Summary
: It’s Day 7, and we’ve gotten a pretty good roll for time.
: And oh look, Phillippe is growing back.
: I’m going to screenshot the rest of the conversation because Phillippe’s portraits are what make this work.
: 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..
: 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.
: 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?
: 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?”
: “Cashier at a hardware store. Yeah. Is this curse a step up or a step down, you think?”
: “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.”
: “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.
: 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.
: 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.
: 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.
: 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.
: 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.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?
: 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.
: 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.
: And this is why it’s called the Promise ending.
: 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.
: “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!”
: 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.
: You can run away, but that’s a bad ending called Screaming Sky.
: “Jasper, I"m losing control. I can’t hang on any longer.”
: 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.
: “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.”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.
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.
: 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.
: 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.
: 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.
: The Spider Husk’s name goes from “Spider Husk” to “Charlotte” to “Charlotte?” to “Not Charlotte”.
: 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.