Anyway, the trap corridor. As you might suspect, this is a corridor filled with traps. The stone floor contains many lighter-colored stone squares of differing shapes, sizes, and positions. These squares, Ellia learns the hard way after retardedly stepping on one, trigger the traps. Now Ellia has to time her running just right in order to avoid the large scythes swinging down out of the walls. Did I say Ellia? Of course I mean me. You know this is just the type of thing I’m so freaking good at, too.
Avoiding the other trap-triggering panels and the beef jerky zombie lying surprisingly intact on the floor, I manage to make it through without embarrassing myself. Seriously, I didn’t get hit once. Don’t look so skeptical, I have the footage to prove it! Yeah, bite me. I’ll have to amend my earlier statement where I said that the trap corridors were as unfun as a Tidus/Seymour tag-team sexual encounter. That jaunt through the scythes was distinctly more fun than such an experience — at least if I’d gotten hit, my life would be over quickly. As opposed to the sexual encounter, which would be over quickly but would cause enough shame to last a lifetime.
I’m getting off track here and depriving you guys of the good stuff. Ellia has no chance to rest after making it through the tunnel of horrors — the doors in the next room slam shut as soon as she enters. The door slamming was apparently loud enough to wake the dead, as a nearby zombie staggers to its feet. But this is no beef jerky zombie — this is a whole new variety. Because it would be so boring if when we died and became rotting undead monsters we all looked the same. Yay diversity!
This particular zombie looks like a greenish mummy whose embalmer didn’t do such a good job securing its wrappings. Before it can try to hump Ellia’s head or whatever greenish zombies in this game do, RETD excitedly butts in to give us some new info — in green font, no less. Fancy! The green font is a gimmick to introduce the latest and greatest feature in the game — the sanity meter. Which looks like the health meter but is, surprisingly, green.
The sanity meter decreases when monsters leer at Ellia — or whoever’s the current playable character, for future reference. RETD goes all schizo with the font colors to explain why This Is Bad: “Beware! Sanity loss affects perception and eventually health!” In other words, if you thought this game was creepy before, you’re in for a whole new level of fucked-upness. Picture the strange hallucinations, creepy voices, and perceptual skewing that you experienced when you watched the pond scene in FFX. That’ll give you a good idea of what happens when the sanity meter gets low.
I’ll let you decide why Penis Assthrustus didn’t have a sanity meter, since the game never bothers to explain it.
Loading ...Just like RETD warned me, Ellia’s sanity meter begins to plummet as soon as the green mummy heads in her direction. Speaking of insanity effects, I think I start to experience some when RETD gives me pretty much the same fucking information about the sanity meter on the menu screen. Seriously, I think I can remember things for more than two seconds, RETD. Cut me some slack, here.
Like its dried-out zombie brethren, the green mummy expels gouts of blood when Ellia lops off its limbs with her dancer’s sword. Like Penis, Ellia also gets to perform a finishing move once she subdues the zombie. Unfortunately, the phallic candles in the foreground block out whether or not she shoves her weapon in its no-no place. RETD can’t resist more green text as he informs us that finishing moves restore some sanity. Wait, so getting ogled by the undead makes you crazy, but brutally assraping them makes you sane again? That kind of logic can only come from sticking crack rocks directly in your nose.
The final penetration triggers the Choir of Discovery and the re-opening of the door. But Ellia wants to go back into the corridor about as much as I want to be violated by Shion wearing a sandpaper-covered strap-on. There is one other door leading out of the room — unfortunately, Ellia’s brutal sodomy of the zombie couldn’t entice it to open. She must turn instead to the set of three candles — hey, just like in that other room! — sitting in the foreground practically screaming “HEY! LOOK OVER HERE!!!!!!” Oh, and someone left a glowing bronze amulet just lying about on a nearby stone thingy. First things first, Ellia grabs the amulet before some flaming zombie can barge in and try to take the fabulous trinket from her.
Next, the candles. RETD “helpfully” gives the same spiel about the candles and the mural both representing the time of day. Two of the three candles are lit, while the mural displays the sun at the top center. But all is not right, for RETD gives Ellia the option to light or extinguish each of the three candles. You know what? I’m going to change things around and not even sarcastically pretend this is difficult. Good god. Obviously, Ellia lights only the middle candle because the MIDDLE candle matches up with the sun in the MIDDLE of the picture. Get it?! They could’ve made this slightly more difficult if, say, they’d moved the candles away from the picture and made me use a fraction of my short term memory or something. But no, the candles line up directly beneath the sun’s various positions in these things. Christ.
Poor Ellia has nothing to show for solving that brainteaser except for a couple of doors that open partway — including the one leading out of the current room. I’m not sure where the other one is, since I have no sense of direction and all the rooms look the same. Although Ellia is more than skinny enough to squeeze through the available opening at the top of the doorway, she has never learned how to climb.
7) Dancing slave girls could read and swordfight, but they couldn’t climb.
