bleeding.

: At 640 HP, it dies before it gets more than one attack off.

: We can take a video game, and just above that is a door that leads to..

: A free herbicide, some duct tape, and a blank VHS tape. If you’re going for the original good ending, you now have all the items you need to finish the game.

: Because we’re going for Promise, there are a couple of extra steps.

: The last boss we need to kill is in the security room. To get in, we need to put in four discs, two on each side. The two sides need an equal number of moons.

: There are a few different possible combinations. We’ll do Uranus (28) and Negative (-10) on one side for a total of 18, and Mars (3) and Neptune (15) on the other side.

: The door on the right needs a total of 18 moons to open, and the only remaining combination we can use is the Sun and Pluto discs.

: This leads to a room with some very good items. We get two rolls of duct tape, two grenades, a combat knife, a flak jacket, and an SMG with two boxes of 24 bullets.

: The flak jacket is pretty good for Sam or Leigh.

: The other room has a boss fight in it. We can’t go near the TV without turning it off using the box on the wall - Sam will refuse to go near it.

: This is Panopticon. Compared to Typewrither, it’s kind of a nothing boss fight. Its gimmick is that it ‘records’ a party member and will copy whatever they do on its next turn.

: Audrey hits extremely hard with Explosive Shot and stuns it.

: Panopticon only has 600 HP and is almost laughably easy compared even to Stargazer or the boss in Fred’s apartment we never fought.

: What I’m going to do is finish the game this update, then I’ll go back and do one more day where we take out Fred and the superboss in the Fungal Lair.

: This next part is a bit of a plot hole. In theory, we should be able to use Audrey or Leigh to do this because they’ve both been exposed to the Visitor and won’t mutate again if they see it.

: Instead, we have to put Cinnamon on the chair and turn the video feed on.

: This makes Cinnamon mutate and breaks the TV, leaving it on the outside feed.

: On the right is a tape recorder that takes a minute real-time to record. I’m not sure how this makes sense given that a still image of the Visitor is enough to mutate someone.

: This next part is very random. Cinnamon is sometimes fine to just sit where she is, but on my first playthrough she sat right in front of the recorder.

: Cinnamon has 600 HP and counts as a boss for ranking points, so we might as well. She hits hard, but dies quickly.

: We now need to give everyone their offerings, and at the same time need to do some dialog I missed.

: First, we need to talk to Aurelius and ask him about the astronomy group.

: “When I joined, it was Jasper, Beryl, and Edwin. I think there were others before me, but I never knew them. We’ve been studying the Visitor for many months - before anyone else even knew of its existence! This is why we were prepared.”

: We give him the painting from Fred’s and now need to go see Beryl. This doesn’t take any time because we’ve already been down there once today.

: “Tell me about your founder.”

: “Sybil spent months observin’ the Visitor. Tryin’ to establish communication as it came closer and closer. Unfortunately.. she observed it through a telescope.”

: “Her attempts at communication.. ruined her, and in the end, she had nothin’ to show for it. She grew less sane and human by the day.”

: “What we’re doin’ now is based on some of her final notes. Probably won’t work, but what else can we lose? It’s the end of the world!”

: “Sybil?! She’s my neighbor!”

: “Your neighbor? That doesn’t make any sense. Sybil is gone. She lived in Apartment 12, on the First Floor. Maybe you’re talkin’ about another Sybil.”

: The manifest in Edwin’s apartment was right - Sybil’s apartment was really Apartment 12, the one we had to use herbicide to get into.

: “I knew her a little, but she was already afflicted when I first spoke to her. She left quite an impression on me. But only Jasper really knew her, out of all of us.”

: “She was the first of us, perhaps even among all of humankind, to ever lay eyes on the Visitor. Unfortunately, she paid dearly for it. Jasper said she observed the Visitor for months, and it had devastatin’ effects on her.”

: And that explains what all the meat stuff is. This links directly to the Unity ending, which I’ll explain in a bit.

: I give Beryl her offering, and then head to Jasper. We don’t want to give Jasper his offering yet - it won’t screw anything up permanently if you do, but you’ll have to take it back and give it to him again later.

: “Please. Tell me about Sybil.”

: “I… we were good friends. Why do you ask about her?”

: “How do I get into Apartment 12?”

: “Last time I walked past it, her.. mass was blocking the front door. I didn’t want to step on her. If you find a way through, maybe you’ll be able to get inside with this.”

: Now it’s time to head back to Apartment 12.

: Before we do, I stop in the janitor’s closet on the ground floor, near the bathrooms. This is the room Papineau would be in if we hadn’t found him in the bathroom.

: The table on the left has a roll of duct tape, and on the right is the Acid Sprayer and two bottles of herbicide. We need a minimum of three bottles to fully explore Apartment 12.

: We also need to do this puzzle in the mailroom. The door needs 147 moons to open, which means we need the Jupiter, Uranus, Pluto, Neptune, and Mars discs.

: This room has the magnum in it, which isn’t as useful as I remember it being. It also has the Saturn disc.

: If you look in the center of the wall, there’s a slightly different texture.

: This is the door Jasper’s key opens.

: There are enemies here who aren’t hostile unless we talk to them. We’re not going to do that. The room on the left has something I’ll save for bonus content because we can’t fully see it today.

Pages and pages of stellar coordinates and objects. Notes of an amateur astronomer. Your eyes glaze over text that has absolutely no meaning to you.

M32, Starfish - RA 05h 28m 42s, Dec +35° 51’ 18"
M42, Orion - RA 5h 35m 17s, Dec -5° 23’ 28"
X - RA 19h 48m 43.4s, Dec -9° 35’ 30"
Altair - RA 19h 50m 47s, Dec +8° 52’ 6"

Maybe charts written from a stargazing session? Notes from a book?

: What does any of that mean?

: I took an astronomy class in college, but I was never good at it. RA stands for Right Ascension, and Dec stands for Declination. They’re like latitude and longitude but for space.

: So THAT’S how that works. I always go space until I can’t go space anymore.

: I went ahead and looked these up. The coordinates for Messier 32 are wrong, while the ones for Messier 42 (aka the Orion Nebula) are a bit off. The coordinates for Altair are correct.

: The “X” coordinates are meant to be the Visitor. I looked them up to see if there was a real star there or something, but there isn’t.

: The closest object I could find is a star with the easy to remember name of ZTF J194845.04+355040.6, which was discovered by the Zwicky Transient Facility in San Diego. I believe it was part of a big dataset they released in 2022 called Gaia 3.

: I couldn’t tell you much more about it, since searches give me no results and I’m not an astronomer. I think it’s somewhere in Andromeda.

: I’m going to officially name ZTF J194845.04 “The Visitor” and no one can do anything about it.

: This part is one thing I don’t like about this game’s design. There’s a hidden door here, but there’s no clues that it exists. We need an herbicide to get through.

: Before we go in there, let’s check the rest of the rooms.

A page of stellar coordinates and objects dated from a year ago. One note draws your attention. It’s highlighted in bright yellow and marked with an additional question mark.

HD 187552 - RA 19h 51m 25.6s, Dec +9° 27’ 21.9" ?

At the bottom of the page, an extra note: Asked Jasper to check HD 187552 with his larger aperture reflector model. Figured it’s too dim to see here with the light pollution, but I could see some nearby stars just fine? It’s just between Altair and Tarazed. Almost like a patch of the sky was just blotted out?? Probably nothing.

A few pages later, another note in a larger scrawl, written the following month. The blot moved?

: HD 187552 is a real star. It’s in the Aquila constellation. The coordinates are off: its real coordinates are 19h 50m 11.01s, Dec +9° 23’ 19".

: If we go through the secret door, we find a door locked by a keypad.

Notes dated six months ago.

this place creeps me out, but it seems like its all mine. berryl’s been building a coordinate map. edwin isn’t QUite as involved but he’s been hellping me obtain a lot of equippmente.

theres something wrong with my eyes. im seeing I Don’t Knoww Weird things. shadows. they distract me from my work, which is all I can think about. im takking a sabbatical from… ac tual work.

the big pROJect is coming along but theres more work ahead. THe discs are complete i believe there’s enouggh space for it in the apartment. It WILL Work.

: The keypad needs a 6-digit code.

: Before we go in there, let’s go down here.

: This room has more pistol bullets and shotgun shells, both of which are kinda useless at this point.

: This big room is supposed to have a boss in it, but I’ve never seen the boss spawn. It’s another shade type boss and doesn’t count for ranking points.

: We find Sybil’s missing house keys, as well as some more SMG ammo.

: North of the keypad door is another room with some notes and rifle bullets in it.

Notes dated to five months ago.

jaspper said im LOsing my grip on things. itt hurt and i told him to leAVe. but.. he’s right. ii havent slept in 3 days. just so i can track thevisitor. im losing myself…

when i look at the patern of its movemennt i can see it clearly its comming to us. It’s coming to me. itts coming because of me it wantss to communicare with me. Imm sure of it.

the shaddows must be related to a form of communication? tHey are real I AM Certain. i can’t tell jassper or beryl. i see shadow when i don’t focus my eyesI see them now.

tthe planetarrium is done. mostly.

: Behind the keypad door is the planetarium. We need to place the planet discs (minus Pluto) in the correct spots.

: I haven’t tested it, but I think you can kill Sam here by putting the Negative Disc in one of these and turning it on.

: This door is where the Unity ending takes place. I’ll talk about that in an optional update at some point.

Notes dated four months ago.

im changeing. because of the visitor. am sure of this. because i looked. and because it looked back. jassper thinks he saw visitor. But He Didnt. onlyme. i accidentally gave the wrong coordinates. The numbers fromm before it moved.

he saw nothing. so WHY is he changing too?! he shuld not be changeingg. dont understand.

but HEs not changging as much as Me. I Saw Too much. i am afraid To see myself in the mirror now. im afraid. all i see are shadows now. i am losing myself. i am already lost

: I’m not sure if this is meant to imply that Jasper mutated because Sybil told him about the Visitor, or because he thinks he saw it even if he actually didn’t.

: Doing the planetarium puzzle unlocks this final door.

Notes, dated three weeks ago.

I understand. I have not been this lucid in months. I need to write while I still can. What I’ve discovered is inconceivably dangerous and must never be learned by anyone else. The world is in danger.

I’ve stopped trying to communicate with them. I cannot put them in danger. I cannot allow them to know what I’ve learned. But I have left instructions. Hints to guide them in the right direction without telling them the truth. They must never know, or the world will die. And my fate will be theirs.

I hope Jasper is able to find what I left him. I wish I could have showed him in different circumstances. I’m sorry.

I’ve begun the process. There is no going back now. I’m forgetting so much already. I’m already starting to forget their faces. I hate it. I haven’t cried in a long time. I guess this body can still do that.

: The Unity ending is about Sam discovering what Sybil’s secret is. I’ll talk more about it in bonus content.

: Before we leave, we want to take these telescope parts.

: The telescope parts have to be shown to Jasper, but he won’t look at them if he already has his offering.

: “What is this? This is Sybil’s. Was this in her home? It’s a telescope I got her two years ago. Just a piece of junk. It broke constantly.”

: “…We’d spend nights looking through it until the sun came up. She never got the knack of fixing it. Always brought it to me when it fell apart.”

: “I.. I figured she would have gotten rid of it by now. She’s gotten much better equipment since. This is just junk. I can’t believe she kept it all this time. She never threw it out…”

: “..Oh. Uh. I fixed it again. I wasn’t even thinking. I’ve done this so many times before. It just kind of happened. Here. It should work now. Please take good care of it. It means a lot to me.”

: This is it. One last thing before the point of no return, and all we had to do was go next door.

: We need to go into either her bedroom or the bathroom to progress.

: “Found your house keys!”

: “…oh. My house keys?! Where were they? Was looking for those. I still had my spare, but.. I guess I dropped them when I was bringing groceries or something.”

: “Nice shirt.”

: “…Oh. Yeah. Uh. I mean. I don’t think I’ve done laundry in weeks.”

: “I have something for you.”

: “_{This is the telescope he..} This is the telescope he gave me. Jasper. He.. I… oh no.”

: “What did I do. What did I do. What did I do? I saw the Visitor. And it saw me. It.. reached out to me. To us. This is my fault. It’s all my fault. Everything. I’m the reason the Visitor came here. It was me.”

: “Did I.. doom the world, Sam?!”

: “You didn’t.”

: “It’s too dangerous for me to remember this. To remember everything. I need to forget. I am a threat to the whole world. In some ways, a bigger threat than the Visitor itself. I have knowledge that puts every one of us in danger.”

: “I need to revert this. I need to make myself forget again. I need to let this part of me die. Don’t bring the memories back. Please stop your research of my notes. Let this die. Can you please promise me this?”

: And this is why it’s called the Promise ending.

: “My memories are dangerous. There are things we humans should NOT know. Toxic, corrosive knowledge. I can feel that knowledge seeping into the world around me as we speak. It is corrupting the very air we breathe.”

: “Promise me that you won’t try to bring me back. Promise me that you will stop searching for the truth. You will let this lie. Do it for me. For everyone else.”

: “I promise.”

: “Thank you, friend. You have more wisdom than I do. What Jasper’s doing is right. It’s what I wanted. He’s not just doing it for me. He’s doing it for the world. And he gave up everything. So please, stand with him.”

: “..Now leave. I need to revert all of this. Sorry that I can’t give you those answers you want. I haven’t known you for very long, but considering how confusing my life is, and how I don’t really speak to anyone else.. your friendship has meant a lot. I just want you to know that.”

