- The path is familiar by now, and it’s that familiarity that helps me get into my character’s head. How many times has she walked down this path in her dreams, past the statue of the hooded woman, watched the beautiful sunset, knowing that Ghost Dad is at the end with some new horror?
Along the way are two handsome horses milling about outside a burned out cottage with blood and char speckling the floor. Was this here the last time I went through this dream? I can’t remember.
Ghost Dad is in the same place as always, chopping wood outside the family house. His flesh is burned; hairless, scarred. Not as bad as a Bethesda Fallout ghoul, but he won’t be winning any beauty contests, that’s for sure. He tells me he has a surprise to show me and leads me into the house, giggling like he just told the world’s best dad joke. As I go in, I see that the sun has moved. The brilliant sunset has become more of a bloody scarlet. Still beautiful, but… yeah. Symbolism, hurrah.
- On the way in, I note the medical diagram of the human body set above a table piled high with what I’m pretty sure are human bits, given the reference chart. Plus… a garlic clove? Pretty sure I would have noticed if
that was there last time.
At the table I see Ghost Dad’s surprise.
Fuck you, Ghost Dad. Nothing good ever comes from you.
‘Mommy’ and ‘Sis’ (that’s what the game calls them) parrot fragments of Ghost Dad’s speech. ‘Play with us, play with us’, ‘Stay with us, stay with us,’ like that. I notice that each of them has a bloody patch on their clothes in the general vicinity of their hearts.
I should probably be grateful for the burlap sacks over their heads.
And then everything catches on fire, because of course. Probably all that hot fire Dad was spitting; the resemblance to Sigil Leader Jorek’s disappointment and cynicism is uncanny. Dad, Mommy and Sis go up like torches.
Dad is dreadfully disappointed in me refusing to stay dead like them, and sounding maybe a little jealous?
And then they show me that, no, there’s fire, and then there’s
fire.
- I like how Mommy and Sis’s ‘Stay with us, stay with us’ chant segues into Jespar’s ‘Come on, stay with me’ comment upon waking, though I think instead of calmly waking up it would have been more entertaining if my character woke up swinging.
Nevermind. So it looks like my character was out long enough to miss the raft ride entirely! And I was so looking forward to spending torturous days playing ‘I Spy’ with Jespar…
We were picked up by a Fisherwoman, and we’re on our way to a place called Duneville. This feels like it would be a good place to fit in a new NPC. Duneville is on the southwest end of the continent, way beyond anywhere I’ve ever traveled, and apparently is going to be one of the first to get hit by Nehrim’s invasion force.
But nope; her name is Fisherwoman.
- Anyway, we pull into Duneville, Jespar throws a sop to those of us wondering why we couldn’t just teleport home (apparently, the teleport runes are just now close enough), and scroll-ports to Ark. He plans to collect his pay, since we didn’t die after all. I’m not sure who he’s going to collect from, mind you, since his boss is buried back in the Living Temple.
Not me, though. I need to check this place out first!
- Duneville’s a pretty great locale. An inlet hidden inside a cave, with a ramshackle palisade built right on the water two, three, four stories high in places, connected by trap doors and ladders and plank bridges. Protected from the elements and anybody looking for them would have to look pretty damn hard. It’s got a certain aesthetic of… look, these guys are probably pirates, right? Smugglers? Something like that?
It’s just got that feel.
Possibly it might be the hookahs perched everywhere, or how the trio having a loud argument as I step off the boat basically out themselves as treasure hunters, which is apparently a banned occupation in Enderal. Respect for the dead, etcetera.
It’s a good bit of quiet worldbuilding that there’s tons of chests and barrels stacked everywhere, but all the goods inside are crap. A few gold pennies, iron, miscellaneous clutter. It makes it feel like Duneville is… not a very prosperous place.
- Now this is cute.
Some barely-literate scoundrel marked up the warning signs that are common in places like Ark with comments like ‘Beware living
dead tits’ and ‘Death
by drowning from behind’. It’s exactly the kind of retarded humor the people who live here would find hilarious.
- There’s some merchants, an inn of sorts, a minstrel. A quest starts up after I wander into somebody’s house and read their mail, telling me (not actually me, but imma do it anyway) to head for Old Solsteim (probably misspelling that) before the Order get there. Going by the name, probably another ruin. Well hell, I’m not tired of those already, off to Solsteim it is!
