After the initial puzzle I mentioned last time, there’s a fairly wide-open area bottlenecked by a toll bridge where you are asked to pay 50 gold coins.
The CAST action of wizards might be the “solve everything” spell, except the need for cold, hard, cash.
This is a way to force the player to explore the entire opening area, because there are exactly 50 (no more, no less) gold coins spread out amongst the map. In some cases they are in wide open places (in which case the game will say YOU HAVE FOUND 5 GOLD COINS with no fuss) and in some cases things are a little more secret.
Also note that, in general, there is no need to TAKE things; if the “party” finds something interesting they’ll grab it automatically. I do have to put “party” in quotes because of a very weird puzzle type in particular. In two places on the map there was an entrance “too small” for most characters to get in. If you switch to the Elf you can make it through:
However, the entire party follows along with the Elf. While you could suppose the crack scene above is just the Elf working solo, there’s another room which undercuts that idea:
You can’t reach this vault without the Elf. Then, if you try to say KIN, the game claims the character can only speak in their own language. The solution is to switch to the Cleric who can TRANSLATE and find out the word actually means GOLD, and if the Cleric then says GOLD, 5 gold coins appear and are added to the communal stash.
But how did the Cleric get in the vault? I can only assume that when switching characters, you really are “working solo” so to speak and you’re pulling them out from some magical reserve. Yet, this contradicts the idea of a shared inventory; later you get a magical sword, and while it makes sense to be held by the “party” it doesn’t make as much sense that the Elf is toting it around.
I think it’s possible the authors had two conceptual models going on at the same time but didn’t bother to resolve the tension. I’m going to assume it’s a traveling party still and the Elf somehow has the power to “pull in” the rest of the party. However, I’ve been stopped before in puzzle-solving by having the wrong visual image, so I have to keep in mind there really may be only one character in the world at a time.
This scene is the result of the Gladiator wielding a sword using KILL twice, once for each hand. It possibly is meant to evoke the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
For the most part, all the gold was easy to gather, but I was stuck for a long time at 45.
I had made a wrong assumption in thinking all the important clues would be textual, but there is one room where you need to refer to an item that is only in the picture (like Mystery House).
There’s gold in here! You need the Strongman to get it.
The fortunate thing is that the character skills in this game don’t seem to require nouns, so just LIFT works and you don’t have to play guess-the-noun.
After gathering all the gold, I made it past the toll bridge over to Oldorf’s underground castle.
This has been fun enough so far; I’m just hoping I don’t have to super-optimize my character swaps in order to finish the game (remember, you can only swap to each character 5 times at most).
One thing I haven’t mentioned yet: what is the objective of the game? Even this far in, I have no idea. It’s not mentioned in the manual, nor the opening screen. Who is Oldorf? Am I supposed to be killing him or her? Just stealing stuff and running away? The advertising says you are “looking for treasure” but given the initial treasure search was simply to get by the opening toll bridge this isn’t following a classic treasure hunt style at all.
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Is it plausible to conceive of the “party” as just one being that can change class at will, or something?
It is. That being can hold a really big inventory, even when shrunk to an elf (and based on something later, it isn’t extradimensional or anything).
I am guessing the authors just never really thought it through. It’s kind of interesting to have narrative-modeling and gameplay-modeling internally clash.
Since the Cleric’s role is just translating and speaking, maybe the Elf’s communicating with him through the crack…?
Clearly, the player character is the Smith Syndicate, and this is an entirely unexpected prequel to Killer7. Is there any indication that Oldorf is really Kun Lun?
The down-exit-to-another-place thing is kind of weird with the communicate-through-the-crack theory, but you could make it work I guess (there’s another route to the same location).
Is the Killer7 situation ever explained, or do people just chalk it up to Suda51 being his usual self?
I don’t think the explanation is in the game itself, but they published an art book which contains some in-universe documents about it. Basically, Harman Smith has a kind of quasi-magical multiple personality thing going on called “Multifoliate Personality Syndrome”.
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