: “Thank you for being so kind to your weird new neighbor. I can feel myself fading. I’m sorry. I can’t go back. I have to forget everything or the world is in danger. Please. Forget this conversation. Just..”

: Now we have to go back to Jasper, give him his offering, and tell him everyone is ready. He gives us the key to the roof.

: The robes are one of the only things that’s a significant upgrade to Papineau’s jacket, so he gets them.

: We need to find all four astronomers and then perform their ritual.

: You can see Charan’s body still wrapped around the building.

: Here’s Aurelius, located on this platform that we have to go under Charan to reach.

: Aster is in the corner, next to what I think is part of Jeanne. I’ll give her laundry to her in the next update.

: From here, all we do is step into the circle.

: “Oh, mysterious Visitor! We have brought a manuscript describing your form! We seek to chronicle you! Commune with you!”

: “Oh, strange Voyager! We have brought a recordin’ of you. We seek to document you! Commune with you!”

: “O-oh, great Observer. We have brought a painting of you! We seek to see you! Commune with you!”

: “Oh, dark Whisperer. We have brought a photograph of you! We seek to understand you! Commune with you!”

: “Heed our call! We look upon you now without fear! We want you to do the same!”

: Any of the astronomers who have correct ritual items will become part of this boss. The Chaos Quartet (or the Discordant Triune, Unholy Duet, or Chorus of One) does not count for boss credit. It has 2000 HP.

: It has a single-target instant kill move, and a number of “gazes” based on which astronomers are part of it.

: Audrey crits it for over 400 damage. If the tank treads weren’t bugged, she could probably hit it for 600.

: After the Chaos Quartet dies, we get put into a white void with their evolved form, the Exalted Four. You have time to heal.

: “Now listen very carefully. We can retain our sanity for only a moment. Ten seconds at most. We have slowed down our perception of time to make the most of it. You are in the eye of the storm, Sam.”

: “Human minds cannot inhabit such an absurd body without falling apart. When we lose control again, it will be for good.”

: You can run away, but that’s a bad ending called Screaming Sky.

: “Jasper! I spoke to Sybil!”

: “What? How is that possible? I thought Sybil was…”

: “Sybil is gone. Whatever you spoke to wasn’t her.”

: “It was definitely her. Listen to me! Sybil is alive! She’s lucid!”

: “STOP IT! Why are you saying this? Are you trying to hurt me? Sybil is gone and she can never come back.”

: “She is alive in Apartment 35. She is my neighbor. It’s the old Sybil. She remembers you, Jasper.”

: “…is she okay? Is she.. is she herself?”

: “She’s forgotten a lot, but it’s her. She has self-induced amnesia. She forced herself to forget everything.”

: “F-forget? What? What do you mean?”

: “She learned something about the Visitor. Something so dangerous, she had to forget. If she remembers, the world will end.”

: “I do not know what this means. But Sybil is alive. And lucid. And safe.”

: “Jasper, I"m losing control. I can’t hang on any longer.”

: “I am struggling. But I will not allow the madness to overtake us. For Sybil’s sake. Please just hang on, Sam. Sybil..”

: The Exalted Four has 2500 HP and will cycle through its four eye colors. Each one fires a ray that attempts to apply status effects.

: The red laser attempts to apply burning.

: Each time it switches eyes, it regains a bit of health. This doesn’t matter, because it’s not going to reach the final phase.

: “There’s.. not.. much of me.. left…”’

: “I made a promise to Sybil. I promised that I would stand with you.”

: “Sam…!”

: “We’re goin’ now. To meet the Visitor. We’re going to straighten this all out.”

Nobody knows what occurs between the Visitor and the Exalted Four. They are gone for hours, and all the world waits in suspended silence for their return.

: “They’e gonna kill the Visitor. I can feel it. It shoulda been us…”

: “This is one mess I don’t know if I"ll be able to clean.”

: “I’m scared. I’m tired. I’m cold. But for the first time in forever, I have hope.”

It is not the old world that humanity rebuilds. It is a new world; a world of compassion, hope, and for many, redemption.

: This route gives you an epilogue for each character you recruited.

Life without his family is difficult for Joel to adjust to. He continues to live with Sam, and in time, comes to view him as his new family. He never outgrows his curiosity and innocence.

: If you go back into the tooth apartment (it opens on Day 9) and kill the super version of Baby Teeth, you get a slightly different ending for Joel.

Ernest decides that his rambling days are over, and settles down for good. He and Squeakums entertain children with their music, which people continue to play long after he’s gone.

Leigh reconnects with her family, who accept the new side of her - and recognize that part of it had always been there. She eventually gives up her rivalry with Sam, and they always remain close friends.

It takes a long time for Xaria to become comfortable with herself. She realizes the burden her behavior placed on the people around her, and apologizes to the people she hurt. Especially Sam.

Not everyone agrees with the Exalted Four’s dominion over the New World. Xaria and Monty join a resistance group and struggle to find a new path for humanity.

Audrey easily settles into the role of surrogate mom, taking care of countless children orphaned by the Visitor’s ordeal. She becomes a beloved figure and learns to thrive in spite of her strange, new biology.

Now part of the Exalted Four, Aster diligently leads humanity’s rebuilding as its omniscient and benevolent ruler. Almost every moment of his life is occupied with work, but he always makes time for Sam.

For the first time in his life, Papineau rests. There will be enough work to last lifetimes. Surrounded by friends, he allows himself a moment of tranquility before reconstruction begins.

: Lyle gets a better ending if you finish his D&D campaign. We also don’t get an ending for Phillippe because he wasn’t fully recovered.

: Here is our final score. Promise is the ending worth the most, at 2000 points. Unity, Mask, and the two original endings are worth 1000.

: The various bad endings are worth less. Here’s how the score breaks down:

Bosses Defeated: (100 pts)

• Grinning Beast
• Stargazer
• Baby Teeth (Day 2)
• Rat King
• Rat Chimera
• Crawler
• Sewer Beast
• Enforcer
• SWAT Truck
• Hellride
• Garbage Worm
• Electrophage
• Guardian
• Spore Mother
• Taxidermy
• Pompom
• Crawling Hand
• Milledoigts
• Typewrither
• Panopticon
• Cinnamon
• APC
• Trench Digger

Total: 2200 (should be 2300)

: We have 23 bosses by my count. I’m not sure which one doesn’t count. This also confirms that beating the Laughing Mold through dialog doesn’t count.

** Party Members: (200 points)**

• Leigh
• Joel
• Papineau
• Audrey
• Xaria
• Monty

Total: 1200

: We got the second highest possible rank, at SSS. The highest rank requires 15,000 points, which I’m not sure is possible on Survivor. It would be if you had perfect door encounter RNG (or used a mod) and if Lyle, Aster, Ernest, and Phillippe counted for points.

: This LP isn’t over, though. We still have a bunch of endings left. Next time, we’ll kill the Visitor. We’ll also finish Pierre’s questline and finally give Jeanne her laundry back.

: If you take the door on the left in Apartment 12, you wind up in Sybil’s bathroom.

: “Hi. I don’t remember you. Can I help you?”

: “Are you Sybil?”

: “No, I’m not Sybil. I’m nobody. I don’t know. I don’t know what I am. I think.. I’ve been thinking about this for days now.”

: “I’m shaking now that I’m about to say it out loud. Like saying the words will break the spell and I’ll just… disappear. Here goes. I think I am not.. real.”

: “I might be some kind of fake person. I think I am some kind of fake person. A homunculi. …phew. I’m still here. That’s a relief. I think. Can I help you?”

: “What happened to you?”

: “I remember having a life. Friends. Family. Having a life. Watching movies. Stargazing with a dear friend. Bu it’s like.. it was all a dream.”

: “It wasn’t me. This was someone else’s life that i inherited. And now, I am here. And this is all too real. And it’s miserable. I am rooted to the ground and all alone. _{I’m sorry. Forget that. That was dramatic. I’m fine, really. Don’t worry about me.} I don’t really matter.”

: “I think you matter.”

: “…That’s easy to say, Mr. Real Person. Do you think you’ll remember me after you walk out that door?”

: Oh, I remember this one. It’s just like Hot Coldman from Undertale. I think that was his name.

: No wait, Hot Coldman was the guy from Death Stranding. I think the Undertale one was Die Hardman.

: “I think I’ll remember you.”

: “You are just being nice to something that looks wretched. This is just pity talking.”

: “You can grow into a real human.”

: What he’s saying is that this thing can be a real human bean, and a real hero. I haven’t done that in FOREVER.

: “How can I? I don’t even have a past. I don’t even have a name.”

: “You can name yourself.”

: “I don’t know. I don’t have a real past, a real life. I don’t know how to name that. Am I a boy or a girl, even?”

: Oh you sweet summer child, you can be whatever you want.

: “It’s up to you, I guess.”

: “Uhhhh.. I guess I’m a girl. I don’t know. Sybil was. Just a whim. I’m new at this. Maybe I’ll change my mind. Can I do that?”

: Yes!

: Between trying to call herself Charlotte and her default name being the name of a ship, this is dangerously close to turning into a show I won’t name.

: “WAIT NO. I just realized why I thought of Charlotte. That’s the name of a spider. Urrgh. That’s embarrassing. No. No. Hang on. False alarm.”

: “Arggh, all I can think now is spider names. Awful, awful! I barely look like a spider, too! Barely. Uhhh… Isabelle.”

: The Spider Husk’s name goes from “Spider Husk” to “Charlotte” to “Charlotte?” to “Not Charlotte”.

: “I feel good about that name! Okay. This is a good start. Could you help like.. pull me out of this mass of flesh? I need some independence.”

: “Oowww.. that really hurt. I think I’m okay.”

: “Nice to meet you, Isabelle.”

: “Nice to meet you too, Sam. This has a nice ring to it. I think I’m okay.”

: “Welcome to personhood! How do you feel?”

: “Hang on. I need some time. This is new territory for me. I also need to learn to walk. All my false memories are of being a biped. I’ll figure it out. I think. Uh.. thank you.”

: Isabelle will try to walk, and will fall over. I think this game is trying to Voight-Kampff me.

: Isabelle will eventually make her way to Mutt’s, and will give you an item held in the ranged slot that will revive whoever holds it if they die.

: She also gets a cane from Mutt.

[Timrod]

Summary

: This short update is going to be about the Unity ending. The Unity ending is the bad end counterpart to Promise - instead of keeping the promise, Sam kills Sybil and opens this door.

: Doing that requires going through Meat World, which is Sybil’s real body. She has nine “organs”, each of which give her a special attack.

: Getting to Meat World requires the use of Iris Keys, and only two of those exist outside of Meat World.

: This hole in the parking garage opens up after the power outage happens, and spawns a boss next to it.

: Darryl sucks because he’s going to do a ton of damage before you even get to hit him. He counts as a boss for score purposes.

: Eventually, he comes out of his shell and wants a hug, which is another full-party attack that does a lot of damage.

: We kill him, and inside the hole next to him is an iris key. There are a few places we could use this, but the best one is the giant eyeball room on the first floor.

: If you sit here long enough with an iris key in your inventory..

You are transfixed by the great eye. It pulsates rythmically. The entire room pulses along with it. Even your own heartbeat joins the chorus. Why does it look so familiar? Is this.. your eye? Somehow? Why does it feel like…

Your vision swims and blurs. The eye is so compelling. You approach calmly. You look down at the small shape approaching you. It looks familiar. Like something you’ve seen before. A long time ago. Something you almost forgot.

It approaches you. It doesn’t seem afraid. It knows you don’t mean it any harm. It clutches something in its hand. A long, needle-like key. You sense that you can somehow will this creature to do whatever you wish with this key.

: The answer is “Stab me”.

: This turns the eye into a portal to Meat World.

: Meat World is a big maze with lots of enemies in it.

: These things have 300 HP each and can inflict a bunch of different status effects, including charm.

: I’m only going to kill two organs, just so you can see what happens. This is Stanley, the brain.

: Stanley has around 600 HP and isn’t hard to take out. His special move is “Brain Blast”. It doesn’t hit very hard, but it causes paralysis on hit.

: The ideal way to do this is probably to wipe all the smaller enemies, find the iris keys, open the doors, and then spend a day wiping the bosses.

: Down the hall from Stanley is this thing, which has a weapon we can take.

: This is the Ocular Tetherblade. If you’re planning on doing the Unity ending, or just spending a day in Meat World, this is a major upgrade for Leigh. It has a 20% chance to blind on hit.

: Meat World has different floors, and honestly I couldn’t tell you which one this is.

: The stairs bring us out near where we’d have entered Meat World if we had used the key on the door behind where Hellride was.

: This is Camille, the stomach. She has a full-party attack that causes acid burn, and is one of the organs that definitely needs to die before you consider fighting Sybil.

: The reason I’m not doing all of them is that one of the entrances to Meat World is behind all that shit in the underwater apartment.

: That entrance is the only way to fight the heart, which gives Sybil a full-party attack.

: Once you take out the organs, you have to go back into Sybil’s apartment and attack her after showing her the telescope, which means you need to have done the full Promise route as well.

: Sybil has 3,000 HP and has a couple of really nasty moves if her organs aren’t taken out. One of them (the intestines) can permanently reduce your party’s max HP by 50%.

: If you kill her, she drops the key to the locked door in the planetarium. The only thing in there is a single note.

Notes, dated to three weeks ago.

The Visitor is approaching Earth to investigate what it thinks are distant, old parts of it looking back at it.

