We finally have our full cast, so the puzzles will involve more complicated interactions between the characters. So far, the most interaction we’ve had has been Tchoup placing an object somewhere for Stucco to punch or jump on - the stepladder is a persistent example of this, but with magic in the mix, there will be many more opportunities for one character to set up something for another character to do. Not only that, but thanks to the ability to have multiple characters active at once, we have timing puzzles! As befits a linear game, we’ll start out with simple versions of everything, then build on it as the game proceeds. We’re not far now from getting to the beginning of the game’s actual plot!
Part 1-3: “Man, I love that this level is just making skeletons vomit. That’s the whole level.” PolsyYoutube
We recorded more of the game last night. There were several opportunities over the course of that time when I could reasonably have called an end to the enterprise and had plenty to work with. I elected not to utilize any of them. Meanwhile, I’ve also begun my solo odyssey through the game, and it’s considerably shorter. Possibly too short, but I tried to cover as many of the offhand things you can do as possible. and make sense of the puzzles where sense is to be made. I think we can all be glad there’s no health bar in this game.
Part 1: Detective Tchoup gathers his friends PolsyYoutube
In any sensible world, a king who has asked for a favor would let the guards know that honored guests are coming and tell them to be prepared. He would certainly try to make it easier for the people who will be performing that favor to get into the castle. In the world of Gobliiins 4, however, sense takes a back seat to more opportunities for puzzles. Frankly, I think this scene is too simple. While it can be annoying to shuttle characters back and forth across the moat, there’s a lot more that could be done with requiring specific pairs of characters at once. Instead, you just need to push a rock, set up the ladder, and then show the letter to each guard, finally having whichever two characters are convenient rouse both guards at once. I don’t think you even need to pick up the stick along the way, although the game will undoubtedly stop you from leaving without it.
Part 2-1: “So the one thing we haven’t figured out is how to also get Stucco to the other side. And also everything else.” Polsy Youtube
Finally, we’ve reached the beginning of the game. We’ve gone to great lengths to round up our entire party and respond to the king’s summons, and he can finally tell us what the actual objective of the game is. That is, once he cheers up enough to say anything at all. Kings in this series just don’t seem to be in control of their mental states. Or their libraries.
Part 2-2: “I apologize to any feet people that may be watching this video.” PolsyYoutube
So, now that we have a quest, we need to start gathering information, beginning in Riri’s bedroom. The problem is that there’s a lot of information to gather, and it’s not entirely clear what any of it means or how to find it. Also unclear is why any of this information exists to be found in the first place. Basically, Riri left on a journey and doesn’t seem to want to be followed, but he’s left clues to how to follow him scattered around the room. It’s like he’s saying “Ha ha, Batman! You’ll never find my secret passage out of this room! But, if you WERE to happen to look for it, the first digit of the combination is seven.” That, or maybe “Dear Mom and Dad: I’m running away from home because you don’t love me. If you really do love me, then you’ll be able to solve the puzzles to find where I’m hiding. The answers are all the things I’ve told you I did at school.” It doesn’t help that some of the things you have to do in this room are complete nonsense.
Part 2-3: “Use stick plus bear’s navel is probably the way that somebody has died in the past.” PolsyYoutube
Part of me wants to apologize for how long this room drags on. But that’s this game. There’s a lot to do, and some of it is really counterintuitive. There are several elements that are used for their own puzzles, but then have to be combined in different ways to solve other puzzles. At least the clues are numbered and their use is fairly obvious once you get all the pieces. It’s just poking at everything, with every character, and with every item, over and over until it all falls into place.
Part 2-4: “Don’t worry. At this pace, we’ll have this done… probably by about four in the morning.” PolsyYoutube
There are times when, even if you know the solutions to all of the puzzles and can plot out the shortest route to complete them, you still have to do the same thing multiple times. There are a few of those here, but I also haven’t bothered to plot out a shortest route. I’m considerably less familiar with this game than the preceding ones, so I get confused and forget things. I don’t think that slows things down particularly, but it’s probably annoying. It’s also a much more authentic Gobliiins 4 experience.
We’re now hot on the trail of the escaped aardvark, a trail which begins in his secret escape tunnel. It’s pretty elaborate for a structure that one might expect to be more functional, and it seems a bit too complicated to navigate to be useful in an emergency. But he may have set things up this way to throw his pursuers off his trail. Or he may want them to follow him. We still don’t know what his intentions are.
