Pathways into Darkness: Io Non Morii, e Non Rimasi Vivo

 

This was less of a big deal than I thought it would be.

       

To recap, I'm in this multi-leveled dungeon in the Yucatan because some aliens told the President of the United States that an ancient evil had awakened. My strike team's mission was to take a nuclear bomb to the lowest level of the dungeon, set it off, and get out. The explosion, the aliens told us, would stun the evil entity long enough for the aliens to arrive and deal with it permanently. Unfortunately, I got separated from my team due to a bad jump, and I entered the fortress long after they did. On the way down through the levels, I've seen plenty of signs of an old Nazi party that came looking for artifacts to help the war effort, but no sign of my own comrades.

     

(Note: I have virtually no screenshots for a while because I thought my recording was running when I accidentally had it on pause.)

     

That changed on the "Plague of Demons" level I was having trouble with last time. The level is swarming with invisible ghosts. To see them, you have to equip a pair of infrared goggles. There is a pair on the body of an American soldier just to the left of the arrival ladder, which would have been great except my standard pattern of exploration is to go right. So I kept running out of ammo firing blindly at invisible ghosts, dying, and reloading. To make matters worse, the level also has those evil, barely-visible phantoms from higher in the dungeon. These creatures only die if you use a crystal, but I had already forgotten that, so they kept killing me while I assumed I just wasn't hitting them enough.

    

"When / a demon bites my head / and I shoot it dead / I see la vie en rose . . . "

            

Eventually, I tried going left, and I soon found the body of John, one of my companions, who (when I spoke to him with the yellow crystal), didn't understand why I didn't remember his name. That's a good question. I had to repeat the same incredulity with the other members of my party on a later level. This is just like those Ultima games where the only word that initiates any conversation topics is JOB, but half the NPCs tell you how ridiculous the question is: "What do you mean, 'JOB'?! I'm in jail!" or "I'm a child; I don't have a job." As if it's the player's fault for asking the only keyword available.

   

John was surprised I had gotten so far by myself. He told me about using the goggles, but the ghosts had killed him anyway. His M-16 was broken. He urged me to go on and find the others, but he warned me that Steven had changed the passcode to the bomb.

   

The problem after this point was ammo.  No matter whether I went right or left, I kept running out. There was this one room with about 20 of the ghosts where I had to spend three magazines. The previous floors had offered magazines here or there; this one didn't seem to offer anything. But multiple comments had suggested some game-changing artifact would be found on the level, so I kept going different directions until I finally found . . . a wooden box.

    

I'd better get this to Lord British.

         

Muller and commenters had both suggested that this was some game-changer, so I fiddled with it until I figured out what it does. It helped that Muller had told his soldiers that once they had the box, they would need only one gold ingot.  It duplicates things left inside of it. It takes about 75 seconds, but fortunately I rested after putting an M-41 magazine in there and saw the effects almost immediately. You might think that would result in unlimited ammo, but a minute is a long time in this game and there are a lot of enemies to shoot. I think at one point I had five magazines, but most of the time, I struggled (without excessive resting) to have more than three. Is that what the cloak is for? Speeding up the clock so you can get more ammunition? I don't know that I'd risk it. Even though it's only Monday night, I'm still a bit worried about running out of time, but I have more of an incentive to at least explore every part of a level.

   

The rest of "Plague" wasn't too difficult after I could use ammunition more freely. (I should note that you have to be careful not to leave two magazines in the box after the first is duplicated, because it stops until you take one out.) I didn't find anything else of interest, though.

   

I was happy to take off the goggles for "Beware of Low-Flying Nightmares." It wasn't a bad level—very linear, lots of big rooms but with many pillars, making things feel tight and cramped. Enemies reverted to ghouls, nightmares, and oozes. I found a diamond necklace (you get points for treasure, remember) and a gold door I couldn't open. I assume it blocks the hoard of gold ingots that the Germans told me about. Supposedly, there's a gold key around here somewhere.

    

Below that was "The Labyrinth," one of the more annoying levels in the game. True to its name, it was a twisty maze. I don't know whether it's a feature or a bug, but my automap didn't work reliably. If I left the level—which I did, frequently, because I couldn't find a single save point on the level, the automap reset.

