Pathways into Darkness: Let Hitler Have It

"Woo-hoo! A submachine gun! Nothing will touch me now!"

       

I'm not going to cut it off just yet, but it's impossible to imagine my finishing Pathways into Darkness given my experience with the game over the last few days. I spent about six hours with the game since last week's entry, but two-thirds of that time was covering the same stretches of corridor, over and over, unable to keep my character alive against the game's sadistic onslaught of foes.

     

When I last wrote, I had arrived on a level called "We Can See in the Dark . . . Can You?," where I was attacked by unkillable flying rats. The solution—thank you, anonymous; please choose a handle next time—was to turn off my flashlight.

   

So far, so good. I made my way counter-clockwise, killing nightmares (flying ghosts) and ghouls. I eventually reached a save rune. There was nothing remarkable about the chamber that held the red rune—certainly nothing to indicate that I would respawn here two dozen times.

     

I really got to know this room.

    

No matter what I did, I could not seem to make it to the next thing—stairs, another save circle, anything. I tried several different directions. The enemies weren't even objectively that hard, and I learned through experimentation that I could freeze them briefly with the Orange Crystal, then kill them in one shot. Nonetheless, they always managed to come at me from multiple directions (I think the respawn rate is higher on this level), and they always found a way to get me.

    

Eventually, I had memorized about half the level. I'd leave the latest respawn, head down a corridor, turn a corner, and say to myself, "Okay, there's a ghoul to your left. You need to dodge his attack, then rush forward and knife him before he can get off another one." And then he'd somehow still manage to hit me. It was infuriating. It probably didn't help that my experience last session had made me paranoid (for a good reason, it turns out) about ammunition.

   

Eventually, after finding a Bubbling Red Potion—the only thing I found on the level, I think—I found another save rune and, shortly after that, the ladder down. You can imagine how excited I was to take it.

   

The next level, "Happy Happy Carnage Carnage," didn't start so bad. There were no enemies when I arrived, and I soon found another dead German with ammo right next to another save rune. There was a ladder down almost immediately, but it took me to a level called "The Labyrinth" where I almost immediately got killed by a couple of electrified floating balls.

       

I did not last long here.

      

After that, though—wow. Every direction I went brought scores of ghouls, nightmares, and a new bullet-sponge enemy called "oozes." They're humanoid-shaped, with wounds in their chests. They reach into the wounds, pull out fistfuls of their own flesh, and throw them at you. Yuck. My ammo ran low, then ran out. There's no way to reliably stab nightmares and oozes.

   

Eventually, after much reloading, I found a room in the north part of the map with the bodies of five dead German soldiers, including the notorious Captain Muller, leader of the expedition. It was fun talking with them. They had all been slaughtered by monsters on the other side of three doors leading from the room. The doors, they said, opened by walking on a rune on the floor. Muller's soldiers all blame him for the disaster.

       

What a dummkopf.

              

Friedrich, Muller's second-in-command—and the only one of the party that Muller respected—said that Muller had sent some soldiers ahead to lower levels to "recover a large amount of gold and a strange wooden box" made of cedar. Muller hinted that they would need the gold for something. Their overall goal, however, was to find "a small glass vial of immense power" that supposedly contained the essence of an imprisoned demon. "Muller wanted to use it for the war, of course . . . Muller was always thinking about the war, and about the glory of the Fatherland."

   

(Elsewhere in the dialogue, Friedrich says that it was 1938 when their party came to Mexico. This is a bit odd because "The War" from Germany's perspective wouldn't start until 1939, though obviously the writing was on the wall, and Muller could be talking about The War that Germany Was Obviously Planning For. Less explainable is the discovery of MP-41 which, as its name suggests, did not exist until 1941. Or maybe the party first came in 1938 and it took them a few years to find the pyramid, during which time the war started and they were resupplied by Germany. That actually makes a lot of sense.)

      

Muller wanted to know whether the war was still happening. "You must be losing, Yankee," he said to my reply, "or you would not lie like that." Probably because he recognized me as an American, he basically lied throughout our conversation. The Cedar Box is "useless." As for Walter's quest: "I was only appealing to his sense of greed. There is no gold." The biggest lie of all was that the party had only succumbed to its wounds after successfully killing the monsters on the other side of the door. "There is no danger."

     

Bastard.

      

More important than the dialogue, one of the dead Germans had an MP-41 submachine gun, and among them, they had about eight magazines for it. I had three or four that I'd already found. Suddenly, I felt invincible again. 