IT IS CORRECT.

The moment we remember this, the moment our cells remember their original purpose, we stop being independent and melt back into its form. Our entire planet is Visitor mass, including us and everything else on it. The trees. The rocks.

This is why and how it can change us. It can change us the same way it can change itself. An enormous, god-like, universe-spanning being with billions of fragmented minds holding on to scraps of individuality by a thread.

Glancing at the real deal, or even a representation of it, shatters the illusion for a moment. And suddenly our bodies are malleable, pliable clay to be molded in its image. We are only independent for as long as we believe we are. We are one. The truth will literally obliterate us.

Maybe if we can lie to the Visitor, somehow make it believe we are separate from it, we can go on co-existing as separate entities for some time.

I think we have that right. Do we? I guess it doesn’t really matter. We need to convince the Visitor that we are separate beings. We need to lie to it. This is our only chance.

Communicate with it. Demonstrate that we are independent agents. Flaunt our subjectivity.

This information is toxic. The only reason my own discovery of this has not resulted in catastrophe is that I have changed so much. I am disconnected from our world. I am apart from it.

But if anyone else, anyone still somewhat human came to realize this, I believe our entire world would cease to be within a few minutes.

You feel a sense of impending doom. You try to put down the notes, but find they are stuck to your palm. You feel the paper curl into your hand. It feels almost pleasant as you merge with it - as its subatomic pieces melt into yours.

You put a hand on the door handle, and your fingers sink into it. The metal knob melts in your arm.

Your legs are rooted to the ground. You sense the wood of the floorboards. You tug at the nails keeping them in place. But the nails are also a part of you. They just haven’t been coaxed into joining yet. Their time will come.

Your senses spread through the building, your awareness infecting the other inhabitants. You are all one. You’ve always been.

You feel horrified at first at what you are doing and try to stop it. But you can’t. Your own mass is not really under your control. You are the conductor of a rebellious, unruly orchestra.

You feel your terrible knowledge infect more. A man cries out for help as he sinks into his sofa. You embrace him with felt cushion arms on your quilted chest. Everything will be okay, you tell him. You’ve already forgotten his name. So has he.

A family of four embrace one last time as they melt into one another. You feel tears on their cheeks. You feel their love and fear. And then it’s gone. All they leave behind is a mound of skin.

These human struggles feel so quaint now. Friends? Enemies? Lovers? Family? Strangers? Just things you made up to amuse yourself. None of it was real. Just a story you told yourself.

You feel the city’s buildings as if they were your limbs and realize there is no good or evil at play here. Nothing is really gained or lost. It’s all good.

Your own thoughts become a blur. The new paradigm digs deep into the ground, and spreads over land and sea. After a few hours, the entire world is awakened. And soon, it is reabsorbed into the Visitor’s mass.

It is as though the Earth never existed at all. Humanity was just a phase that an infinitesimal splinter of the Visitor experimented with. And now, it is forgotten.

: Unity is divisive among the fanbase - I know a lot of people don’t like it because it definitively tries to explain how the Visitor works when the game never really tells you what exactly it is that makes the mutations happen.

: Personally, I just think it doesn’t make sense that Sybil bothered to write down this big, world-destroying secret.

[Timrod]

Summary

: Huh? What? What was I doing again?

: …Sam?

: I think he’s in some kind of self-induced fugue state. His mind’s cleaning up the mess, as it were.

: It happens every time he thinks about clowns.

: How did I get here? Oh, right! Sybil, do you want to play this terrible anime JRPG I bought off a guy in a fedora?

: Sam, how much did you pay for that?

: $120. He tried to buy it back and then tried to give me his katana, but the katana’s name was Cat Piss in Japanese so I didn’t want it.

: Sam, do you know what emulation is?

: Emulation?

: This is how I imagine this route going. We’re going to start from Day 7 and do nothing but waste time playing Massacre Princess.

: Actually, let’s go do that superboss first. We can also take a break to give Jeanne her laundry back and talk to Pierre.

: Swordmaster Comatus is a reference to The Master from Paper Mario 64, who was an optional superboss.

: Before we fight him, we need to ask him a question. He won’t respond to most of these.

: “Who were you before?”

: “What’s important is who I am now.”

: “I want to know!”

: “My past is hazy. The memories are faint. A mystery even to me.”

: “Nothing at all? Are you sure?”

: “…”

: “…”

: Typical yoga idiots. They’re all in it for chicks. Or twinks. Or both.

: I do yoga classes twice a week for the exercise and stretching.

: My wife tried to have me take one of those once. She’s much better at it than I am.

: “I always wanted to try yoga.”

: “Perhaps I can teach you, if you are worthy.”

: This is the only time I think you can see this portrait. There’s one on the wiki where his cap is up and you can see he has a third eye.

: We need to do this in order to unlock something after the fight.

: Comatus has 3,000 HP. All of his attacks have a chance to freeze and cause bleed. If you have the 8-Ball, USE IT.

: The good news is that even with 50% stun resistance, Audrey manages to stun him pretty consistently with Explosive Shot.

: After his first attack, Comatus begins his yoga routine with Tadasana. Tadasana gives him an 80% chance to counterattack when hit, and reduces incoming damage by 20%. Every time Comatus switches poses, he heals a little and purges all debuffs that aren’t Pain.

: If you do yoga, you might know Tadasana better as “mountain pose”. It’s one of the most basic poses there is, and it’s used as a base to get into other poses.

: Why don’t we all stand up and do that for a bit? You know, just to do it.

: Fuck that. Yoga’s a weird cum cult.

: It is time to call in the 8-Ball.

: GRANT ME POWER!

: Comatus has a four-hit attack that can potentially get really nasty if he manages to hit everyone. Fortunately, we have Nitro Boost.

: Because the 8-Ball increases all stats by 50%, the party barely takes damage.

: Once his HP goes to around 75%, Comatus switches poses to Virabhadrasana, which gives him a 50% boost to attack but increases his damage taken by 50%.

: You see Virabhadrasana in yoga classes all the time, but they usually call it “Warrior Pose” or “Warrior 1”.

: You can chain it into Warrior 2, but I can’t because my wings get in the way so I have to modify. Warrior 3 is another option if you want to do a one-legged pose.

: Warrior 1 is also a really easy yoga pose. Let’s get up and do that one too. It gives you a nice stretch in your legs.

: Oh, the Shiva pose. He came up with that and started showing it off to everybody thinking it made him look like a badass. Then I punched him in the gut.

: Papineau crits him for over 1/10th of his HP.

: And then Audrey does this.

: This puts Comatus into Phase 3, where he switches poses to Vrksasana. Vrksasana regenerates 15% of his HP every turn at the cost of lowering his attack, defense, ballistics, and bullet defense by 50%.

: Vrksasana is better known as “tree pose”. It’s a graceful one-leg pose and is super easy to do. Just make sure if you can’t get your foot that high that you don’t press it against your knee.

: Let’s get up and do this one too. It’s fairly easy, though you might get a little wobbly like I did.

: “You are a.. formidable opponent. I bequeath you my blade. You’ve earned it.”

: Because of the 8-Ball, we don’t see him use his other two poses. The next pose is Urdhva Hastasana, which makes Comatus attack twice a turn. In exchange, he takes double damage.

: Urdhva Hastasana is “upward tree pose”. It’s Mountain Pose except you put your arms straight up. You can combine it with a side bend to do Half Moon Pose and it’s a really nice stretch for your core.

: Make sure to watch your wings and your tail so they don’t hit anyone or knock anything over.

: I think that’s a you problem.

: Go ahead and do that one too - you can throw it in with your Tadasana if you haven’t done that yet.

: His final pose is called Astavakrasana, sometimes called “8-Angle Pose”. This makes his attacks (not his skills) hit twice and also boosts accuracy and crit chance by 50%, which negates Painful Stab and Nitro Boost. In this pose, he takes 15% of his current HP in damage a turn.

: I would not recommend doing that last one. I actually tried it only to discover my legs do not go that way.

: I can’t either because of my wings.

: I won’t because I value my balls.

: I can do it easy.

: You don’t have bones in your legs.

: The Whisperblade has four break stages and can’t be repaired. It gets stronger every time it breaks.

: The reason it turns black is a reference to the Comatus mushroom, which turns black and dissolves very quickly once it reaches maturity.

: It’s also currently bugged. A few weapons (like the jawbone club we got off Baby Teeth) are meant to inflict status effects but instead provide protection against them. The Whisperblade is supposed to do both bleed and freeze, but only inflicts freeze while providing bleed resist.

: This is also true of the Hellsword, Azure Greatsword, Combat Knife, and the Ocular Tetherblade we saw last update. I didn’t know this until just now and it explains a lot.

: This goes on Leigh, even though there’s not much we can fight with it at this point apart from maybe the Furnace and Boiler Beast.

: Comatus shows up at the basement camp the day after you beat him. If you asked him about doing yoga..

: “And although the past is the past, I admit that I still draw strength from that practice. It may have even helped me retain my sanity as I.. became what I am now.”

: “You have the countenance of a warrior, but I feel many things weigh heavily on your mind. Perhaps those teachings could help. My new form is somewhat incongruent for its practice now, but it would gladden me if I could still teach someone to do it in my stead. Are you interested?”

: It’s funny to me that Sam would need to learn to use Mountain Pose, because chances are you do it several times a day without realizing.

: This unlocks all of Comatus’s yoga poses for Sam. They all start by using Tadasana, and then you have to go through chains of poses to get to the later ones like Astavakrasana.

: Tadasana is definitely useful by itself, but the other poses take too long to set up when Sam has a more important job in the form of Nitro Boost and Painful Stab.

: I reloaded after fighting Comatus only because we aren’t going to need the Whisperblade for this ending. Let’s check on Pierre.

: “Hello again my scaredy friend! I think maybe I could help you a bit. So, are you ready?”

: “Today, we’ll talk about clowns. My favorite topic!”

: “…how are you feeling? Maybe you’ve had enough for a day. I think you’re getting used to the subject matter a little! How encouraging!”

: “Tomorrow, we’ll try something a little more scary still. We’ll take a big step.”

: Tomorrow we’ll see Pierre’s true form. Let’s go back to the apartment and play Massacre Princess.

You play as Rush Braver, a spiky-haired youth who practices swordsmanship in his spare time. His best friend, Blast Armbrust, is the strongest hunter in the village.

: I think I’ve told this story once before, but I played on a World of Warcraft private server once and was farming achievements because I was bored.

: The server was mostly South Americans during the hours I could play, so I got in a group with a bunch of Brazilians to farm a raid I had never done before.

: I have no idea what I’m doing, and the raid leader looks at me and says two words: “MAGE BRUST”. I took those words to heart and.. I’m gonna be real, we absolutely failed that raid achievement.

: We can put in a new name for Blast, but we’re doing this all in one update so I’ll go with the default.

: The dialog window changes during Massacre Princess.

: “The Cave of Trials? Isn’t that dangerous, Blast?”

: “No!”

: I love this exchange. Just “No!”

Rush and Blast set off for the cave in search of a boar. Predictably, the cave is filled with all kinds of creatures that you have to fight in turn-based combat. Eventually, you find a boar. It’s a tough boss fight.

: Massacre Princess isn’t meant to be any one anime or JRPG, but this is absolutely the part at the start of Final Fantasy 8 where Squall has to fight Ifrit in a cave.

: It’s also the next part of FF8 where Squall has to fight a T-Rex in the training center in Balamb Garden because Final Fantasy 8 was a lot of things, but one thing it was not was a compelling story.

: “You’re too slow, Rush! You’re not fast enough to pull off a Meteor Strike yet! Stick to the basics!”

: “(Damn… I’m never gonna be good enough..)”

: And this is, of course, the scene in Final Fantasy 10 where Tidus learns the Jecht Shot.

Rush and Blast carry the boar home, but there’s smoke on the horizon…

You race back to the village, dropping the boar. The town is ablaze and bodies litter the streets. A tall man in a strange, black costume with a giant sword grins devilishly as you approach.

: “Wind Crystal? What’s that?!”

: “Forget it, Rush! We’ve gotta get this guy!”

A boss battle begins. Ominous and kind of rockin’ boss music plays. But it doesn’t last long. The strange man takes out Rush and Blast in a single hit each.

: “D-damn you!”

: “R-Rush.. is that you? I.. I can’t see. I don’t think.. I’m gonna.. make it… don’t let them.. have this…”

: “Blast, nooooooooo!”

: This scene is, of course, a reference to Final Fantasy 7 when Sephiroth burns Nibelheim to the ground. There’s also a bit of the scene in FF4 where Kain gets demolished by Titan.

: I was VERY into Final Fantasy until around the end of middle school. Then I realized how utterly stupid it is.

: At least you didn’t run a Sephiroth fan-shrine.

: Unlike most games, Massacre Princess drains morale. On my first playthrough, I marathoned it and never had a problem.

: The next morning, we go visit Pierre first thing. I am not joking when I say we are going to spend the entire day playing Massacre Princess.

You nearly faint at the thought.

: “You can do it! I believe in you!”

You approach it. Him. Pierre. You hold out your hand. And you feel something round, cold, and rubbery.

: “Hee hee hee! You’re making great progress. I’m proud of you! I think tomorrow, we can up the ante a little further.”

: I want to go get Lyle’s D&D set, so let’s go see Jeanne while we’re down there.

: Jeanne is now a giant hydra and most of her heads are insane. We need to kill them all off.

: At this point in the game, they’re not much of a challenge. You’re meant to do this a lot earlier.

