The Last Door - Complete Edition (Switch)

Recall the dream of luxor

How fluids will arrive

As if by call or schedule

Resume through the morning tide

Where entry is by seaweed gate

And plan the plan of dreams

To lose oneself in reverb

In all that is and all that seems

Been on some kind of Lovecraftian kick since my summer vacation where I listened through Blue Öyster Cults Imaginos cycle and also got a Lovecraft collection. And then Switch got this game and since it was published by Phoenix Online that did the remake of Gabriel Knight and their own King's Quest the Silver Lining I decided to take the plunge and I gotta say, it really sucked me in. Beginning with the suicide by hanging we are introduced to Jeremiah Devitt that have received letters from an old classmate and decide to meet his old friend. Arriving at the old manor no person is there to meet him so he wanders the house, getting keys and some disturbing images and ravens following him. Turns out that after his friends wife died he went mad and hanged himself leaving some clue toward Devitt and his school back in Aberdeen. Calling the police after finding the corpse Devitt visits his psychiatrist, Dr. Wakefield and then travels to the school that was turned into a hospital. People are dying like flies and Devitts old teacher, an old priest, are the head of the hospital. He stumbles upon some kind of ritualistic murder of the patients in a room under a class room. In the catacombs he sees a light from a room and as he enters I see the most ghastly thing ever. A bug that stop me from progressing. It took them over a month to fix it with an update before I could continue. 

After that setback I could continue with watching the priest burning himself to death after retelling of their experiments in school where he part took in an experiment to enter the Last Door that Devitt and his friends tried to do. Now, game is really good. It's not hard since it's just a puzzle game where you walk around and try to get keys to enter doors and such, but the atmosphere is uncanny. The music, the sound and graphics all build this sense of dread as I played through it. And I admit, I had things running on the computer besides me, but that probably was for my benefit since it felt uneasy. And to be fair it used a couple of jump scares and quick cuts to unsettle the player, but I liked it overall.

The real story is that Devitt suffers from amnesia and looks for answers to what happened and therefore tried to connect with his old friend. Which took him to Aberdeen where he is knocked unconscious by a serial killer and transported back to London in a coffin and after being released stumble upon another friend, Alexandre DuPre where he is injected by a serum to enter the veil once again. Then the game shifts perspective to Dr. Wakefield and a Dr. Kaufman. Wakefield tries to find his patient and Kaufman is a friend that have connections to the occult and helps in the search. First they try to find information about DuPre at an asylum. That leads to an officer that puts them on course toward Kaufman's old teacher Dr. Wright who suffers some kind of Alzheimer. Kaufman grows sick and eventually dies and leaves the final clue for Wakefield to an island where they are in the midst of pagan rituals, dressed up in masks and a child have gone missing... am I the only one that got the Wicker Man vibes of that chapter? Turns out that the island used to have a ritual to enter the other side by installing terror on people so that they enter the land of fog. Which Wakefield is submitted too and there he finds Devitt. Looking through the lands he is given a choice to either turn back or try to save Devitt. 

I'm Burnin' for you!

It's hard to tell the story since it's not that hard and as stated earlier, it's the atmosphere you want. Think about a late autumn night, alone and silence with only the sound of the howling wind. This game gives me that chill, but interesting enough I knew I never could die and that doesn't need to be. I highly recommend it for the Halloween holidays... that is, what, like 20 days ago... I blame the bug. If there something I don't like about the game it's that the ending... wasn't that satisfactory. They hinted about this custodian that like a spider guarded the last door and would hunt down anyone it found within the fog. I assume it might have been the creature you saw below the tunnels around the Wright mansion, but it wasn't giving me a final ending winning over it to get to the door. And then of course, what happened after entering the door? What is its purpose and why did they seek it beyond the mere curiosity of the the bored student that had to return? And what about the eye? Why does it exist? Maybe it's just the lovecraftian way.

The Silver Lining

After playing Diablo it was time to play something happier. Coincidentally episode 4 of The Silver Lining came out during the Sunday. Unfortunately my internet seemed to screw up so I had to wait until yesterday to get it. Then I played it until the end. Yes, I finished it in one day... or at least till 2 AM this morning so technically it would be two days. Well, it wasn't that much happier story, people seemed really depressed and who would blame them. There is some serious business going on in that game. And yet for some reason I was able to finish it. I don't know how I was able to finish that game (well, I do since I know what to do now). I ended up having a lot of luck when it came to playing this game. First I just stumbled through the castle in the beginning and just happened to touch items from the earlier parts that I now was able to take. Pure coincidence. Then the game float on like normal and I picked up some small hints here and there and could guess fairly well what they was supposed to do. It might have to be my King's Quest marathon earlier this year so I had trained my brain to recognize those small hints and solutions. One puzzle in particular was the same as in the ADG Interactive King's Quest II: Romancing the Stones. Then I get stuck trying to get an instrument to get the first ingredient, so I just stands near it since I know that it's that thing I need, but I don't know how to get it. So I look in my inventory and look on those things I haven't used (everyone knows that if an item is picked up it gotta be used). I have no clue on what to do, but then my mind turns into a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives. This is gonna be spoilers so here goes. I needed a horn, it existed in a 3D-picture, but the game wouldn't allow me to take it. I had found a gold baton and some beast hair and my mind just said, "what if we make it look like a horn and switch them around?". You see how ridicules that is? It didn't work, how could it? Although it wasn't completely wrong, the game told me I was missing some thing to glue (subtle is it not?) it together so I went where I knew it was and suddenly I had a painters brush. No idea what that was for, it was actually an answer to another puzzle which I hadn't found yet, so I basically found the answer before I knew what it was for so I figured the puzzles out backwards just by mistake. Wish life would be that easy, having all the solution, you just need to find the problems to solve them.

Either this was a much easier than the earlier episodes or my luck was just fantastic... it ended pretty much with the second to last puzzle. Not because it was hard to figure out what to do (took me 5 seconds), no, because they decided to make the puzzle harder and harder. The puzzle is to solve 12  combinations with 4 spinning wheels with different images that together form one of the zodiacs. After solving the first ones the wheels spin faster, then they blink in and out, then they change places (you start to see the problem?) and after combining 10 they start moving around the screen, still spinning and phasing in and out. This was on the normal difficulty and it was after 1 AM so I decided to chicken (tired as hell with a headache is not the best mood to play a game of patience and memorization) out after an hour so I could finish it before I went to bed so I quit and restored my earlier game. Somehow I glitch it, always present was the spinning wheel of the Pandoras Box and my clue in the Druid's parchment was the Druid himself instead of Shamir the Genie that I was supposed to see at that point. Anyway, I played the puzzle again, but on easy this time (meaning they cut of the changing places and swirling all around the screen) and thus beating it... and the next puzzle following: Magic Duel with the Big Bad of the game. Oh Yeah, it was epic. Unfortunately it will probably be another half year or something before the conclusion is payable. Oh well.