     

The level was full of these balls of electricity. No matter how carefully I tried to clear each area, they always found a way to sneak up behind me and start shocking me. I think perhaps they just spawn randomly as you explore, so you can never see them coming.

   

I don't know if there was anything important to find on the level, but I didn't finish it (or, at least, I haven't yet). If I stuck to the outer walls, it wasn't hard to get from ladder to ladder. There was one ladder in each corner, the two northern ones going up to levels I'd already explored, the two southern ones going to new levels. 

      

"Labyrinth" was easy when I was just trying to get from one ladder to the next.

     

I took "Need a Light?" first, and it was without a doubt my favorite level of the game so far. It was a simple level, with large, mostly wide-open areas where I could see enemies (ghouls, nightmares, oozes) coming for miles and easily dodge their attacks.

    

I would love it if the rest of the game were just like this.

     

Near the entry, I found another member of my team, Ed. In the southwest corner, I found four more: Jason, Steve, Sean, and Darren. They were surprised that I made it, as the doors on "Ground Floor" had closed behind them. (I guess they had remained open after the Germans used their alien pipes, then later closed after my team went through?) They had all been killed by some "blue grinning thing" that "torched them all." Only Greg, who had the nuclear bomb, managed to get away. They warned me that the code for the bomb had been changed after I was lost: the first three digits are now "658" instead of "287." (The manual gives the full code as 2870334.)

      

The team is helpful and confused.

     

The soldiers had M-79 grenade launchers and 40mm grenade cartridges. I had already found a few, so by this point I had four or five, which seemed like a lot until I realized each cartridge only holds one grenade (duh). They also had more broken M-16s, empty M-16 magazines, and radio beacons (for extraction later). I wonder if I'll ever find a live M-16 in this game (or, for that matter, ammo for my Colt .45).

   

The "big blue grinning thing" soon made himself known. I think he's the first "boss" creature in the game, although I might be misremembering something from an earlier level when I barely understood what was happening. He fires twin fireballs. He takes so much damage that I would have thought it was impossible to beat him, except that a) Jason insisted, "you can kill it," and b) there was no other way out of the area. Doors had closed behind me. Those doors posed the biggest problem. If I could have led the blue creature to the wide-open area, it would have been easy. Instead, I had to kill him in the space of the corridor before he backed me into the locked door.  

     

If not friend, why friend-shaped?

        

Reloading meant replaying the whole level, which I had to do twice before I was able to kill the thing with a combination of three or four grenades, half a dozen M-41 clips, and maybe 10 uses of the blue crystal. He self-immolated when he died, which I unfortunately didn't get a clip of. There was another brown potion, a bubbling red potion, and an amethyst ring in the chamber behind him.

     

There was no way down from this level, so I had to go back up to "Labyrinth" and across to the ladder down to "Lasciate Ogne Speranza, Voi Ch'intrate," a quote that anyone with a classical education will know from Dante Aligheri's Divine Comedy. Specifically, it ends the first stanza of the third canto to "Inferno," which recounts an inscription above the gates to Hell. Even if you're never read it, you've heard it in its English form: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

    

This was an appropriately creepy level: Satanic, runic writing on the walls; twisted columns of dead vines; and new enemies called ghasts and skitters. Ghasts looked like zombies but were capable of damaging me from a distance without actually throwing a projectile (they raised their arms and caused the ground to quake), so it was important to kill them immediately. Skitters were gray sacks that waddled along on two spiked legs and spit some kind of fast-moving projectile that was nearly impossible to dodge.

     

The level, looking appropriately hellish.

       

Even freakier were these naked ascetics sitting cross-legged in the middle of corridors. I couldn't kill them. If I tried to walk into them, I got shocked (for no damage) but couldn't pass. They blocked a decent part of the level. I did find a red velvet bag with a blue (healing) potion in it.

     

I couldn't just step over him?