That means there’s only one fucking place to fucking go. Yes, back through the fucking trap corridor. I pass through safely, effectively making myself look stupid for just throwing that tantrum of swearing. There goes my image as a super-1337 gam0r. It’ll take me years to earn that back. Ellia avoids the nest of beef jerkies in the first candle chamber and ends up back in the entrance hall. The one with the four-armed boobie statue. In what is probably the most mindbending puzzle thus far, Ellia realizes that when she removed the original magical amulet from this statue, a door opened. Using this same necklace-door logic, she places the brand-new bronze amulet she just found onto the statue’s neck. The moral is that even inanimate, multi-armed women must have jewelry because chicks love that shit.
With the new, non-magical necklace in place, obviously the previously-closed door opens across from the first one. When she heads through the doorway, Ellia encounters a completely different layout and atmosphere. I’m just kidding, of course — it’s the same candle puzzles and trap corridors.
Another uneventful trap corridor later — again making me feel like a giant pussy for complaining earlier — Ellia enters another square candle puzzle room. Just like before, the door slams shut. Just like before, a zombie rises to its feet. Just like before, a game designer takes a hit from his bong rather than try to introduce much diversity to the gameplay. But wait! It is totally different! For this zombie, unlike the scraggily green mummy, is blue. I get what’s going on here! Green zombie? Blue zombie? Why, this is all according to the Pokemon color scheme!
Ellia dispatches the Squirtle zombie in the usual rapey manner. Since neither the Bulbasaur nor the Squirtle zombie lasted more than a few seconds, I didn’t get to experience this myself, but supposedly they each have their own special traits that make them unique snowflakes. The Bulbasaur zombies, when hacked apart, grow phantom limbs (and head) that continue to suck out sanity faster than Shion attached to her latest prospective boss. The Squirtle zombies, on the other hand, have an extra special trick where they will explode (and set off any other Squirtle zombies in the vicinity) unless decapitated first. So…I always just decapitate them before even hitting any other area of their bodies. What a complicated strategy — obviously, I’m a genius.
No wonder he’s so pissy — someone burned off his penis!
Speaking of complicated strategies, the game designers try to throw me for a loop in the candle puzzle when the image above the candles is empty except for the horizon. But there’s no sun there! How will I know which candles to light! The game designers once again underestimated my genius-level IQ — using it, I know that I am supposed to extinguish all the candles. Who wants to touch me?
Solving this puzzle causes the partially-open doors from the last puzzle to open all the way, so thankfully Ellia won’t have to try to squeeze her inflexible, bulky body through the tight openings. Heh…”tight openings.” Once again, my usual shitty sense of direction combined with the fact that everything looks the same in this fucking place (OMG! Dungeon racist!) prevents me from figuring out if I’m heading through the previously-blocked door or not. Plus, I’m using a walkthrough to minimize unnecessary fucking-around time, so it’s not like I have to use my brain to navigate. Hey, cut me some slack — those exceptionally hard puzzles take a lot out of me.
The next trap corridor — again giving me no trouble (sigh) — has a new feature to break up the unforgivable monotony of the rest of this place — a small alcove in one of the walls. Holy shit, is someone recording this? Amidst all the mythological carvings in the wall sits a small shelf containing a glowing phallic object. Okay, I understand that game designers like to create jackable situations for themselves and the fanboys, but hot Asian chick + dildo is just way out of bounds.
OH GOD MY EYES ARE BLEEDING!!!! Wait, that’s just a sanity effect. You almost had me there, game designers!
RETD describes the scene thus: “A small pedestal covered with decorative etchings stands before the wall. The Blowgun upon it must have some special significance for it to be the focal point of the display.” Sure. “Blowgun.” Whatever you say, RETD. Even if we were to take his word for it, hot Asian chick + phallic object inserted into mouth isn’t a whole lot less pandery than my first thought.
Ellia thoughtlessly grabs the blowgun without bothering to swap it with another phallic object of similar weight, causing a trapdoor to open directly beneath her. I would give her more shit for this Einsteinian lapse in judgment, but seeing as how this is the only way to progress in the game, I’ll hold off. Plus, Ellia will more than pay for her stupidity later, unlike most female video game characters.
Anyway, Ellia and her new toy plunge into a pit, screaming the entire way. At least Ellia does — thankfully the blowgun knows how to keep its mouth shut. Somewhere along the way, Ellia lets go of her sword, and in an effort to prevent herself from being impaled by the falling sharp object, she jumps quickly backwards after landing, of course, on her feet. Because she’s a dancer. Though she manages to survive the fall without the slightest injury, even to her bare feet, the sword isn’t so lucky. It breaks into several pieces upon connecting with the stone floor. Now, Ellia only has a blowgun for protection against the undead. That’s bad. Not only are there a mere 100 darts in the cylinder (I love how they try to be realistic by having a finite amount of ammo, but then retardedly pack an unrealistic number of darts in there), but that means I have to watch Ellia wrap her lips around it and blow for the rest of her chapter. I don’t fucking think so.