SureAI

Xandariel, thanks, I had forgotten about the wait period.

In that case, I would do something very dramatic since this is the last chance:
Actually go into Thalgard city.
or
Go high into Frostcliff Mountains and try Rockwatch and Old Iniath.

I had the impression she had already been to Thalgard, but yeah to Frostcliff; you haven't really finished the game if you haven't found Luke Skywalker's skeleton!

Just the "easy" part. She needed to go up the stairs to where the real fun begins.

It’s been a while, huh? But I have a new Black Friday computer, so it feels like it’s time to get back into the Enderal mines and finish this Let’s Play.
Of course, saying that, I begin by immediately digressing, because I’m in the middle of one of those main story blocks where the game tells you to go do something else for a while and come back later. I think I’m waiting for them to decode the map I got from the moon on where to find the old Pyrean capital?
Like I said, it’s been a while.
… Onward!


- One of the few quests I have left in my quest log is to visit the Dark Valley to track down Erica Braveblood’s mother (also a painter, named Andrasta Braveblood) who for some godawful reason decided to go live in the middle of an old, haunted battlefield or something.
Basically, whenever someone mentions the Dark Valley, it’s in the context of ‘that place with all the skeletons,’ more or less.

- The Myrad keepers have an option to take you to the Dark Valley, which is great!
Unfortunately, they drop you off at the other end of the valley, which apparently stretches over half the main non-Powder Desert part of the continent. Typical.

- Along the way, I run into a burned out house with a readable note left on the fireplace mantle reading ‘How to get out of debt!’
He burned it down to collect the insurance money. Heh.
Then I notice the burned corpses next to the bed.



… Damn it, Enderal. Why you gotta be like this.

- I picked up a little spell called Death Storm last time I was in Ark. Off the Order mage supplier. Sometimes I wonder about this place, but there’s that saying about gift horses…



Verdict: not really any better than summoning up a sharp bit of ectoplasm to stick in some bandit’s guts, but it does pretty good damage if the enemies bunch up. Three seconds in the storm is enough to murder the average marauder or wild mage, but it does eat your own health and mana, which is unfortunate.
Mostly, it’s nice to have variety sometimes, and I can appreciate throwing green lightning storms at people just as much as the next lich.

- I also wander by the Westpoint Monastery.
Naturally, I head right inside like I own the place.
Marauders and wild mages put up moderately stiff resistance, but I feel like I’m around 5 to 10 levels above what’s needed to crack this place open. Nice looking place, I’ll give it that.



What animal is that, seriously? Mammoth? Mysterious tusk-fish?
Although the scholars seem weirdly obsessed with books about a type of crystal jellyfish whose venom causes loss of appetite, melancholy and ‘notorious’ rage attacks, and then six hours after the sting the patient begins to rapidly age. Healing magic and tinctures prove ineffective.
That’s metal as hell, holy shit.

- There’s a spot where ballistas have fallen inward off the walls and cracked the floor, letting me squirm inside and drop down. Well, who am I to avoid an invitation like that?
Down below is a partially submerged room with an attractive layout. Very clean, very symmetrical. I like it. Pretty standard skeleton residents, nothing fancy like ghost monks or alchemists. A rather badass note reads:

“Here we sing to honor the dead. May they live on in our voices for all eternity. We are the liable carriers of an inhuman burden. What once was, shall sink in the sound of chaos, the old order lie before our feet in shambles. We will stride across mountains of humans and know no mercy.”

What inhuman burden? Why do you talk about ‘striding across mountain of humans (presumably corpses) like you don’t belong to the species? Did a skellington with a poetic soul write this? Are we gonna find vampires in this joint, waxing lyrical about their dark burden?

I wish there was some follow-up backstory explaining this, I’m feeling slow today.
Following a light swim and a grate-and-lever puzzle (the puzzle is ‘find the underwater lever to open the portcullis’), there’s a proper castle area only lightly choked with what look like grape vines just turning colors for the autumn. I wonder if the old monks-or-whoever grew grapes and it got a bit out of control, or what. I mean, for all I know the grapevines murdered all the old inhabitants and used their blood to water its fields. Who can be sure, with Enderal?



It’s pretty, however it got here. I’m starting to feel crypt envy, and when that happens I know what comes next.



Yep, another one of the Darkhand clan. Sabat Darkhand, this time.
I kinda feel like among lich-kind, these are the Joneses. You know? Like, sure, my place in the noble quarter is nice enough, but this place has character.

- … Does that mean the poetry in the note earlier is Sabat’s? He’s not bad, if so. I mean, Prince Adreyu of Mith (of the poetry anthology Lyrical Gushes and Other Fluids, natch) is nice but it’s good to have variety.

