Shadows of Darkness: Nuages (Part 2)

Continuing from yesterday's narrative:

Together, Wherever We Go

In the last entry, I told of the old Nikolai, futilely searching around his house for his lost wife, Anna. Olga told me that she was lost in the forest and "eaten by something terrible."

  

I found Anna's ghost while wandering through the forest. Unaware that she was dead, she begged me to lead her home but was incapable of following. The game forced me to encounter her a few times before I could finally clue her in that she was dead.

       

How did Nikolai even die?

     

After she accepted her fate, the game allowed me to tell Nikolai where he could find her. Nikolai went hobbling off into the forest. The next time I visited the square where I'd seen Anna, I found both of their spirits. (There was no indication of how Nikolai died.) They both expressed their love; Anna said they could now be together forever; and the spirits united and disappeared. 

   

This is a touching scene. Honest.

    

Another way to look at it is I used an addled old man's grief over his lost wife to convince him to wander into the woods until he died of exposure. Paladin!

  

Let Me Entertain You

Returning to the inn one evening, I sighed to note the presence of a gnomish jester standing on a table and telling jokes. He introduced himself as Punny Bones. (He's voiced by prolific voice and character actor Hamilton Camp.) His jokes were terrible, but he suggested that wasn't his fault. He'd somehow forgotten most of the good ones.

      

Punny gets a review.

    

At his invitation, I later met him in his room. He related that his lack of humor was a curse from Baba Yaga. Having no sense of humor herself, she got angry when Punny Bones told a joke about her, and she cursed him so that he would have no sense of humor, either.

      

Don't try to make sense of it.

      

The gypsies later told me where I could find Baba Yaga, but I can't figure out how to get past the magical bushes that block the path. If she has a weakness for food, it's not for any food that I'm carrying.

    

I would imagine that's true of a lot of bushes.

      

Punny Bones is pretty goofy, but the character basically works in this world. There's nothing particularly wrong about the idea of an itinerant gnome that makes his money as a comedian. He didn't bother me as much as I would have thought.

        

Wax On, Wax Off

The part I like most about Quest for Glory games is watching my statistics increase as I successfully employ them. I had been returning to the adventurer's guild daily to use the strength machine (you can only use it once per day) because I thought I needed improved strength to get the bonsai tree in the swamp. I later became convinced that I needed to improve my climbing skill for the same reason. Fortunately, there's a ring on the ceiling of the guild that you can use to practice climbing, by tossing your grapple up to it and shimmying up and down the rope. The only problem is forgetting to grab the rope and grapple when you're done, which I only do every single time.

    

It looks to me like I'm doing okay.

   

Again, I thought I had to buff up so I'd be strong enough to push the squid obelisk out of the way of the bonsai tree, but it turns out that all pushing does is knock it over so that you can climb back up to the cave (the path you originally come down is too slippery). Clicking around with other solutions for the bonsai tree, the game suggested I needed to climb up to the ledge above it. It took me a while to build my climbing skill to the point that I could do that with the grapnel and rope. But that was a dead end, too. I suspect that's simply the thief's way back up to the cave.

      

Man, I could have solved this hours ago.

  

Essentially, I had misinterpreted the scene graphically. The only thing stopping me from getting the bonsai tree was a pile of rocks creating a dam in the river of goo in which the tree sat. By knocking them apart with my own rocks, I broke the dam and the tree came loose and flowed down to the end of the rocks next to me. Saving the tree from goo is a requirement to get help from the Leshy.

      

Well, now it feels more like I'm playing an authentic version of the game.

       

Unfortunately, I can't figure out how this ends because the game crashes if I pick up the tree or try to leave this screen. I don't know whether this is a temporary problem or a permanent one, so I'm going to continue playing and solving puzzles until I know for sure this is a "walking dead" situation, then figure out what to do from there. The error is #47 ("not an object") if anyone has ever seen it before.

 

All I Need is the Girl

It was Olga who first clued me in that the residents of Castle Borgov might be vampires. As for their "Master," I know it's Katrina, the woman who met me outside the cave when I first arrived. I remember it from playing the game in the 1990s, but even if I didn't, I think I would have figured it out by now. Any woman who only hangs around at night despite insisting that it's dangerous at night clearly has something going on.