Arantheal probably isn’t waiting for a debrief, he probably thinks we’re dead! So what’s the harm?
- On the way out I run into one of the many ‘Watchdogs’ who serve the function of guardsmen around here, and he had this to say:
I still don’t know who the heck the Tuchessa (Truchessa?) is or was, but since we know she was/is part of the Order, that suggests Duneville’s town of miners, scoundrels, ne’er-do-wells and probably mafia leanings was sanctioned by the Order. Or at least given a hands-off approach. He even references ‘who rules this place,’ another question I’d like to know the answer to.
What a great throwaway line from an NPC who doesn’t even rate a name, to get me wondering about Enderal’s history.
- Anyway. Outside Duneville is a wasteland of sand, mysterious towers, rocky cliffs, sand-blasted wood wreckage, and more sand. There’s a constant background whistling as wind makes its way through the cliffs.
…
Duneville, I get it!
Riding my donkey through the large, mostly-empty desert feels pretty good. Like a spaghetti western hero.
- I appreciate that the first thing I run into is a Nehrimese invasion ship run aground with a bunch of murdered Nehrimese soldiers and a couple of new undead (Sere Lost Ones, with pretty sweet looking armor on) sprawled out across the beach.
It’s like Coarek didn’t realize what a shitshow the Enderal countryside is. They came expecting to stomp some clerics and instead are learning the kind of pain I’ve felt for two dozen hours. I kind of imagine this is happening all across Enderal right now, and I love it.
Also, the Duneville area is home to Enderal’s version of slaughterfish, some kind of armored red sea serpent thing. Still just as annoying as in Skyrim.
- I also happen to run into a place called the Hollow Hand, a little hole in the wall whose landscaping looks like this.
Nope! I tip my hat and move along.
- A priest’s tower has a desert spider outside, like the lil' guy is standing guard. Now where have I heard… aha. Haha. Hahaha!
I enter the tower, kill a few of the little guys, and then my old nemesis from the Kor quest, the Desert Spider Queen, shows up. It looks like the priest was digging out a cellar and happened upon the nest, or the spiders broke through and found him.
I snipe the Queen from across the room, and it turns out she’s actually too big to fit through the tunnel. I can only shrug and fire another three arrows into her general head region until she folds like a cheap card table. I’ll take it.
I also take a dozen books, to add to the collection I’ve got going in the storage room back home.
- Along the way to Solsteim (or whatever that ruin is called), I find ANOTHER ruin, called Old Lyguria. Well, one Pyrean ruin is as good as another, right?
Wrong.
I have some small initial success, although the dead adventurer bodies stacked knee deep is a little worrying.
Dead fire elementals look totally sweet, by the way, and the soil elemental decided on a victory lap of sorts.
Look at how happy he seems to have killed that frost elemental! He holds that pose for a good ten seconds as he roams the area.
Considering his curmudgeonly old man face and his just-proven elemental elitism, I think my soil elemental is the equivalent of an Enderalean.
Anyway, all goes well until it turns out a lot of these elementals are linked encounters. Four elementals at once is a bit much, turns out.
It’s been a while since I’ve done the ol’ corpse pose. So… back to the main quest?
Back to the main quest.
The Takeaway:
The nightmare is actually getting better with repetition, in the sense that when I see that lovely vista I think ‘Oh god, this again’, but with something closer to dread than annoyance. I think I’ve said this before, but SureAI’s nightmare game is
strong.
Duneville’s pretty great too, at least in small doses. The town’s architecture is inventive without the cave feeling claustrophobic like Undercity (high ceilings), and does a lot with like, 6 named characters with something to say. The desert is empty but that’s kind of the point of a desert biome, right? It’s pleasant to ride through, and I was serious about the spaghetti western vibe I was getting. SureAI really is trying to make sure every biome is represented somewhere in this game.
The monsters range from pushovers (some kind of armored deer called a Crusher), to slightly dangerous but mostly gross (so
this is where the pus monster centipedes come from! The mystery of the pus creature in that one Undercity house deepens), to still pretty dangerous (Desert Spider Queen, last of her name), to ‘holy shit that’s a lot of X what did I do to deserve this SureAI.’ I’ll probably come back at some point.