- Getting into Dark Valley proper, it has something of the character of say, New Hampshire. Mountainous and studded with evergreens like pines or fir trees, wooden buildings (abandoned, natch) that look like they were built by lumberjacks, like that. It loses out a bit to more extreme biomes like Goldenforst, The North or the Powder Desert, but nice enough I suppose.



Lots of Wood Elementals.
I’m still not entirely sure how the Enderal Spriggan-equivalents work, but they seem to get a one-off Charm spell, which would explain that one time my Elemental Wolf went Brutus on me in the middle of a fight with a Goldenforst Matriarch.
After killing one, I’m often assailed by a green-veined undead, bandit or, in one notable case, bunny rabbit.



If I move, it follows. Is it… is it trying to nibble me? I don’t think SureAI gave it a bite attack. It’s adorable, whatever it’s doing.

- Following a sidepath lit up by Wisps, I find an Abandoned Alchemist Camp with an interesting note:

“My investigations bore interesting fruits. The cave near my camp … houses a much older, apparently undiscovered complex of ruins. Maybe there the last ritual ground can be found. How exciting! … I could trace the magic spell to the deserted cloister very close by. If I get to visit all ritual sites the gates could open up by chance. What will await me beyond? What’s the purpose of this ancient building? Soon I will know.”

It feels like a quest hook of some kind, but nothing got added to my quest journal. I wonder if this is sidequest material, or could this be something to do with the main quest’s endgame? Travel around the various Pyrean ruins activating ritual sites to open the ‘gates’ to the mysterious beyond?
I could dig it.

- The address of the painter I’m given is a moderately ruined-looking home butted up against a cliff, with tattered banners but a neatly-kept frog pond complete with lily pads and croaking SFX. Nice.
Inside is a fire elemental and the painter I’m looking for hiding behind a portcullis. She doesn’t care for visitors, but I’m a little impressed because at least she’s still alive. A cut above the average kooky hermit; that poor guy out in the Powder Desert who accidentally wound up sharing his library with a Desert Spider Queen could learn a thing or two, if he hadn’t been horribly murdered even before I got there.
The elemental is her idea of a trap. I’d dock points for putting a monster made of fire in a room with rather a lot of presumably-flammable paintings, but since the paintings are part of the background they don’t even get jostled by the fiery explosion of the elemental’s end. Convenient!

- She sounds surprisingly sane, for a middle-aged lady touting the merits of a haunted battlefield as an artist’s inspiration and an infusion of dawnflower and children’s blood applied to the skin as a moisturizing tonic.
(A joke, probably, unless she tries to exsanguinate me later. These are the risks you take, visiting Enderal’s scenic vistas).
She doesn’t sound very complimentary about her daughter and son-in-law, although she seems to think selling all of her paintings is somehow a mark of poor business…? Maybe she’s in the painting business for the love of the game, and trying to get rich off it offends her artist’s sensibilities.
Anyway, she wants me to get back a painting some jerks stole (and coshed her on the head during a sitting, in the bargain). This sounds innocent enough, except that the quest marker says ‘Locate the effigy.’
If this turns out to be some Dorian Grey thing and I have to retrieve a painting of an old lady who is slowly getting older… well, I guess it’s fine? As long as it doesn’t try to eat my face or something.
It’s pretty hard to throw shade, these days. Rocks, glass houses, etcetera.


The Takeaway:
Nothing much going on here, just wandering around taking in the sights and getting my bearings again. I wish these random open-world worldbuilding tidbits had some more meat on the bone, but there being any worldbuilding at all in my random side content is welcome.

- Anyhoo, after wandering around some more fighting, in no particular order:

• Skaragg soldiers in a literal hole in the ground

• Skaragg soldiers in a rather nice hole in the ground, complete with a well-stocked modern alchemy room and of course, the room where they placate their probably-evil gods with human hearts. This room is, for some reason, underwater. Seems inconvenient as hell to take a long underwater swim every time they want to do their ritual sacrifices, but who am I to tell you guys how to live? Maybe the upper altar is for everyday sacrifices, and then the arts and crafts project one in the secret room is for special occasions.

• An ancestral mage-ghost in the cellar of an abandoned general store

• A cellar with a note explaining that some asshole played a cute practical joke and hid the key to the Massive Chest up high, and you have to shoot the bucket it’s in with an arrow to get it down

• A vatyr camp containing two tents but only a single, solitary (purple-furred) vatyr

• Vatyr running some kind of, and I shit you not, logging operation. Who is buying these wheels you're producing??