     

Unable to pass the weird guys, I took the only way down: a vine leading to "Watch Your Step." I was feeling pretty good for the first time in a while, so of course the game had to pull the rug out from under me. In addition to dozens of skitters, the level featured "violet pods"—basically landmines—on the floor. I couldn't find any way to destroy them without stepping on them, which caused a couple points of damage. Worse, there were more of those flying rats, but these didn't disappear when I turned off the light. The only way to get rid of them, it seemed, was to deliberately step on a pod. Nowhere else has the game forced me to take damage, but I suppose I might be missing something.

      

A violet pod and a bunch of dead skitters.

        

Avoiding the pods except when I (perversely) needed them, I made my way around the level, slaughtering so many skitters that I ran out of ammo for a while despite the Cedar Box. There were more ghasts, too, and more cross-legged guys blocking corridors. But eventually, I found a green crystal, which let me create my own earthquakes. This turned out to be the secret to killing the ascetics, which I guess are called "sentinels" (you get their names when you walk across their corpses).

   

In the northwest corner, I found Greg's corpse. He had been killed by a ghast. He told me he hid the nuclear bomb underneath a violent pod to the south, and I soon found it. I figured, screw it, this has to be low enough, and I tried to activate it. The game told me I wasn't low enough. Bastards.

      

It's a nuclear bomb. Does it matter that much?

      

I couldn't find a way down from "Watch Your Step," so I went back up to "Lasciate etc." and used the green crystals on those sentinels. Getting past them, I was able to find a vine down to "I'd Rather Be Surfing."

    

The level had the same textures and enemies as "Lasciate," just a lot of them. There was an especially long, wide, hallway in which I had to move slowly, doing figure 8s around the pillars, lest I activate too many enemies at once. After about 20 minutes, I got through that, past some more enemies, and into a room where the door closed behind me.

     

Despite fighting a billion of them, this is the only shot I got of a live skitter. And it's not even complete.

      

There was a corpse in the room holding an AK-47. He called himself "Pedro," but I don't know what nationality he was supposed to represent. Cuba, probably, but I believe the Sandinistas and FARC guerillas also used AKs. Anyway, he said he had suffocated to death in the room and said that would also be my fate: "Long after you've used up all the oxygen in this tiny room, the doors will open. Just like they did after I died. They will open and wait for someone else."

      

"There's no such thing as an 'assault rifle'!" -- someone, probably.

      

You know what's annoying? I knew immediately the solution to this puzzle: put on the cloak that makes time slow down for me and speed up for everyone else. But for some reason, I waited, thinking that I would start to lose health and then put it on, and instead I just died immediately after a few minutes. So I ended the session here, but I'll try the cloak next time.

     

Miscellaneous notes:

       

• I now have three weapons with no ammo: an M-16, an AK-47, and a Colt .45. 

• My inventory is a bit out of control in general. I should try to organize it with some of the containers I've found. The game makes a point about how much everything weighs, but I guess the developers never implemented an encumbrance system.

• I went from "Novice" to "Beginner" with my M-79 in two shots.

• Oddly, the Cedar Box stopped producing new M-41 magazines for a while. I panicked as I started to run low, but when I took the last magazine out of the box, it started generating them again. Something just occurred to me: does the box work with blue potions? Probably not. That would make the game way too easy.

• I didn't realize until I started timing the appearance of duplicate magazines that the game's clock operates in real time. If it weren't for resting, which speeds up the clock, the player would literally have 6 days to complete the game.

• As I wrap up this session, it's Tuesday at about 12:30. So I have a little over 3 days (I have to activate the bomb by Friday at 14:00), but I have to allow enough time to escape the pyramid, plus 20 minutes for the extraction helicopters to arrive and clear the area. It's the "escape" part I'm not sure about. If I just have to go from ladder to ladder and deal with a few respawning enemies, it shouldn't take long. But if the dungeon fills with enemies after you set the device (which is the sort of sadistic thing this game would do), then I might need hours.

      

A map of the dungeon as I have experienced it.

       

I had a better time this session than the last (there was a lot less reloading), so I guess I'll keep at it. Some of my commenters are correct that although the game isn't really much of an RPG in terms of character development (my primary consideration), it does offer a certain RPG feel in the dialogue, developing plot, puzzles, and dungeon design. For those reasons, I enjoy it. Thanks to everyone who offered assistance last time.

    

Time so far: 18 hours