   

That feeling lasted about 10 seconds. I walked over the rune that the Germans had warned me about. Three doors opened, disgorging a couple dozen oozes, ghouls, and nightmares. I hadn't believed Muller, of course, but I still didn't expect as many monsters as there were. I tried to run, but the outer doors had closed when I entered the room, trapping me here. I laid into them with my submachine gun, but they soon overwhelmed me.

     

One of my unsuccessful attempts.

        

And thus began the next phase of repeatedly dying in the same place. After several reloads, I tried to clear out as many enemies on the way to the slaughter room as possible, then return to the save rune, but even this is impossible because not only does pair of doors trap the player in the slaughter room, but also an earlier door closes trapping the player in this section of the dungeon.

   

I finally beat them by using the Bubbling Red Potion that I found on the previous level. This slows down the monsters. I found that if I walked across the rune, opening the doors, and immediately went to a corner in the outer room, and then drank the potion, the monsters would slowly emerge from the doors into the crossfire of my MP-41.

      

The outer room after the slaughter.

       

After all that, what I found on the other side of the door was a Red Cloak, a Brown Potion, and two Clear Blue Potions. A rune in the inner room opened the doors in the outer room.

    

The difficulty of the level didn't end after the horde. I still had to make my way back to the save rune (I think there's only one on the level) via a path I hadn't taken on the way here. Fortunately, I managed to make it on my first try. After saving, I took the ladder down to the next level. 

   

I couldn't get anywhere with "The Labyrinth." It was a tight, winding maze in which dodging was impossible. Electrical spheres kept spawning behind me, and they spawned so frequently that I couldn't rest anywhere. Eventually, I gave up. I remembered that there was another way down from "Ground Floor," and I figured I'd check it out.

     

I hope you appreciate what it costs me to get this close to take a screenshot.

     

The first level in this second path was called "Feel the Power," and wasn't bad. There were a lot of groups of oozes—three or four at a time—but the hallways were wide and roomy, and there were a lot of corners to duck behind. In the middle of one of these hallways, I found Walter, dead next to one of the gold ingots he'd been sent to find. He pleaded with me not to take the gold. "It's all I have to look at." He said there were 11 more ingots on a lower level behind a gold door locked with a Gold Key that Muller had given him. After he died, some Spanish-speaking soldiers came by and took the key.

   

It was the next level, "A Plague of Demons," that broke me. The moment I arrived, I started getting attacked by invisible monsters. They didn't do a lot of damage, but they were constant. I had to spin my submachine gun around in circles to kill them. That just wasted ammo, though, and soon I was completely out. Since I can't even see the enemies attacking me on the level, I certainly can't knife them. None of my stuff seems to allow me to see invisibility. When I got to the point that I started hating not only the game but my computer for running it and all of you for reading my blog, I decided it was time to quit.

     

A rock hits me out of nowhere.

     

Some miscellaneous notes:

   

• Putting on the Red Cloak seems to make enemies move faster. Why would I want to do that?

• I've figured out that the Clear Blue Potions heal. I guess I could rely on them in The Labyrinth, where I can't rest.

• You know I like item descriptions. This game has a descriptive paragraph with everything that you find. 

    

I thought that the M-41 was an anachronism. According to one site, the Walther P4 wasn't available until 1975!

      

• I've knifed and shot hundreds of creatures without advancing beyond "Expert." I suspect that's the highest level. The game's only claim to be an RPG rests on a skill system for which there are only three levels and the top one is relatively easy to achieve. Moreover, since you really don't have a "choice" of weapons—you have to use whatever you have ammo for at the time—every player is probably going to end up an "Expert" in everything. I should have just BRIEFed this.

• It was Monday evening when I wrapped up. I've stopped being paranoid about the time—running out would be a blessed mercy—and started being paranoid that by not exploring every little nook of every level, I might be missing some key item. I don't see how you possibly avoid running out of ammo if you insist on exploring every nook, though.

     

With RPGs, it's rare to encounter a title that I'm afraid I simply cannot win, no matter how hard I try. If tactics don't lead to victory, there's always grinding and luck. Neither is an option in most action games (at least, not the type of luck I'm talking about, where you roll a 20 on a backstab), and thus while I plan to take a couple of days before deciding whether to quit this one, it's likely that the game will make the decision for me.

   

Time so far: 13 hours