• Soil elementals in an area with trees that look suspiciously like crystal jellyfish. Just in case, I try not to touch anything likely to magically envenom/grandma me, which is probably everything

• A jaunty skeleton taking a nap using his overstuffed backpack as a pillow

• The Bone Farm, which I’m a little sad to say is a graveyard and not some kind of necromancy-powered organic produce situation

• At least two separate bandit camps. A wild mage says ‘Crocco ain’t gonna like this’, who I assume is some sort of local bandit boss or something? Nobody I’ve met yet, as far as I know

At this point, I’m practically to Fogville already. I’ve run across most of the middle part of the continent, east to west.

- Regardless, I do find my way to the particular bandits that took Braveblood’s thing. God bless the minimap marker.
One thing I notice is that there are some surprisingly nice chandeliers in this mine, situated just above a perhaps unnecessarily large stockpile of black powder. Enderal presumably doesn’t have OSHA.
There’s also some running streams feeding into a bog at the bottom of the mine, with what looks like more Pyrean statuary, or a carved wall or something, complete with the crystal that keeps sprouting up around all the old Pyrean stuff. The Pyrean Stuff is blocking any path forward though, probably why we have the standing pool of water down here in the first place.
There’s a notebook explaining that these guys are either in league with the Arps over in Fogville, or haven’t noticed Fogville is Arpsville now; they plan to transport ‘the next shipment’ to the Fogville port and then away from Enderal. I wonder where it’s going? Nehrim, or any other part of the world that isn’t invading us right now? More importantly, they call the Order ‘the Steel Crabs’, which is adorable.

- Also, at one point a painting starts talking to me. Of course Andrasta is sealing people into paintings to secretly murder them. I’m not even surprised at this point, I do have basic pattern recognition.
Apparently the two thieves were a pair of ‘witch-hunters from Arazael’. You’d think I’d have heard of every major country in this world by now, but no.
The witch-hunters were, naturally, there to kill her for sealing the nobility of Ark into her paintings.
Also naturally, they decided to get her to drop her guard by… agreeing to a sitting, to be painted.
… Rys, I have no sympathy for you, man. How did you think this would go, exactly.
Well, a little sympathy. They did some autotuning or something to make his voice all echo-y, but he is pretty broken up about his partner/lover Lyf getting killed by bandits. Good emoting. A little overblown, but you kind of want that in your ‘I got turned into a painting and my lover got murdered by bandits’ scene.

- One interesting tidbit Rys drops is that the people she paints behave like normal, but they’re naught but puppets. Like Lost Ones, is how Rys describes it.
Now honestly, I kind of assumed the Lost Ones came back hating humans for still having everything they aren’t, or something. Rys seems to think they’re just going through the motions. Their motions just happen to involve murder, but then, this is Enderal.
Murdering everything that crosses your path out there is basically just a defense mechanism.

- Welp, not sure how this is gonna go down, but I head on back to Braveblood.
Rys recommends I ignore her honeyed words and stab ‘er, but I like to give my psionic murderesses a little time to chew the scenery before I whip it out.
Now on the one hand, she’s murdering Ark citizens. On the other hand, they’re nobles and in Enderal. So odds are good they’re god-fearing, slave-keeping, xenophobic assholes doing something to deserve it.
She also goes on the attack against the witch-hunter, talking about the Purge of 8182 or so, where thousands apparently died for following a woman who disavowed the Lightborn Order. Of Free Folk boys and girls hunted down for ancestor-worship instead of following the Lightborn.
Now, it’d be super nice to be able to ask about ALL of this, but she’s not really giving me much to go on and forced Rys back into his painting so he can’t talk either. I have to make the decision blind.
You’d think there’d be some kind of middle ground, you know, vet her choices. ‘Only go after nobles like that one who’s got a stranglehold on the farms’, like that.
But I am busy I guess, can’t just be taking time out of the busy schedule to fact-check some potential murders. I mean, I’ve got a couple friends in the Order now, and Tealor Arantheal has a goddamn statue. He’s totally the type to sit for a painting.
So in the end I have to go with the ‘less murder’ crowd, and stab her good.
(This one doesn’t count.)

- Rys wakes up back in his body, which is one of the better ways this could end, really. Because I certainly don’t have any spells to drag a soul back out of a painting. I guess I do have Soul Trap, so I could maybe stick his soul in a rock instead…?
He does sound regretful about the child-murdering, but we can’t really hash it out much there, either. He just wants to take his lover’s corpse and GTFO.
Mannn, and I’m gonna have to come up with something to tell Erica later, too.