We’ve made it to the Transworm Express station, which could probably be seen as a statement about the state of modern public transportation if anything in this game appeared to have any meaning beyond fitting into a puzzle. The only employee doesn’t seem interested in doing his job, everything is in disrepair, and the worm himself is in a sorry state. Riri must have been REALLY unhappy at the palace if he braved this route.
At last, we have a means of transportation! Is what I would love to say, but our worm has already broken down and stranded us on a mechanical chameleon that doesn’t even work, in the middle of the sea of mud. We’re going to have to catch some evil carrots to get to the lettuce we need to proceed. Have I mentioned that this game ramps up the weirdness quite a bit from even the standard set by the earlier games?
I will say this for Shadwin’s cave in the first game - while you had to repeat the process of loading the cannon and firing it many, many, many, many times, at least you were accomplishing different things each time, and there was no need to restock the matchbox - true, you could only carry one cannonball at a time, but that was the inherent limitation of the game. There is no reason to make the player catch three carrots. There is absolutely no reason to limit the number of peas that fit in a bucket, especially when there’s no additional puzzle to solve to get more peas. The hairs ran out in Goblins 3, but at least you had to solve a puzzle to find more!
By a strange coincidence, we finally managed to line up our schedules to record earlier this week. I still have to figure out how to make videos out of the cluster of technical difficulties we endured, but I will be doing that very soon.
Whoops. I didn’t realize quite how long it had been. It’s been an interesting couple of months, what with my recording equipment failing on me (I sent it back to the manufacturer, and they’ve mailed it back to me without a reply - I’m assuming there will be some paper in the package that explains their findings, but it would be nice to know what to expect, exactly), and scheduling difficulties with The Splash. Fortunately, we found the time for another recording session, but the new setup I’ve had to use to work around the hardware problems caused other technical difficulties, and then I accidentally put in the wrong password and jumped a level too far ahead. We got it sorted out, though, and then got off on a tangent discussing Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. I barely managed to get to the recap of last session when we had to fiddle with more setup, but the rest was a bit too funny not to use. So here’s another bonus look behind the scenes of what we talk about when we’re not expecting the rest of the world to listen in, in a video whose first line will leave you wondering how I could possibly not have used that for the title quote.
Bonus video: “If I ever die, make sure no one eats my sandwiches.” PolsyYoutube
Additional bonus viewing of note: The Jojo theme piano medley I used to test the audio before we started recording So This is Basically Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, which is still good because I promise the parts I misquoted weren’t the funniest parts. The list of alternate titles for each part really stands out, although I still stand by John Dies at the End for part one and Joe vs. the Volcano for part two. The best thing is to watch it as someone who isn’t an expert on Jojo, then get into the series and realize that every last part of that video is completely serious.
We’re finally back in business, and right back into the hunt for magic lettuce. It’s guarded by a gigantic vegetarian monster with bad eyesight. The absurdity is just going to keep growing, and we’re only about halfway through the game.
We’ve finally been noticed! No, the LP hasn’t suddenly experienced a surge in popularity or anything like that, but our characters have been featured on the front page of… “Gobliiins” the newspaper. It’s an interesting enough gimmick, I suppose, but they don’t really do anything meaningful with it. There’s so much possibility in a setup like this for things like interactions between panels, or manipulating the sequence of events by moving forward and backward in the time represented by the panels. Instead, they just split the level into smaller chunks that take too long to move between for no actual benefit.
Sorry that updates have been so spread out recently; life has been kicking my butt in all kinds of ways and we haven’t been able to schedule another recording. Looking back, it seems like almost every post I’ve made here has started the same way. Fortunately, I’m stuck at home with side effects from an anti-depressant, so let’s get back to the solo version of the quest. This time, we’re finishing our worm journey by giving our worm some magic lettuce, then picking up Riri’s trail again from a turnip juice barman with a bad case of the hiccups. I really think I need to spend the time to make one of those “Jojo but really fast” videos that accurately explains the plot while making no sense to anyone who doesn’t already know the plot, but about this game. I don’t know how that would differ from the actual game.
Bet you forgot this thread was down here, didn’t you? Surprise! The Splash and I cleared out our schedules for the week and got together for two more recording sessions. That’s right - we’ve finished the game, and with it, the series. I still need to finish getting the videos together, but the only thing standing in the way of the end of this series is my own free time. For starters, I’m sure everyone remembers that we missed a gold tooth in the last session, so we started things off by going back for it. I could probably just have combined this with the first part of the next session, but in the interest of having some content as soon as possible, here’s that part of it on its own.
