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 guyjust so you know the shop is closed
pretty crazy whats goin on right??
i just wanted to make sure everything is good with youkinda 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.
: “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.”
: “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…
: “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.
: 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.
: 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.
: We get the option to refuse, but we don’t want to do that.
: 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.
: 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.
: 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.
: 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..”
: “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.”
: “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.”
: “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.
: 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.
: 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.
: “No! The shoes are bad. Dude. The shoes are a trap. You hit the spikes if you have 'em.”
: “Your brother’s a liar. He told me you can kill the boss with a flying saucer. He lied about that.”
: “Yeah, yeah I’m suuuuure he did. I’m suuuure he did. That’s what you call SAR-CASM by the way.”
: “Crouch-jump? What the hell? You can’t do that.”
: This kid should be glad this apparently takes place in the 2020s, otherwise he’d never survive TF2.
: “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.
: “Ugh. He’s not my dad.”
: “You sound insane, dude. What are you even talking about?”
: We keep going to the left, and dodge some more enemies.
: 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.
: 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.
: “And smelly too. Eugh!”
: “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.
: 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.
: Beryl gives us a free tonic.
: 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