  

Katrina was waiting for me after I climbed over the town gate one evening (it took me a few tries). She chastised me for wandering around at night and gave me the "Frostbite" spell to protect myself. We flirted a bit, and she gave me some generic answers to questions about Mordavia, magic, and the like, but she abruptly departed before I got through the rest of the keywords.

   

What game are you playing?

  

My first attempt to get into Castle Borgov was to climb the gates at night, when Boris was off-duty. That got me promptly eaten by the two necrotaurs guarding the other side--which I don't understand, as I can defeat necrotaurs in regular combat.

   

Things are about to take a dire turn.

  

Later, after freeing Igor and getting the key to the Borgov crypt from him, I found the secret way into the castle through the crypt. The key opens the way into a dark mausoleum with statues against the walls. Some of the statues conceal hidden doors, but the ones I initially tried just brought me back to the crypt. The one I needed to get to the castle was locked, the key hidden under a seal on the floor.

      

A cool crypt.

    

The seal was another puzzle, and from my perspective not a very fair one (cf. our recent discussion on color-blindness). I intuited what needed to be done almost immediately: spell out the name BORGOV in colors that begin with the same letters; that is, blue, orange, red, green, orange, violet. Someone like me has to solve this kind of puzzle like a logic puzzle if Irene isn't immediately available to come over and help. Looking at the six colors (on the left side of the crest) in order:

   

• The first could be red, orange, or green
• The second could be red, orange, or green
• The third could be yellow or orange
• The fourth could be green or brown
• The fifth could be blue or purple
• The sixth could be purple or green

     

How I love color puzzles.

    

Since I only had one candidate for blue, that meant blue was definitely #5. That left me with only one candidate for purple, which was #6, which left only green as #4 (brown isn't in the puzzle at all). Yellow (although not used by the puzzle) had to be #3. I couldn't figure out red and orange by elimination, but at this point I was down to only two possible sequences, so I tried both and one was right. Later, while typing this, I realized that the colors are presented in the standard ROY G. BIV order (minus indigo), so I could have saved myself some time and angst.

   

The correct combination opened the seal, which contained a key. That key led me to a passage behind one of the statues that ran all the way to the basement of Castle Borgov.

      

A typical castle room.

     

Castle Borgov is a large series of rooms with two or three doors, sometimes concealed behind bookcases and operated with hidden switches. One required me to spell out "EXIT" in letters on the spines of encyclopedias.

      

The extra letters confused me. I tried AX TIME and EXAM IT first.

     

There wasn't anything in most of the rooms. Some of the doors opened to stairwells leading to towers. I had to kill some giant bats in one of the stairwells. There were two places that I couldn't pass. One was a door that opened into the castle's main hall. I blundered into Katrina and Ad Avis, who immediately killed me with blasts of magic. (This was a bit of a spoiler. The game should have just had the character die when he opens the door without showing explicitly what happened.) The other was a downward staircase that ended at a door guarded by two goons. Their conversation indicated that the door led to the dungeon, but that no one was in the dungeon. Trying to get anywhere near the goons led to instant death.

   

I meant to get a shot without the text, but I screwed it up.

    

At the top of another tower, however, I found a room occupied by a giant apelike creature and a little girl. The giant ape, which the girl called "Toby," slammed the door in my face if I tried to enter, but I could stand on the threshold and talk to the girl.

      

Do you play a little Harry Belafonte on the radio?

    

She was a vampire. In a long conversation, it transpired that she was Tanya, missing daughter of the innkeepers. Toby used to visit her at the inn, and one day brought her a doll that she named Vana. When her parents found the doll, they freaked out and forbade her from seeing "Toby" again. Tanya ran away with the creature instead, and he brought her to the castle. At some point, Katrina (who Tanya calls "Aunt Trina") must have turned her into a vampire. Tanya misses her parents but think that they wouldn't want to see her now that she's a vampire. Yuri and Bella must have been aware that vampires were a threat, as they used to make Tanya wear a garlic necklace. Now she wears a choker that Katrina gave her. The relationship between the two is weird ("Aunt Trina says she will be my friend and take care of me . . . She says that I'll be her little girl for ever and ever"). Tanya does not like Ad Avis, who she calls the "dark man." Neither does Toby. Maybe that's something to exploit. Anyway, Toby was clearly barely tolerating my presence, so I eventually left after suggesting to Tanya that she keep my visit a secret.