: Alternatively, you can see Jeanne’s body right across from her. You can kill it to kill all of the heads, but this also kills Jeanne.

: There are certain spots where Jeanne will lift her neck for you.

: “Y-you’re back. Uhm.. things went f-from bad to worse. It’s over. They’re all gone. Thank you SO much.”

: “I don’t know how I can repay you. You saved me from hell. For now, this is all I have. Take it.”

: She gives us an elixir.

: “I need some time alone, I think. I need to.. process this. Sorry. I don’t mean to kick you out or anything. You did so much for me.”

: “Can you please, uh.. check on me tomorrow? I just need some time.”

: “Oh, Mazes and Wizards? I actually used to play that with some college friends.”

: Audrey is one of two characters who have played Mazes & Wizards before, not counting Lyle.

: “Well, I like video games…”

: “RPGs feel very different around a table with f-friends! It might be fun to p-play again… it’s hard to keep a group together for a full campaign.”

: “I haven’t been able to run a game in years. I have a full campaign and a lot of notes, but my last group only played two sessions before it petered out.”

: I have never gotten to play a custom D&D or Pathfinder campaign.

: “They didn’t even get to meet the bad guy! So much work wasted..”

: “We should play it. Now.”

: “Like.. TODAY? I can’t do that!!! We can’t do that. That’s… I’m not ready! I.. you… I don’t think I’m in the headspace t-to play make believe about wizards at a time like this.”

: “Some escapism could do us good.”

: “…maybe you’re right. …okay! I mean, there’s five of us. We have enough to play. I still have all of my campaign notes, but I need to prepare a bit.”

: We can’t play until after.. I think it’s 6PM. Keep in mind that when you play, you will play with whoever is in the active party.

: The setups I’d recommend are Joel, Papineau, and Sophie (Sophie is a door encounter we haven’t met) and Ernest, Audrey, and Aster.

: Dan (who we also haven’t met yet), Phillippe and the Roaches are all joke characters and are pretty funny if they’re all together.

You start where you left off. Reeling from the destruction of his village and the loss of his best friend, Blast, Rush heads towards the only clue he has: Hyrcania. This is your first time on the world map. It’s gigantic. You wander around fighting grindy battles until you stumble upon a village.

In the village, you meet two mercenaries - a tough soldier with a huge axe named Zonrath and a beautiful Elven sorceress named Himiko. They’ll join you if you help them fight some goblins.

The three of you set out for the goblin cave, which is labyrinthian and filled with all kinds of traps and encounters. After a grueling slog, which requires about an hour of grinding to get through, you reach the boss: the Goblin King.

: Himiko is pretty clearly Deedlit from Record of Lodoss War. I don’t think Zonrath is a reference to anything in particular.

A boss battle commences. Himiko’s water magic, which had so far been useful for taking out goblins, is completely ineffective in the battle. You’re forced to rely on your items, and in the end you just barely win.

With that, the Goblin King falls to the ground, dropping a small blue crystal. Zonrath walks over and picks it up.

: “Huh? What’s thi-”

Suddenly, a giant sword rips through Zonrath’s guts, killing him instantly. He drops the crystal, which is snatched up by the large man in black from before - the man who destroyed your village!

: “Maldark…”

: “I knew you were keeping the crystals from me. Hand me the Wind Crystal and I’ll let you go.”

: “Never! Not after what you did to my village!”

: “So be it.”

A second boss fight ensues. Once again, Maldark easily defeats your party. He smiles smugly as he takes the Wind Crystal from your hand.

: “Pathetic. Your Meteor Strike has barely improved. Farewell.”

The man in black saunters off, leaving you and Himiko to regain your composure in the cave. A single tear trickles down Himiko’s eye as she holds Zonrath’s tattered body.

: Let’s keep going.

: “If we want to find Maldark, we’ll need to go through the Cavern of Calefaction. We’ll need to be careful - fire monsters block the way.”

: “Fire monsters, huh? They’re no match for me!”

: Says the guy who gets his ass kicked every episode.

An old man with a kind of.. squirrel-rabbit thing on his shoulder approaches Rush and Himiko. He wears a wizard’s robe and carries a wooden staff.

: Zalatar is a reference to Tellah from Final Fantasy 4. Rabu is a reference to Poshul from Chrono Cross.

: “Blessing of the Mana Tree be upon you.”

: Secret of Mana, anyone?

: “Rabu!!”

With your new companions, you set off to the Cavern of Calefaction. Unfortunately, the new area has an unbelievable difficulty spike and you’re only able to win two or three encounters before you have to rest at an inn. You spend a miserable hour grinding. Himiko’s water magic is useful, and Zalatar’s buffs and debuffs are kind of nice, but Rabu is totally useless. It almost seems like a joke character.

: We then get jumpscared by this guy at the door. This is Dan. Unfortunately, we missed the best moment he has.

: I feel attacked. Dan is a weird freak who has a bunch of unique mechanics. He has a “viewer count” bar that determines how strong his skills are.

: Dan can either go Calm or Irate to access support or damage skills. Calm lowers his viewer count, while Irate boosts it.

: We’re not going to keep him because I fucked something up and had to reload, but his best moment is if you bring him to the roof. Dan has a skill called “Poll Viewers”, which is the only way to scan enemies.

: Because he never stops streaming, this means that if you bring him to the roof, you can use Poll Viewers and it will cause his chat to mutate. Dan’s ending in the Promise route is that he gets banned from Twitch for exposing people to the Visitor.

: He also has a quest to retrieve his “NeoDuo”, which makes me feel even more attacked because I own a consolized Neo-Geo.

After a brief grinding session, you’re finally strong enough to attempt the Cavern of Calefaction. As expected, it is incredibly difficult, even after gaining several levels, and the layout is really confusing.

: “Rabu Rabu??”

The earth shakes… red stalactites fall from the cavern roof. A flaming red form erupts from a fissure and charges toward you!

: “No.. it’s the Flame Golem… I had hoped we could avoid this…”

A tough battle ensues. You fight a giant flame thing that can use an area fire attack that nearly wipes you out. Himiko’s water magic saves the day, but Rabu is as useless as always. When the flame golem dies, a red crystal falls from its chest. Zalatar leans over to pick it up, but..

: “Maldark!”

: “So you’ve retrieved another of the crystals for me. You’re quite the useful pawns, you know.”

: “I’ll show you who’s a pawn.. Meteor St-”

: “No, rush! You mustn’t! Run now. I’ll stop Maldark. We have business to discuss.”

: “A-are you sure, Zalatar?”

: “I am sure.”

: “Rabu..”

The party runs off through the cave exit, leaving Zalatar alone with Maldark. Maldark approaches the old man, a smug grin on this face.

: “Always one to play the hero, aren’t you, father? Your heroics won’t save the day this time.”

: Tetsugoro Kusabi would be a way better JRPG villain than this.

: “Tetsu? Hah hah hah! How long has it been since someone called me that? Enough with the pleasantries. Hand me the fire crystal or join mother in Hell.”

: “Never!”

You watch a cutscene of the two battling. Zalatar is able to hold his own with magic, but alas - it’s not enough. Maldark cuts him down with his giant sword and takes the crystal from his body. Maldark confidently struts away from his fallen father, glimmering red energy coursing throughout his body. The screen fades to black.

: This is very obviously the scene from the end of The Last Jedi where Adam Driver kills Harrison Ford. I hated that movie.

: At this point I remember that Phillippe is hungry, so we feed him one last time.

: We did it! We saved Phillippe!

: “So.. um.. can I.. can I crash here for a while? I’ve never been - uh, I mean, I haven’t been on my own in a long time! I used to be, uh, surrounded by friends. It’s hard out there for a little moth!”

: Let’s talk to him again because there’s some more dialog. I don’t know how Francis Coulombe (I realized too late I’ve been spelling his name wrong the entire LP) was so on point for Phillippe, but he was.

: “Oops! I-I mean, um… even moths need a little ‘me time’ sometimes! Hee hee!”

: If we insist on talking to him..

: “It sure is a good thing I killed the princess.”

: “Ohhhh, definitely! Thank you SOOOOooooOOOO much for freeing me from her evil clutches! Now I get to be a happy widdle moth again, and not the magnificent viceroy of eternal fungal glory!”

: Phillippe is in his own personal hell and we are his tormentor. Just wait until we try and play D&D with him.

: If I was writing this, I would have had a scene post-Fungal Lair where if you talk to Pierre after Sam is spored at least once, it does something to his brain where he can actually recover from his coulrophobia.

: Sam is now all in on clowns and sees Phillippe being depressed and goes “I know what’ll help!” and brings him to Pierre. It ends with Phillippe begging for death.

: “Huh? Princess? What princess?!”

The team runs outside and finds a lone swordsman battling hordes of demons. He has long, black hair and a cool scar over one eye. The tail of his badass trench coat billows behind him.

: Blatant reference to Auron in Final Fantasy 10. My favorite part is how the portrait does not match the description at all.

Together with the swordsman, you fight wave after wave of demons and skeletons. After a grueling battle, the village is saved.

: “You there. Your swordsmanship has potential, but your timing is off. I’m Musashi, a travelling ‘ronin’ from the East. It seems the Princess torments even this land..”

: “The Princess? Who’s that?”

: “An evil demoness who nearly destroyed the world 999 years ago. She was sealed away in the Tower of Hyrcania, but her minions keep appearing throughout the land.”

: “Hyrcania? Huh.. that’s where we’re going. We should team up.”

: “The Tower of Hyrcania is north of here. We can get there by su-”

: This seems a little ridiculous even for a 90s JRPG.

: I like how they all die before they can become annoying.

: “Rabu!!!”

: Except that one for some reason.

: “I searched long and hard for the bearer of the Earth Crystal, but never expected him to be here…”

: “I.. I never got to tell him I loved him…”

: “You bastard, Maldark! I’ll get you this time!”

: “I have no interest in fighting, child. Time is short. I must make haste to Hyrcania before it’s too late…”

: We play one more time, but there’s no dialog, just a generic message. This puts us exactly halfway through Massacre Princess, which takes two full days to finish.

: We run into Harriet at the door. Harriet is Sophie’s mother, and Sophie is another door encounter party member.

: Sophie uses a slingshot and marbles, which can also be equipped to Joel as his only means of ranged attack.

: I’ve never used Sophie at all. She’s also odd in that she counts as a party member for rank points, but if you meet Harriet and choose to let Sophie go with her, she no longer does.

: There’s a chance Harriet is mutated, in which case you can no longer see her shoes and her dress is longer. If you give Sophie to mutated Harriet, Sophie dies.

: This is where I fucked up. I forgot to save, and had the wrong party. I want to do this with Audrey, Ernest, and Aster for screenshot purposes.

: Because all of the dialog has been dumped, I think what I’m going to do is an update that is just the Mazes & Wizards campaign as if every character is participating.

: Instead, let’s end the day. We have a lot of stuff left to do.

: We can visit Jeanne the next day, and the dialog auto-advances which is really annoying. She’ll try to hug Sam.

: We are 2 for 2 on bad hugs (Fred Who Bites and Joel) so far.

She hesitates, but then decides to try it. She sways her sinuous body towards you and awkwardly attempts a quick greeting hug, keeping her myriad claws away from your skin. You get uncomfortably close to the zipper-like line of fangs running down her body.

You can’t help but think back to the scenes of horror you witnessed when you fought her other heads. The people that were torn apart in jaws just like these.

From this close, she could disappear you in an instant. Nobody would ever know what happened to you.

: I’m sure Leigh and Audrey would kill her before that happened.

: Let’s give her back her laundry that we’ve been carrying around for over a week.

: “You.. what?”

: "…My laundry…?’

: “Umm.. err.. I forgot about this. I… Th-”

: “You.. God. Why am I even laughing? Hee hee. This is horrible. God. Ugh. Okay. I’m done. Ooof.”

: “I feel like I’m holding my old life in my hands, and it looks so foreign to me already. God. I shouldn’t be laughing.”

: “But you standing there and handing the basket over… Man. I think I really needed that. Thank you so much.”

: “What am I going to do with these now? Can I wear clothes at all anymore? Well, I can figure this out later. This really cheered me up. Maybe I’ll be all right after all.”

: “Oh. Before I forget. I did say I’d pay you fifty dollars for this.. here! As promised!”

: This isn’t the last scene with Jeanne. If you come back the next day…

: “So how do I look? Not bad, huh?”

: “Suits you well!”

: “Come on. Have you seen a more stylish worm-snake-eel-hydra thing before?! Heh heh. Don’t think you have.”

: “Well, as for the rest of me, I think I’ll need a tarp. Or some bed sheets. Maybe a big tent would do.. I"ll figure something out.”

: You can probably see why Jeanne is a favorite among fanartists. Let’s go talk to Pierre now.

: I know he’s probably secretly hideous, but I’d hug him.

You feel so very ill.

: “If you can hug a clown, you can do anything! Come on! Bring it in! Show me all you’ve learned!”

You give Pierre a hug. Something feels weird about him. His body seems completely inhuman. Weird moving lumps. You feel a set of teeth at his back, under the robe. Limbs growing in all the wrong places. What the hell is he. What the hell is this? What are you doing. Are you in danger? Is this a trap? Will he eat you? You are in danger.

: “I’m so proud of you! You are really putting in the effort. Look at you, can you believe it? You just hugged a clown! Incredible! You only yelped once! and it was more of a whimper, really.”

: “You will never fear clowns again. That’s my promise! I can’t wait! I’m so excited!”

