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

[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.