  

This is probably some anagram.

     

For now, I couldn't find anything else to do in the castle, so I left. I'm looking forward to learning more about Katrina and what she's trying to get out of all of this.

 

You'll Never Get Away from Me

    

Back to the Rusalka. The gypsies told me that to free her, I would have to:

  

1. Remind her who she is and how she died.
2. Weave her hair into a broom.
3. Beat the broom three times against her murderer's grave.
4. Kill his ghost.
5. Give the spirit "what she truly desires."

     

I had already found her name on her gravestone: Elyssa. When I had re-visited her before, the game wouldn't let me tell her. It did now, though. She remembered her death. She had gone skinny-dipping with her fiancé. She refused his affections, so he drowned her ("he always did have a low frustration point"). She gave me her hair, which I wove into the hand broom I had previously bought from Olga.

          

Did previous games allow you to use one inventory item on another like this? I can't remember.

      

Elyssa's fiancé, Janos, apparently got to live out his life with his fellow townsfolk thinking that Elyssa had drowned. They buried him next to an empty grave for her. I beat at it with the broom, and his ghost appeared and promptly killed me. Reloading, I cast the gypsies' "Aura" spell first, and this time I was able to defeat the ghost.

    

When do I avenge all the people that the Rusalka has killed over the years?

     

When I returned to Elyssa, her comely features had faded, leaving a rotting corpse behind. I sucked up my revulsion and gave her a kiss, which put her to rest at last. Paladin!

       

Does she have to be hugging me at the same time?

    

Some common themes and other notes from this session:

   

• You really have to talk with people multiple times. Almost every time I swung through town, people had something new to say. I've been trying really hard to improve my "Communication" and "Honor" statistics by ensuring that I click on myself and greet the NPCs, then click on them to talk about various topics, then click on myself to say goodbye, but it's more annoying to do this than it was in Wages of War because you can't do it from the same screen.

• If "Cask of Amon Tillado" wasn't enough, there's another clear Poe reference in the cemetery, where one of the headstones is to "Ligeia," another Poe short story. Ligeia's body comes out of her crypt if you open it during the day, and the animation has you shove it back in and close the door. If you open it at night, you get attacked by Ligeia's ghost.

      

I don't know. That looks like Rowena's ghost to me.

      

• I'm really sick of getting poisoned. I started this session poisoned, probably by a wyvern. I continued to get poisoned by wyverns and giant bats and a trap in the mausoleum. It wears off eventually, but it's annoying until it does. Dr. Cranium will only give me one antidote per day.

• I'm running out of money fast. I haven't found any way to make more. No monster drops any. There isn't even a "sell" option when talking to Olga.

• Wandering the forest at night carries the risk of running into a wraith. Wraiths automatically drain all your life force the moment you see them, then continually drain after that, so not even a healing potion can help you. Neither can the "Aura" spell, which is supposed to protect against undead. I honestly don't know how to defeat them.

    

Protected with what?

      

• It's been fun watching Dmitri's opinion of me grow throughout my quests. When I first arrived, he barked at me that they didn't like strangers. By the end of this session, he was saying things like "Good to see you!" when I spoke to him.

   

Don't gush so much, Dmitri. You're embarrassing both of us.

    

• I keep waiting for that hawk to be involved in a puzzle somehow.

         

As I wrap up, I find myself with only a few puzzles. I have to figure out how to get to Baba Yaga, the end of Erana's dream message, how to explore the castle without dying (I'm thinking I want to oil the hinges), where to find the other rituals, and how to communicate with the will-o-wisps. I'm sure I have a few more in my notes. I really enjoy the characters in Shadows of Darkness (at least, most of them), and while I don't think voice acting is necessary to an RPG, having professional actors involved in this one does add something to their personalities. 

   

Just as I was readying this entry for publication, however, commenter ATMMachine alerted me to a "walking dead" scenario that I've almost certainly already experienced. Coupled with the crashing issue reported above, I think this means I'm going to have to start over. Hopefully, progress will be quick through the areas and puzzles I've already solved.

    

Time so far: 12 hours