: Let’s never come back.

: “Alright! Here goes. It’ll feel really good to finally get to stretch out a bit. Can you close your eyes for just a moment? It’s a little embarrassing to do in front of somebody.”

: The screen goes black, and you can hear honking noises interspersed with what sounds like bones snapping.

: “Okay. Uh. Hang on. Agh! I’m stuck! Hang on. Wait, no. I got it. I’m fine. Alright! You can look! Be strong!”

: If you don’t want to know what Pierre looks like, I blurred the picture.

: “Phew! Alrighty then! I don’t have enough room to fully come out here, but this will do for now. Baby steps!”

: “Sooo… how are you feeling? You look a bit.. off.”

: We get an entire menu of “KILL IT”. Pierre has 1200 HP, but we only need to take out around half of that to end the fight.

: You can’t die to him, as he’ll end the fight and heal you before you would game over.

: “Wait, what? What’s wrong?! Hey!!”

: “Did I do something wrong? I’m so sorry! I was really excited to finally show someone my real face!”

: “I’M NEVER SLEEPING AGAIN!”

: “Ah, well. I mean, you didn’t run away. And you’re still here! I’m starting to suspect I don’t have the know-how to help someone overcome an extreme phobia. Do you think it helped a little, at least?”

: “MAYBE A LITTLE BIT.”

: “To celebrate, here is a little gift from your clown friend! Maybe embodying the thing you fear could help you a little bit. Something to try!”

: “Well, good luck conquering your fears! I think I’ve done everything I could..”

: The Clown Wig and Nose is a head slot item that gives a ton of different status effect skills. Pie Throw in particular is great with Nitro Boost and Painful Stab.

: Giant Revolver is a weird skill that has a 1/7 chance of doing a bunch of gun damage. Any time it misses, the chance goes up, but it resets once the battle ends.

: Let’s finish Massacre Princess.

: “Rush, before we go any further, there’s something I need to tell y-”

: “Rabu Rabu!”

A beautiful ninja with long, brown hair and a pair of sai backflips from the top of the tower and lands before you. She raises her weapons.

A pretty easy boss fight ensues. She creates multiple copies of herself, but the real version is the only one with a shadow. You win after a few minutes.

: Mei is a reference to Shadow in Final Fantasy 6.

: “Huff… huff.. s-so strong.. maybe you truly are the one who can end this tower’s curse. I.. I must join you!”

With Mei in the group, you begin your ascent of the tower. It’s an insufferable teleporter puzzle that takes a lot of trial and error. After at least an hour, you make it to the top.

: This is a reference to Kefka’s Tower at the end of Final Fantasy 6, which was a teleporter maze.

: “With the four elemental crystals, I can finally..”

: “Maldark!”

: “You again? Why did you follow me? There’s not much time left - the seal will soon be broken!”

: “Seal? What are you talking about? I don’t care about that, I just want revenge!”

You battle Maldark again, but this time you’re on more equal footing thanks to your grinding. The four crystals are enemies, and each time you destroy one, Maldark gets weaker. You finally shatter all four and win.

: This is, of course, Culex in Super Mario RPG.

: “Wh-what have you done?! You destroyed the elemental crystals! You’ve.. you’ve..”

: “Rabu?!?!”

The tower quakes and pieces of masonry fall from the ceiling. Mei calls you over to a balcony.

: “Quick! Get on my airship! There’s no time!”

: This is another FF6 reference. At the halfway point of FF6, you fight Kefka on a floating island before he destroys the world.

: Once you fight him, the island self-destructs and you have to extract using your airship. If you have Shadow, he goes off on his own. You have to wait until the timer is almost up in order for him to make it back to the ship so you can save him.

You run to a conveniently-positioned airship on the balcony, but you’re not fast enough. Maldark swings his sword and unceremoniously gibs Mei into a thousand pieces.

: “Mei! Dammit.. my Meteor Strike wasn’t fast enough!”

: We’re doing nothing today except playing Massacre Princess, so let’s keep going.

You pilot your fancy airship around the world map, checking out all the cool new places you unlocked. You discover Golden Valley, a casino town filled with minigames. You spend some time playing minigames until you’ve won some overpowered equipment. The best game is Rabu Racer, and the worst is definitely the skateboarding half-pipe.

You ride a Ferris wheel with Himiko. At the very top, she turns to you.

: This is, of course, the Gold Saucer from Final Fantasy 7 (and later the Manderville Gold Saucer in FF14).

: “Rush.. there’s… something I’ve been meaning to tell you for a while.”

: “You fool.. do you know what you’ve done? By destroying the elemental crystals, you’ve freed the Massacre Princess Catholicon!”

: “What?!?!”

: “I was using the crystals to seal her for another thousand years! She’ll be free at.. the stroke of midnight! We don’t have much time!”

: “Damn… but how do I know I can trust you, Maldark?”

: “You’ll just have to take that risk. Come on, we need to take your airship to Celestion, her evil sky palace.”

: “Rabu Rabu!!!”

: “Come on, there’s no time to spare!”

: The next three plays don’t have any interesting dialog or references, apart from possibly one to Shadow Hearts.

You navigate your way through a tiresome dungeon with lots of pits. Every time you fall through a pit, you have to start back at the beginning. Finally, you reach the Princess’s throne room.

: “Spare me the tough talk. What’s your plan, Massacre Princess?”

: “So.. you haven’t figured it out yet? You never told him, Maldark?”

: “N-no.. you.. you can’t say it…”

: The ending is that he’s Steven Universe?

: I can’t believe Rush was Shadow the Hedgehog all along.

: “Wh-what?! But how can this be? I…”

: “I..I’m sorry, Rush. I should have told you…”

: “Rabu… Rabu!?!”

: “Wrong, Massacre Princess!”

: “Wh-what!?”

: “Rush may be your son.. but there aren’t four elemental crystals..”

: “N-no…”

: This is a reference to the moment Hazbin Hotel jumps the shark.

: “NOOOOOOO! You’ll pay for this, Himiko!”

A boss battle begins; as you fight the Massacre Princess, the background warps through time and space. Stars and planets explode in the distance as energetic anime prog-rock plays.

: You need to play one more time to finish it, so I’ll stitch it together.

: We get a door encounter with the evil version of Morton. Morton is the final party member we haven’t seen yet. He is a perfectly normal Canadian cricket.

: He trades for Junk, and needs 14 to join you.

Rabu dives in front of the black wave, absorbing the blast in Rush’s place.

: “Rabu! Noooo!!!”

: “…Rabu…”

The Massacre Princess fires two more black waves, this time targeting Maldark and Himiko. They disintegrate instantly.

: This probably isn’t meant to be a reference, but it comes alarmingly close to Persona 4’s final boss.

: “Maldark! Himiko… I never got to say…”

: “Blast…?! But.. but you’re gone…?”

: “I’ll never be gone as long as you keep me alive in your heart!”

: “Come on, Rush! Show that Massacre Princess how strong you’ve gotten!”

: “You’re so much stronger now, Rush. I always believed in you.”

: “Don’t let my death have been in vain, Rush. Believe in yourself..”

: These characters all had like three lines before dying.

: “Rush! I know you can do it!”

: “Rabu! Rabu rabu!!!”

: “This is it, Rush. Humanity’s last stand. There’s no second chance here.”

: “Rush.. do it.. for me.”

: “I.. I can do it. I believe in myself. I HAVE to do it!”

You won. You beat the game. It’s over, and yet you don’t want it to be. You feel like you’ll never be the same again. You wonder.. the {Meteor Strike}… could YOU perform such a feat? Would you even dare to?

: We go through the same final boss rush as we did in the Promise ending, except this time we don’t tell Jasper about the promise.

: Sam winds up in space, with the Exalted Four crashing back down to Earth and dying. This is how both of the 1.0 endings worked.

: …Wait, the Visitor could fix these people the whole time?

: We could talk to the Visitor - that’s how the original game ends. But you know what? We can kill it.

: We need to last around 3 rounds with the Visitor. I believe there’s also a certain amount of damage you have to do. The Visitor is very weak to the magnum.

The Visitor: I feel something new. I feel anger. I have never felt this before. I don’t like it. I’m going to make you disappear.

: Normally, Meteor Strike takes 999 stamina to use. At this exact moment, it instead switches to 1.

: The Visitor hits Sam for 9 million damage. Leigh, Papineau, and Audrey are nowhere to be found.

: “N-no.. this can’t be it.. this can’t be.. the end.”

: Blast shows up and revives Rush. Our goal is to stay alive long enough for Rush to use Meteor Strike again.

: “Blast? But.. but how? I thought you were gone!”

: “I’ll never be gone as long as you keep me alive in your heart!”

: Rush has two useful skills. Hero’s Will is a 200 HP self heal that boosts Attack and Ballistics by 50%. Rushing Wind does a lot of shock damage.

: Blast has Beat Down (high single-target damage, hits 4 times), Demon Haymaker (single powerful attack, 80% stun chance) and Demonic Rage, which works like Leigh’s insanity.

: Each of Rush’s party members is loosely based one of Sam’s - Blast is Hellen, a character we never met.

: The Visitor kills Zonrath in one hit. Zonrath has Guillotine Chop (high single-target crush damage), End of Yggdrasil (even higher single-target crush damage, but costs 80 stamina) and Warrior’s Rest, which restores his HP and stamina one time.

: Zonrath is Papineau.

: Zalatar has a bunch of spells that do varying amounts of damage (based on his Ballistics) and a self-buff that increases his Ballistics by 250%. He is the Roaches.

: Musashi has three skills that do varying amounts of single-target slashing damage and inflict bleed. He is Leigh.

: The Visitor can mutate party members, which changes their skills.

: All of Rabu’s skills are useless. Rabu Cake actually heals the Visitor, Rabu Dance does nothing, and Rabu Bonk is the same as his physical attack.

: Rabu Poison inflicts poison, and is the only skill you should use. Torment Beam does a lot of damage, but..

: I think we should throw him into the Vivisection Pit. Rabu is the Rat Baby.

: No.

: Mei has the ability to hide, and then a very high-damage attack that hits three times which she can only use when hidden. She is Sophie.

: Himiko has a skill that reduces all damage by 50% and provides a heal over time. She also has a skill that pierces all defense. She is.. kinda a mix of Xaria and Dan.

: And finally, Zondark. His skills are outright named after Magus’s skills from Chrono Trigger. He’s the only one to not be one of Sam’s party members.

: “I’ve always believed in you! And.. and there’s one more thing.. I’ve always..”

: “Save it for later! There’s one more thing I gotta do!”

: “My friends believe in me. It’s time to show them they were right. Meteor… STRIIIIIIIIIIIKE!”

: We did it! We killed the Visitor! Sybil won’t need to worry about the promise anymore.

: What adorable little sparklefurs!

: And that’s all there is. We’ve done the True Final Ending, which is only worth 1000 ranking points. Except..

The gamer closes the game, pulls up the wiki and begins the solemn task of adding a new page for this ending. Grimly, with a heavy heart, he labels the page correctly as “Final True Ending” and begins writing out the events that just transpired.

For some strange reason, he decides to leave the final four messages of the ending out of the article. “They don’t need to know,” he thinks. “It’s better this way.” The gamer is correct.

: If Rabu uses Torment Beam, his portrait changes every time he does.

: And if you do use it, his ending slide changes.

Rabu never quite recovered from the final battle. He returned to Rabu Village a despondent man, rarely leaving his home. Eventually, he disappeared without a trace.

: Next time, we’ll see what happens if you only have the four correct offerings and don’t make the promise or play Massacre Princess.

[Fefnir]

Somewhere out there, the author of a “top ten JRPGs you’ve never heard of” article full of RPGs you’ve definitely heard of is getting really upset nobody altered reality to make Legend of Dragoon real instead.

[Timrod]

Summary

: Let’s do some D&D. This kind of hard to do from an LP perspective without having the dialog dump.

: The reason why is because the campaign is only sort of linear - there are a few guaranteed events, but also several random ones.

: Before we go any further, I need to introduce the final few characters we haven’t met yet.

: This is Hellen. Hellen is a door encounter and generally fills the same role Papineau does, though with arguably better skills.

: Hellen’s thing is that she starts each day with “bloodlust”, and has some really powerful attacks that remove bloodlust. The only way to get it back is a skill that costs half of her HP.

: The downside is she has a hockey mask permanently equipped and has a 0% evade rate. The upside is that due to a bug, if you find the chainsaw at Mutt’s, she can use it without consuming ammo for it.

: Hellen is a character from the developer’s other game, which is called Malison: The Cursed City. It hasn’t released yet.

: These are the Roaches. To get them, you need to let them multiply to a certain number and fill a hidden friendship meter.

: Basically, you want to leave food out every night and pick up a roach and pet it every day.

: Roaches is a lot like Phillippe. It has a skill that causes the “roach swarm” status effect on enemies, which is like bleed but more damaging. It can then consume roach swarm stacks to do damage.

: This makes Roaches a really good boss killer, and is why you’ll see it a lot on cursed mode runs.

: Morton is a mutated cricket, and is a straight up better Papineau. If you get Morton on a Survivor run, you may as well unequip Papineau and give his belt to Morton.

: Morton only has two skills, which allow him to use bandages and first aid kits in combat. He also doesn’t have a body slot - it’s occupied by his lower arms.

: What makes him good is that he has a skill called Fidget, which is usable outside of combat. Fidget equips a random item to his body slot, and one of those gives him a 30% chance of acting twice per turn. There’s another that gives him a 50% chance of blinding on hit.

: Morton is also REALLY good at crosswords, and will help reduce the amount of time you need to spend doing them. If you plan on doing the crossword ending, you’ll want him.

: Finally, there’s this thing. This is The Spider, and is the reason every boss in the game has high resistance to corruption damage. The Spider is a very well hidden party member who I talked about earlier.

: To recruit it, you need to kill all four of the shadow bosses that show up when the danger meter maxes out, like the one that almost killed the party when I first talked to Beryl.

: You then need to leave your party behind and go to the stairwell with Sam alone, who then has to find a hidden door in the basement to reach the Spider.

: The Spider does nothing but corruption damage, and used to be disgustingly overpowered. It’s a time-traveling entity that is only really important to the Mask ending that explains where the Shadow comes from.

: “One such wizard, Zalmoxis the Soulreaver, was thought long-dead.. but has now returned to wreak havoc across the land, stealing souls to create an army of undead.”

: The races don’t really matter. There are descriptions of each one, but I’m not going to bother. Sam picks a human.

: We then pick a class. This actually DOES matter. Sam picks a Warrior because the party I’m using is Ernest (a bard), Audrey (a cleric), and Aster (a mage).

: We can pick a god, same deal. We then need to pick the character’s name. I was going to pick Pollux, except something happened to me a few days ago and I’ve been feeling kinda weird ever since.

: That game deserved death for naming a character after me who has tentacles and never uses them.

: You actually finished that game?

: My character’s name is John Highguard, the human warrior. His ability is to get cancelled in 45 days or less.

: Unfortunately, the game wouldn’t let me fit “John Highguard” so I had to use his other name. Lyle gives you two +1 bonuses to random stats, which I think in this case happened to be STR and AGI. I don’t think the stats matter.

: “Okay! Let’s meet everyone else at the tavern.”

: We have a lot of people playing, so let’s go in alphabetical order. I’ve never GMed for this many people before. Aster, why don’t you go first?

: “Indubitably! I’m playing as Glastovald, a Human arch-mage of the highest reputation, with a focus in Cosmic and Astral magic.”

: What’s funny is that humans in this setting can’t use magic.

: Audrey, you’re up next.

: “Used to play as Ria - Scalefolk Cleric of Rhubezal - with my old group. Protector of the grove, healer, wielder of magic. Can I still use her?”

: “Wow! I didn’t know we had a veteran at the table! Of course you can play as Ria. Okay Dan, let’s hear about your character.”

: “First off, the way you’re GMing is.. let’s just say painfully amateur. Anyway, my character is Kazemaru Starblade, a Z’zlythian Elemental Battlerager. Shrouded in mystery, Kazemaru served as a mercenary in the Shadowblade Wars, where he honed his skills executing demons. He dual wields keyblades.”

: Dan’s character is a Kingdom Hearts OC.

: “Okay. Wow. Very creative! But none of that is legal in the rules of Mazes and Wizards, so let’s start over.”

: “Called it. Total amateur hours here. All of this is completely legal in the Mazes and Wizards 2.7 Homebrew Manual, which you’d know if you weren’t a complete pleb, Lyle.”

: He’s using a third-party splatbook?

: This is, in fact, the kind of thing you’d see in third-party splatbooks for Pathfinder. The Pathfinder group I used to play with had a Dan in it - his name was Vlad, and he cheated like crazy. I let him get away with murder because I thought it was funny.

: “Y-you don’t have to get so personal, Dan.. you know, this isn’t worth arguing over. Just.. whatever. You can be, uh, Kazemaru. Moving on. Ernest, tell us about your character.”

: I have played with people like Ernest before. They fall into one of two categories: either they’re complete assholes or the best people you will ever play with, with nothing in between.

: “Wh-whoa.. you’ve been playing since First Edition!”

: “I’m old as hell! And my sidekick, Colonel Squeakums.. he’s gonna be my duck familiar, Lieutenant Quackums!”

: “Aww… why do I have to be a duck?”

: He’s probably a duck as a reference to Suikoden 3, which had a character named Sergeant Joe who is a duck.

: “Well I’m glad we’ve got a veteran on board. Let’s move on.. Hellen, tell us about your character.”

: “Her name is Hellen and she kills people.”

: “O-okay. Well, um.. y-you’re sort of supposed to… play someone else, Hellen. Not yourself.”

: “She’s someone else.”

: “W-well.. o-okay. Does she at least have a class, Hellen?”

: “Alchemist.”

: “A-alchemist. O-okay… well then.. um.. moving on… Joel, tell us about your character.”

: “Okay, here - hhh - goes. I’m, um.. Fuzzy, the Kobold warrior. I’m strong and kind to everyone.. and I always do my best. Did I do it right, Mr. Papineau?”

: “That was great, Joel! I can’t wait to clean up Hyperborea alongside Fuzzy!”

: “You did that very well, Joel. I’ll just mark down your character sheet…”

: “Ummm.. do I need to roll a - hhh - dice now or something?”

: “Nope, you’re all set. Leigh, tell us about your character.”

: “Heh heh.. of course! She’s called The Beast, a Giant rogue.. a legendary assassin of kings and cannibal of the Lost Brain God.”

: “Giant rogue? Are you sure? That’s a pretty, um.. non-optimal combination, Leigh.”

: “What’s the matter, Lyle? Afraid the Beast’s gonna.. get ya? Heh heh heh…”

: “N-no! We’ll do Morton next, since it looks like Xaria and Monty are still busy.”

: “Ehhh, yes.. I will be transacting under the moniker of ‘Martin’, Elf cleric of Babali.. purveyor of rare and exotic artifacts, researcher of the arcane.”

: “Morton.. you’re naming your character.. Martin?”

: “Ehhh.. that is correct. Is there an issue?”

: “No.. no, if you’re happy. M-moving right along… Papineau, tell us about your character.”

: “Eh.. I don’t really understand this, but.. I’m Sir Garamonde, Giant cleric of Monolihr. He believes in justice, power, and fighting evil wherever he finds it.”

: “You did it just right. Alright, let me just write that down and we can move on to.. Phillippe..”

: “Hee hee! Of course! My character is a fat, stupid, bungling imbecile! He smells, he’s ugly, and everyone hates him! Hee hee! He’s a human warrior named Sam!”

: Phillippe remains the best character in this game.

: “What a coincidence! That’s MY name!”

: “Ummm.. Sam, are you okay with this?”

: “Of course! That’s just our Phillippe!”

: I’m going to skip the Rat Baby - it makes a character called “Roo” and doesn’t have dialog.

: “Mr. Roaches, can you tell us about your character?”

: “HeLlo. i Am A LEveL 500 impOrTanT GUy. I aM AlsO tHE kiNG. I HavE 50 STreNgTh AnD 50 wiZaRDS.”

: “Okay. Thank you for sharing that. There’s a lot to unpack here. First off, ‘wizards’ is not a stat.”

: “i MEanT tO SaY 52 WiZArdS.”

: I can’t believe the CEO of Larian Studios was a bunch of roaches in a trenchcoat this entire time. It would explain why Act 3 was as bad as it was.

: “I’m just going to mark you down as a wizard. Sophie, let’s hear about your character.”

: “Welllll, I’m not really sure I did this right.. but she’s Princess Zalara, an Elf Rogue and world famous thief. She’s not really a princess, but that’s what she tells people!”

: “You did it perfectly! Sounds like you got really into it, too. Next up is.. umm, Spider.. I-I’m glad you’re joining us. Can you tell us about your character?”

: “I shall not stoop so low as to engage. Nay, I shall stand aside and behold the foolish sport wherein thou mortals do squander thy fleeting days.”

: “W-well, um.. you could at least make a character.. if you’re just gonna w-watch..”

: “Well then, if I must, I must. “The Wizard” shalt thou call me, yet lend I no hand to thy vain amusements.”

: “And finally, Xaria and Monty. Can you tell us about your characters?”

: “No.”

: “Huh huh, sure. I’m Balzor, the Kobold alchemist. He likes fire. Huh huh… like.. really likes fire. If you ever need someone to make you a bomb, he’s y-”

: “Shut up, dude! Are you actually taking this seriously?”

: “Balzor sounds great, Monty. C-come on, Xaria. I"m sure you can come up with something.”

: “God, I can’t believe you nerds are making me do this. Fine, whatever. I’m uh.. Xanza. Warrior. Scalefolk. Are you happy now?”"

: “Thank you, Xaria. See, that wasn’t so hard, was it? Moving along…”

: This is a random event, and not part of the main plot.

: “A boy bumps into you while walking through the crowded city market and then bolts by. You walk on, perusing the market goods… until you realize your coin purse is missing! A tale as old as time! The boy must have taken it..”

: “Hey! What the heck? That’s not fair! You’re not allowed to steal!”

: “He didn’t get my Bag of Infinite Holding, right? 'Cuz it would be physically implausible for a child to get that from a trained Elemental Bloodrager.”

1. Chase after him.
2. Go to the guards.
3. Pretend to be a mark and catch him.
4. Shrug.. he’s gone now.

: All of the options have dialog, but I’ll pick the “best” option for brevity.

: “I’ll pretend to be a mark because I don’t know if I could take someone stealing from my best friend, Phillippe.”

: “It doesn’t take long before you feel a small hand rummaging at your hip. You swiftly grab it; it’s the boy!”

: “S-sir.. please let me go.. I just need to feed my family..”

: “Chop off his hands!”

: “Eh, I’ve heard that sob story a million times, usually ‘cuz I’m the one who’s tellin’ it!”

: “Maaan, let him go. Who even cares about the gold, we’ll get more.”

: “…”

: I would like to point out that Sophie is canonically 7 years old.

: “With a sigh, you release the boy. He evidently needs it more than you. It’ll be rough without supplies, but you’re sure you’ll make it.”

: “It’s hard to say what the right or wrong choice was here. I understand why you let him go.”

: “i CHop oFf HIs HeAD!!”

: He’s already gone, Roaches.

: “I cHOp OFf yOUr hEaD!!!”

: “Heh, I almost thought you were gonna whoop him.”

: “Yeah. I felt kinda bad for the kid.”

: “You made the right call, friend. We all need help sometimes. This might’ve saved him.”

: “You’ve got a real bleeding-eth heart, John Highguard. Let’s hope it doesn’t bite us in the ass.”

: “I thank you, adventurers, for daring to face this ancient menace. Zalmoxis and his undead army must be stopped before it’s too late!”

1. We shall do your bidding, your highness!
2. Heh.. only if the pay’s good.
3. (I’ll destroy him.. and take over his army!)
4. [ROGUE] Steal the king’s crown when he’s not looking.

: I’m going to do option 1 and option 4, because we know half the party would probably beat the king up and steal his crown.

: I feel like most of the scenes in Baldur’s Gate 3 would have been better if this party was in it. You’d get to Gortash’s coronation ceremony and he’s got five daggers planted in his back.

: “We shall do your bidding, your highness!”

: “That’s what I like - an obedient subject willing to do my dirty work! Well, off with you, peasant! Hup hup!”

: “Alack! And alay! A stout-eth of heart-eth knight such as myself-eth will always heed-eth the call of those in need… eth!”

: Papineau reminds me of the early days of medieval mode in Team Fortress 2. Medieval mode has a dumb wordfilter on it, and when the gamemode launched it applied to chat commands used by common server mods - things like saying RTV to vote for a map change - that made it impossible to use those commands.

: “Huh huh… you’re just gonna do it for free?”

: “What beautiful words! I bow grandly at your eloquence, but my pants fall down and I tumble oafishly down a stairwell.”

: “I sneak up behind the king while he gives his boring little speech and SNATCH the crown right off his head!”

: "Ehhh.. very nice, very nice. May.. may I hold it? Just.. for a moment?

: “Umm… is that allowed?”

: “You’re able to sell the king’s crown on the black market later on for 1000 gold - a nice way to start your adventure!”

: “Greetings, adventurers! I am Ignatus Fourrah, King Auramis’ court magician! I am glad such renowned and daring warriors have taken up the king’s mission!”

: “This is Zalmoxis in disguise. I attack him.”

: “Ah, heh. Ahhhh.. he, uh, gracefully sidesteps your blow and forgives you. Um.. no harm, no foul!”

: “…”

: She just saw right through it.

: I’m surprised he didn’t have a plan if this happened.

: Normally you only get to pick one option here, but I’m going to do Option 2 and Option 4.

: “Do you have any advice for us?”

: “Here’s advice: this man wants your soul. Anything he tells you will be to that end.”

: “I am Zalmoxis’ former appentice.. he is a wise and shrewd man - capable beyond compare! I you can find it, use holy water against his minions!”

: “If this realm be aught akin to mine own, then holy water holdeth no bane o’er the undead.”

: “Aha! Holy water, indeed! We shall have to find some on our journey!”

: “Well, duh. Everyone knows you use holy water on the undead. Tell us something we don’t know, gramps.”

: “Can we have holy water to fight the undead?”

: “Ah, of course! This will help destroy Zalmoxis’ foul minions!”

: “Wow! What a gracious gift! I was getting thirsty, too! I crack that bad boy open and chug the whole thing!”

: “H-hey! Why’d you - hhh - do that?”

: “Heh.”

: “Thou ignoble.. knave-eth!”

: “sAVe sOMe fOr mE!!!”

: “All gone! Too bad!”

: And that’s the end of the first session. Each character gets a reaction line at the end of a session, so let’s do those now. Some of them (Phillippe) are particularly amusing.

: “Okay! I h–hh don’t really get it, but it’s fun to throw the dice.”

: “This is BORING. Can we do something FUN instead?”

: “Alright chat, how was that? I basically carried the team the whole game.”

: “…is it over? Okay.”

: “That was pretty fun. I mean, I’m just happy to hang out with friends.”

: “cAN i SToP PrETenDInG To Be sOMeOnE ElSe noW???”

: “Huh.. I don’t know what I think about this yet…”

: “Huh. Well, I can’t say I really ‘get it’ yet, but it could be a fun way to spend downtime.”

: “Oh my god. This is SUCH a waste of time. Why are you making me do this?”

: “I dunno. It’s kinda fun, but I don’t really care about that wizard guy.”

: “The game is very, ehhh… difficult. Martin’s psyche is so different form my own. Roleplaying truly is a struggle.”

: “I am not amused by these human frivolities.”

: “So THIS is that game my students play. Hm! Most intriguing!”

: I don’t know if I mentioned it, but Aster is a geology professor.

: “Oooh, this roleplaying thing suuuuure is hard for my widdle bug brain…”

: “Hoo-eee! This takes ol’ Ernest back! It’s been a hot minute since I’ve rolled the bones with the boys!”

: “E-Ernest, if you don’t mind me saying, you, um.. roleplay very differently from how you actually speak.”

: “Huh? What’re you talkin’ about, son?”

: This session starts with a random event again.

: “While exploring the wilderness, you come across a particularly strange stump - a stump with a face!”

: “I’m not a stump! I’m an Elf! Unlike humanoids like you, Elves often take the form of inanimate objects. I suppose we’re rare around these parts. Although not too rare! The Elf winks at Wyngale.”

: “And I’m also a peddler! Say! Howzabout buying some of my holy water?”

: The elf will also acknowledge Morton and Sophie, both of whom play elves.

1. Sure, we’ll buy some.
2. We’re good, thank you.
3. We won’t buy it, but we’ll TAKE it!

: I’m going to do option 2 here, because it has most of the dialog from option 1 in it already.

: “We’re good, thank you.”

: “No, no! Thank YOU! And good luck on your travels! And with that, the stumpy elf hobbles deeper into the woods.”

: “What a friendly fellow. I wouldn’t mind meeting more Elves if they’re all like that.”

: “Always good to meet another of my kin! Safe travels, friend!”

: “So.. are all elves stumps? Or just this -hhh- guy? Can ANYTHING be an elf? Am.. I an elf?”

: I can picture Sybil sitting in her apartment knowing how close Joel just came to discovering the truth about the Visitor and sweating profusely.

: She blinks and suddenly everyone is an elf.

: “Ehhh.. he dropped a vial of Holy Water. I think we should keep it, just in case.”

: “Martin! You stole-eth from him?!”

: “Huh huh.. nice, dude.”

: “Did you take that from him? I can’t believe you’d do that!”

: “It seems our sticky-fingered friend got us a 100% discount!”

: “The forest is treacherous, and teems with countless creatures and perils. As you draw closer to your destination, a grim aura clings to the air.”

: “Finally, through the brush, you see it - the vilage. But something is amiss.. there’s no sign of life. No sounds, no villagers.. only a deathly silence. The village square is empty. There is not a living soul in the village. What do you do?”

: The only option that actually works here is “Look for a trail”, but I want to do the second option because it’s kinda funny.

: “HEY!!! ANYONE THERE?”

: “Gahhh!”

: “GgGYAaaHH! hELlO!!!”

: “Tabarnak!”

: “Fucking hell!”

: “A-ahhh! Sophie! You didn’t have to actually yell! Y-you uh.. you get no response. Geez!”

: Roaches can also call out, which is equally pretty good.

: “HeLllLooOOooOOOOooO! AnYOnE thERe ? ? ? iT’S Me, tHE KiNG!!!”

: “Ahhh, Roaches, y-you’re not actually the king! In fact, I’m not really sure who you are.. but either way, you get no response.”

: “nEVeR MiND! i Am thE PrIMe MInISteR.”

: And now we’ll do look for a trail.

: “Heh heh.. I think we’d be better off looking for graves…”

: “Ooh! My Nature skill is really high! I think I could find a trail pretty easily!”

: “Maybe if we look deeper in the forest, we can - hhh - find something.”

: “Suddenly, a pale, clammy hand reaches out from the mound.. and then another! Ragged bodies climb from the earth and shamble towards you!”

: “Get ready…”

: “Tis just as I feared.”

: “Oh no.. it’s the villagers, isn’t it?”

: If you accepted the blessing at the start, the party gets paralyzed and the encounter ends. Hellen called it when she said Ignatus was Zalmoxis in disguise.

: Let’s pick the first option, since the second one ends up in a fight anyway.

: “The undead creatures draw closer, and you engage in combat. Everyone make attack rolls now.”

: “I SMASH and TEAR at the creatures, rending their flesh to RIBBONS!”

: “wHO arE YoU GUys!!!”

: “With lute in one hand and dagger in the other, Wyngale adopts a fighting posture, ready to strike…”

: “A fight, huh? Maybe THIS’LL be fun, unlike the rest of this stupid game.”

: “I cast Gift of the Elflord on the party, granting us all a bonus to defense.”

: “I shall not entertain such nonsense.”

: “I-I’m ready.. I think.”

: “I’ll let you guys handle the hard stuff. I’ll keep an eye on our retreat.”

: “The fighting is intense. With every undead creature you strike down, two more climb out of the mound. You’ll need to take drastic measures!”

: I’m going to do the warrior and bard options, because those have the most unique dialog.

: “Attack the largest creature.”

: “Quick, John Highguard! We’ve gotta take down the - hhh - biggest one!”

: “When I unsheathe my keyblades, I can only sheathe them after I draw blood. Stand back.”

: I want to punch him.

: Actually, so do I.

: “C’mon, Mont - uhh… ‘Balzor’… let’s kick their asses. Go for the biggest one.”

: “Sure, huh huh.. I’m gonna throw some fire potions.”

: “Play a rousing song!”

: “Singing a song? NOW? Hey! That’s a GREAT idea! Why didn’t a GENIUS like me think of that?”

: “Join me, brother, in a rousing chant! We must inspire our comrades to fight harder!”

: “Wyngale playfully plucks a melody on his lute and bows gracefully, whimsically removing his hat with a flourish.”

: “Now THAT was a close one. I think I’m gonna need to learn Haste!”

: “We did-eth it! We actually won-eth! Good work, everyone!”

: “I want MORE blood…”

: “Adequate.”

: “That was, ehhh.. exhilarating.”

: “Phew! I didn’t think we were gonna make it! So.. I call looting duty!”

: “You’re WELCOME, guys. I’m really carrying the party here.”

: “hAPpY biRThDaY!!!”

: “You take a moment to celebrate your victory, but soon notice a bloody trail leading into the forest. You decide to follow along… the trail leads you to an ominous stone building, deep in the woods. Its massive doors are wide open, almost inviting you to walk inside.”

: Most of the closing thoughts for this session aren’t terribly interesting.. except for the Spider’s, who I’m going to do every time.

: “The realm thou hast conceived, Lyle… by what art was this wrought?”

: “Well, um, I dunno.. I just thought of stuff I thought was cool?”

: We’re lucky enough to get the real Morton while I wait for the next session - I was doing crosswords to try and get the code for that ending, and Morton is great for that.

: One thing I haven’t mentioned is that each character has a hidden “vocabulary” stat that governs how good they are at crosswords. Some of them are kinda surprising.

: Morton’s is the highest at 40, and having him makes doing crosswords significantly faster. Other surprising scores include Papineau at 22, Xaria at 16, and Audrey at 5 (which she shares with Joel).

: Sam’s vocabulary starts at 10. Mutt has a chance to sell a video game called Auntie Wilma’s Crossword Challenge that boosts his vocabulary by 2 every time you play it.

: “As you enter the arched entrance of the temple, its massive doors shut behind you. Ahead lies only darkness. Your only escape is.. forward.”

: This random event isn’t particularly interesting, but I’ll do some of it.

: “Among the bodies is a small, wooden chest with a golden lock..”

: “It’s treasure!!”

: “Yes.. open it… open it!!”

: “It’s trapped.”

: Who the fuck carries a trapped chest into battle? Do they want it to go off in their pack?

: It sounds like something the goblins in Baldur’s Gate would be dumb enough to do.

: The Huntsmaster does. He had a trapped cooler he accidentally brought to my 4th of July barbecue. Damn thing went off on its own and blew up my grill.

: Was this the guy who tried to rebuild the grill and turned it into a blast furnace?

: Yes.

: If you have Sophie or Morton, or Sam is a rogue, you can open the chest. Leigh doesn’t count for some reason. All three situations have very similar dialog, so I’ll do Sophie’s because it’s amusing.

: “Wait.. lemme check that bad boy… as suspected, it’s a trap! Stand back. I can handle this.”

: “Rolling.. and.. success! Princess Zalara identifies the poison trap on the spring mechanism and carefully disarms it. Inside is a cache of gold coins!”

: “Woohoo! See! I told ya it was trapped!”

: “Nice work, Princess Zalara!”

: “Exceptional work, Zalara! The next beer’s on me! Ah - when you’re old enough.”

: “Ahhh… the way it glitters…”

: “See, this is why you always bring a rogue along.”

: “Not bad, but even a noob would know it was trapped. That’s dungeon 101 stuff.”

: Morton has an amusing line if you have him with you and decide to not open the chest.

: “Please.. we must go back. Please! I’m begging you…”

: “But you stop. Something is amiss. Other than the crackle of your torch, there is complete silence. Your intuition tells you that you’re in danger. That’s when you see it! The floor in front of you is an illusion - a pit of daggers!”

: The first option isn’t that interesting. Let’s start with “find another route”.

: “Yeah.. I"m not gonna risk-eth some grappling hook holding my weight-eth.”

: “Heh. Coward.”

: “Um, this is probably for the best. I can - hhh - scout ahead if you want.”

: “The party agrees that the safest way to the other side is around the pit. You set off down another corridor to find a detour. It doesn’t take long for the party to find another route.. guarded by an undead minotaur!”

: “We can take it.”

: “Out of the frying pan and into the fire…”

: At this point, you get the option to fight it, sneak past it, go back and use the grappling hook, or if you’re an alchemist you can end the encounter by throwing a potion at it.

: I’ll just do the “fight it” dialog.

: “Yes… YES! KILL IT!”

: “I knew we should have just crossed the pit…”

: “Uh, Lyle? Don’t forget that undead minotaurs are my racial enemy, so I get a +11 bonus against them.”

: 3.5E had a really stupid favored enemy system like this for rangers - if you picked “humanoid” as your favored enemy, you had to pick one particular type of humanoid.

: “Rolling for attacks.. aaand.. a brief but intense battle ensues. The minotaur gets a few strong hits on you, but the party ably dispatches it in the end.”

: Now let’s do “jump across”.

: “Um, DM? Instead of jumping across, I’ll actually be flying across since the Z’zlythian race has the Enhanced Wingmastery feat.”

: “Great idea! Sam jumps oafishly into the pit and disappears into its depths forever! His death scream is horrifying!”

: “That’s not how this works, Phillippe. Rolling for dexterity.. nope, sorry. You safely jump across to the other side.”

: “Dammit!”

: Fun story, I have a friend who used to GM Pathfinder Society. One day, he’s at a convention GMing a table, and it’s this scenario that’s meant to be an introduction to PFS for very new players.

: I would’ve done it in the LP, but I couldn’t find a copy of it. It’s not particularly surprising because it got retired before PFS died due to them re-writing the lore or some shit.

: The first obstacle in this scenario is a spiked pit trap that has already triggered before the party got there - it’s out in the open and marked by the goblins who cleared it out. The players have a couple of options to get around it: if I remember right, there’s a ledge you can skirt across that requires some really low acrobatics check to not fall.

: There’s even a bridge on the far side that the martials can use to let casters across in case the casters aren’t willing to risk it. But on that day, my friend has this guy at the table playing a fighter who goes “I’m gonna jump the pit.”

: He rolls a 1, falls into the trap, and because he’s a 1st-level fighter dies in one hit. This guy managed to die in an adventure that, from what I recall, specifically had a warning to the GM not to let people die in it.

: “Many paths lie safer than this one. What folly moveth thee to leap?”

: “Despite the absurd risk, the party chooses to leap across the pit. Dexterity roll.. and… safely makes it across. The Beast just NARROWLY avoids falling into the pit. Perhaps she could have managed the jump more easily if she wasn’t a GIANT ROGUE.”

: “Rolling for strength.. success! The Beast successfully SMASHES THE DM’S HEAD!”

: I wish I’d had Leigh at the tables I GMed. Leigh can also disarm the trap by smashing it.

: “Suddenly, a human form materializes before you. Misty, blue wisps swirl around the figure of.. Ignatus Fourrah, the royal court magician!”

: “It was obvious.”

: “Wh-what?! N-no way! He was like a father to me…”

: “Yes… YES! I feel a fight coming on.. I’ll rip you to shreds, wizard!”

: “To be betrayed by a fellow wizard! Have you no honor, knave?!”

: “The bard’s eyes widen in shock, and he steps back, aghast at Zalmoxis’ revelation..”

: “That wizard guy we met back at the court? Um… so what?”

: “Alack! And alay! And.. alack!”

: “Let’s kill him and take his loot.”

: “We can take him.”

: “I believe, ehhhh… we might be in trouble now, yes?”

: “I knew there was something off about him..”

: “Wow! I can’t believe that guy was pretending to be a different guy!”

: “hELlO!”

: I picked the first option. It doesn’t really matter. I think this is also the only time you see this portrait for Lyle outside of killing him.

: “Rolling for attack.. failure! You draw your weapons and attack Zalmoxis, but they merely pass through his incorporeal form. Nothing you do is effective - no magic or weapon can touch the necromancer, and his powerful spells tear away at your flesh.”

: “Finally, when all hope is nearly lost, the mysterious blue door reappears. Zalmoxis approaches it…”

: This part is a minor inconsistency and I’m not sure if it’s intentional or not. Every other time the game refers to Zalmoxis’ fortress, it’s called the “Fortress of Final Dusk”.

: “Damn…”

: “We weren’t even close-eth, were we…?”

: “Uh, Lyle? Actually, my +4 Adamantine Keyblade has a bonus to hitting incorporeal enemies.”

: The +4 bonus is against being 'norted.

: “I don’t get it. How are we supposed to beat this guy?”

: “There must be some magical means by which we can defeat Zalmoxis…”

: “Alone, wounded and confused after your first confrontation with Zalmoxis, your party attempts to regain its bearings. Where are you? How can you defeat Zalmoxis? Where did he go? These questions will be answered.. next time we play!”

: I’m going to do a couple of the reactions and then call the update here. I’ll do the rest after I do the Version 1.0 endings.

: “Lyle.”

: “Y-yes, Hellen?”

: “Your plot points are too obvious. You need to write better surprises.”

: “O-okay.. okay! I-I’m sorry!”

: There’s a Pathfinder scenario I should probably do that has a PAINFULLY obvious twist in it.

: “Never knew how much I needed a good dungeon after being stuck in that labyrinth for so long.”

: “Having to pretend to be someone else.. this is very difficult for me. But I am doing my best.”

: “Speak now, Lyle - what craft of divination dost thou wield?”

: “D-divination? What do you mean?”

: “Fain not ignorance with me. Thou knowest well my meaning.”

: “Uh, umm… I-I don’t know! I’m just.. um… j-just a normal guy who loves games!”

: “…”

: Next time, we’ll see the Version 1.0 endings.

[Fefnir]

@Timrod

“Wow! I can’t believe that guy was pretending to be a different guy!”

Phillippe remains the best.

[Timrod]

Summary

: We’re back here, at the Exalted Four fight. Because we did the requirements for Promise, this dialog box appears.

: For this ending, you do not need to have gotten all of the planet discs or spoken to Sybil. The only requirement is to have the four offerings.

: On this route, the Exalted Four give you a few turns to ask questions. You can alternatively begin the fight immediately by attacking them. Most of the questions aren’t interesting or are things we’ve already learned in Promise or Unity.

: I’ll do a couple of the interesting ones.

: “How do we save the world?”

: “All our accomplishments… all those things that had meanin’ to people…”

: “Bach…”

: “Walking on the moon…”

: “Fly fishin’ on weekends…”

: “Sybil…”

: “Those things are over. All you can do now is catch the few grains of sand that haven’t already fallen.”

: “Once the Visitor is gone, we four may be the biggest threat to the world.”

: “Why am I still human?”

: “I don’t think you are.”

: “No, you’re definitely not. Sorry.”

: “The changes will come all at once. Very soon.”

: This one doesn’t really make sense given that Sam doesn’t mutate in the Promise ending.

: “How are you holding up?”

: “What? What kind of stupid question is that?!”

: “Don’t waste questions…”

: “We don’t have t-time to think about that.”

: “…well, I think it’s sweet that you still care.”

: “…okay. I’m worried that I’m going to lose my mind soon.”

: “I already feel it slipping away.”

: “Yeah. I don’t want to die, but this might be worse. Or I guess it’s about the same.”

:: “I’m worried that I’m going to kill you. After my mind’s gone. We’re friends, right? I… I’m sorry.”

: “I’m worried I’m going to hurt my friends. And they won’t even know it’s me. They won’t know that I don’t want to do it!”

: “I’m worried that I’m going to do horrible things and I won’t even care.”

: “Yeah. Uh. Sorry I snapped. It’s just that our time is short. But, uh, thank you.”

: Just like in True Final Ending, we kill the Exalted Four and Sam goes into space to meet the Visitor.

: Sam splits apart and then the Visitor fixes him.

: This time, we’ll opt not to attack.

: “Depictions of you.”

: “Depictions.. I don’t understand.”

: It’s hard to see, but the Visitor opened the canvas bag and pulled out the painting.

: “It’s a painting.”

: “This is me? And these? Also me?”

: Again, hard to see but you can see it manipulating the photograph and unspooling the VHS tape.

: “A video recording and a photograph.”

: “And this? Is this me, as well?”

: “It is writing about you.”

: “About me…? I don’t understand.”

: “We want to understand what you are.”

: “You.. understand me. Are we.. different? Sam?”

: “We are different.”

: “Yes. I understand now. You are you. I am I. We are separate. You are many. I am one.”

: “You are destroying our world. You’ve hurt many of us. You need to leave.”

: “…!! I am hurting you. I understand. I feel something new. I am sorry. Should I go somewhere else?”

: “Yes.”

: “I break things when I look. When I understand. I should go. I have never seen anything like you. I have not thought before. This is also new.”

: “I am not Sam. Not human. I cannot say what I am, but I could show. I will not forget you. I will think about this for a long time.”

: “Before I go.. do you want to see me?”

: “I see you now.”

: “You do not. ..how to say.. this is not me. This is only a painting of me. I can show you the real me.”

: Neither of these endings has a name. They’re both called “Perfect Ritual”. The top option is the base game’s equivalent of Unity, the bottom is the equivalent of Promise. We’ll do the bottom one first.

: “…Maybe it is too much for you. Goodbye, Sam.”

You’re unsure how much time has passed. Seconds? Minutes? Hours? Days?

Fear begins to set in.

The fear turns to panic. There is too much happening all at once.

You feel their skin ripple like water. There is movement under the surface.

Eyestalks, covered in sensory cilia. This is too much. You can’t keep track of all this.

You become quite adept at performing hundreds of tasks at once.

: It’s basically the same ending as Promise, except the Exalted Four doesn’t survive and Sam takes their place. At the same time, it’s a little more horrifying than Promise.

: Now let’s look at what happens if you choose to see the Visitor’s true form. The other half of the ending isn’t particularly interesting: it’s a re-write of the first half except Sam goes insane and kills everything.

: This leaves us with only three endings: Mask, XIN-AMON, and Words of Power.

: XIN-AMON might be a bit hard to do, since you have to do it before you mutate Cinnamon. I have to see if I have a save left for that.

[Timrod]

: Huh, the game updated. Somebody said I should do Comatus again, and thankfully I still have my save from the end of the Promise route.

: That’s.. different. I don’t remember this option being here the first time I did this fight, or the second for that matter.

: Version 2.28 lets you kiss NEARLY EVERY ENEMY IN THE GAME. There are a couple of exceptions I know of. Those include Jeanne, Summer, Phillippe, and the Laughing Mold.

: Can you kiss Pierre? We need to go kiss Pierre. Right now.

: Fortunately, someone on /v/ got that for me. You can only kiss Pierre after you fight him, and I didn’t have a save ready for that.

: YESSSSSSSSS!

: There’s a new boss in a room in the basement if you kiss enough enemies, but I’d need to start a whole new playthrough to do that and I need all my save slots.

: The reason why is that the real patch (Patch 2.3) is updating all of the ending art, so I’ll need to do Promise and True Final again.

: Edit: Someone discovered you CAN kiss Jeanne, but it has to be done the first time you meet her before she starts mutating further.

: You can also kiss Sybil if you’re on the Promise route, but also if you’re on Unity.

[Timrod]

Summary

: Another day, another ending to cross off the list. This one is called XIN-AMON, and is a joke ending that you’d have to purposely go out of your way to get. I have no idea how you’re supposed to know this exists short of decompiling the game.

: This ending requires that you have three correct offerings (namely the photo, the painting, and the manuscript) but have not sacrificed Cinnamon for the VHS tape.

: “Well, hello there! Aren’t you a cutie pie! You really think offerin’ a guinea pig to the Visitor is a good plan?”

: “You’re almost too cute to offer to the Visitor, aren’t you? Well, thank you. We’ll take it.”

: We then go through the same ending sequence as Promise or Perfect Ritual, except..

This is no way to live. What a terrible fate. Maybe you should help, but.. she seems extremely dangerous. I’m sorry, Beryl, this is too much. I know this is my fault. I hope you can forgive me.

: This is what happens if you give any of the astronomers a bad offering.

: We again go through the same cutscene, except.. what’s that in the middle?

: “I guess we were really struggling to come up with a fourth offering.”

: “It seems to be unaffected by the Visitor’s presence thus far. That must count for something.”

: “I-I don’t like this…”

: “Now is not the time for such distractions.”

: We now get to fight XIN-AMON, along with the Maws, Claws, and Eyes. This fight is getting reworked in the final patch for the game.

: “THIS WASN’T SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN. THIS IS WRONG! YOU BROUGHT THAT THING TO US. TAINTED US. YOU RUINED EVERYTHING!”

: XIN-AMON and its various body parts barely do anything. The Eyes can inflict panic, and the Claws can inflict bleed, but they do no damage.

The monster had been growing this whole time.. you thought you were doing well, but now realize you’ve been fighting an increasingly insignificant part of a now much more massive creature. Worse still, it seems to be growing faster now that you’ve cut off its heads. But there’s nowhere to run. The infinitely expanding rodent flesh surges towards you - around you. A piece of your astronomer friends’ minds held back the abomination’s growth to give you a fighting chance.. but there is none now. There is no thought or soul in the beast. It only grows and eats.

The pleading sobs and horrified shrieks below are cut short by thrashing limbs and snapping jaws. A great tower of rodent limbs rises in the distance. It must be a hundred meters away. Another erupts from the carnage behind you. The rodent closes in on you. There’s nowhere left to go.

Your own hand bites your face. You can taste it. It tastes like..

There is only the cold void of space. There was a lot of screaming before, for a long time, but it’s all over now. You almost miss it. You miss.. them.

: And that’s that. Now I need to grind the crossword ending. I’m still thinking about what my next LP is going to be.

[Timrod]

Summary

: On Day 12, we finally finish the crossword book. Doing this is the most annoying thing in the game - you can do crosswords for up to 4 hours, but are extremely unlikely to actually get that because of door encounters.

: The numbers are randomized per playthrough, but since the randomization is done at the start of the game, you can get the numbers and then reload an earlier save to skip doing all the crosswords.

: We can then go into the room off of Steve’s room in the basement that’s locked by the Pluto disc and open the safe with the combination.

: This leads us to Wilhelmina’s crypt. We can only walk on the white tiles, which will spell out random ominious words when walked across.

: The soundtrack to this is Francis Coulombe whispering random clues from what I believe is the New York Times crossword into the mic.

: The tomb is full of mummies that are incredibly easy to roll over with an end game party. They’re weak to most forms of physical damage and fire.

: They drop bandages and scrolls, which are single-use spells that depend on the user’s hidden vocabulary stat. If you plan on getting Morton, it might be worth it to clear out the crypt.

: To reach the ending, we need to get rid of two mummies on either side of the room.

: Only one of these is a real word, and that word is Agelast. Google tells me that the NYT crossword has used that as a word seven times.

: Nihilod sounds like a term for those unhinged monsterfuckers who played Elden Ring and want to marry Mogh. You know who you are.

: We then need to fight the mummy and steamroll it in seconds.

: The other side has the other chain.

: This one is admittedly a bit harder.

: I knew the answer without looking it up, but technically all of these are correct. The answer is octothorpe, even though that’s a term that was only ever used by people at AT&T back when AT&T made things.

: We’ll just juke the big mummy and open the sarcophagus, which is now unchained.

: We get the option to not say it and fight her, but the ending requires that we say it.

A word that you don’t know and would never even conceive of escapes your lips, as if of its own volition.As the golden chains that bound the witch evaporate, you realize something: this was a mistake.

: The developer has said that all of the characters are actually speaking French, and that it’s merely in English for the benefit of the player.

: My theory is that all the characters actually talk like Wilhelmina and the game dumbs it down for us.

: I’m just now realizing that this is a horror version of the “Mu training” scene from Earthbound.

You can still feel as your skin wraps itself around her legs and crawls up her body.

They pull at your optic nerves until they snap. The eyeballs skitter onto the witch and bury themselves into her back. The pain and the shock are too much. You begin to fade away.

: It’s kind of a nothing ending for the amount of time it takes to reach. Now let’s see what happens if we fight Wilhelmina.

: Almost all of her attacks are full-party. She has 2600 HP, putting her on roughly the same level as Comatus.

: She has three curses: Frogs (reduces HP by 10% per turn for 1-3 turns), Seizures (chance to stun for 2-4 turns), and Broken Bones (reduces all stats by 50%).

: Her attacks do a lot of ballistics damage and can inflict almost every status effect in the game in addition to a potential instant kill.

: This fight is one you do not want to do unless you have Morton. Morton blocks all of her special attacks by pointing out she doesn’t understand all the words she’s using.

: The party barely makes it out alive.

: The last two options don’t work.

: The spell sword/spear/hammer are very good weapons for Morton. Papineau can use them as well, but isn’t quite as good with them as Morton is.

: Next time, I’ll finish the Mazes & Wizards campaign.