The Takeaway:
Not a bad sidequest, certainly. Better than, say, the one with the brother and his druggie sister, or the one with the plague mushrooms. But there’s not quite as much meat on the bone as I’d like, you know? You get some moral choice I guess, hints of some good old fashioned Spanish Inquisition stuff, but we don’t really dig down into it. I got more depth out of Arantheal regretting the riot than this bunch.
You could get a real spirited (geddit? Because one’s in a painting) debate between these two; was Braveblood there for the Purge? How long ago was 8182, anyway? Rys could give some reasons for why murderin’ Free Folk mages was a good thing, or at least morally gray. I mean, considering the number of small gods like Kor in this setting, there’s probably a good argument that could be made for not leaving mages free to contract and do who knows what for/with them.
But we don’t. So it all feels a little… fizzle-y.

I think the events of the game take place in 8234, so it happened give or take 50 years ago. I think there might be a mention of this purge somewhere in the Suntemple, in a book or even in a conversation, but I could be wrong. I also think that if you keep her alive there is some kind of option for her to 'kill less' or something like that.

For those of you who are not Yankees, that is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Duck and Cover?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXzDOHDbrYA
OSHA applied to a video game.

LOL

After all these years since i've finished Enderal's story i had to write this. Of all the video games i've played in my whole life. None was so touching as Enderal. The storytelling and the characters are all so lively. The soundtrack is so beautiful to my ears. At some moments i even got emotional. Maybe i can relate. There is no better video game developer in this entire world than SureAI. My heartfelt thanks for creating such a masterpiece.

I couldn't agree more

I think one key to Enderal is the emphasis on immersion. During the years of development, immersion in the story was a very frequent topic in the forum here, discussing things that would impede immersion and those that would advance it. When the player becomes immersed in the character, he or she can empathize and feel that "touching" feeling. SureAI was very cognizant of that and worked very hard to achieve it.

I must add, however, that for me, the most touching video game moment ever, one that I still remember after 24 years, was Celes' opera aria in Final Fantasy VI (or III, in some countries).

Even more so than Aerith's death on 7?

I still resent the fact that I invested a lot in her as a party member in the long run, only to have that cutscene defeat blow everything up for me at the time. Quite successful moment.

I've got to say, that moment was one I can't forget as well. I am also super salty that originally there was supposed a way to save her, but then they cut it from the game. I doubt they will change that for the remake, but hope dies last! ^^

Right, and for me it was more the surprise of it all, playing it the first time. It really caught me off-guard!

As to them changing it now, well for me personally the remake doesn't count at all, so:

- Back in Ark, I lied to Erica about her mother’s untimely murder. Bandits, terrible, just terrible. Such a nice woman. Yes.
I feel like I used to be lying about these people’s gruesome deaths because I didn’t want to tell the poor NPCs what their significant others REALLY got up to, but either it’s been too long a break since the emotional punch of the story or I never cared that much about this quest, because honestly I’m just lying for convenience’s sake here.
Erica sounds fairly sad about her mom, but also notes she has no money to pay me. … Woman, I could have got turned into a painting!
Whatever. Who cares about money?
(Me, if I have to pay the highway robbery prices on Master Skillbooks around here. Good God.)

- Erica noted she’d have to pay somebody to bring her mother’s body back to Ark.
I wonder if they’ll notice the mummified corpses in her mom’s back room, where she’d stashed the Witch Hunter’s body after she stuck him in that painting. He got up and moving again after she died, but there were at least three other corpses back there that didn’t (thankfully).

- Well, I appear to have reached the point of no return, which the game is kind enough to tell me via pop-up window.
Checking my Journal, I appear to be 27/30 on ‘Knowledge about Enderal’ checks, 6/? On ‘books read about the Butcher of Ark’, 1/5 on ‘myths and monsters slain’, and one last quest about Old Soltyris out in the Powder Desert.
Well, that last one seemed do-able, but the minimap marker doesn’t appear to be working for it. I wandered around the Powder Desert for a bit, ending up in a fairly posh tomb called the Duneville Crypt.
Absolutely covered in ghostly undead with a Lord of the Lost Ones hiding in the back.
But I have to give it props for some nice statuary and nice lighting.



Not sure I've seen this one before. There's also more offerings in other alcoves with some kind of prayer up on the walls.
I'd have guessed the Lord was some devout Order Sublime when he was alive, but way out here in Duneville, land of the smugglers?
Weird.
And off to the side is a skeleton that didn't get up and start lusting for the flesh of the living, still buried with rotting grave goods; a red blanket with gold filigree and a big-ass sword. Presumably he had other goods with him, but... well. Duneville. Dude was clearly ransacked at some point.

- The statue at the entrance is actually covered in scaffolding, like they’re building or cleaning it or something. Not sure what that’s about.



It’s also got some fresh fruit placed as an offering. Which kind of makes sense, since we’re really close to Duneville, but at the same time, the very next room is covered in bloodthirsty undead. Who is keeping this place kept up, and why? Do the Dunevillers not know this crypt is home to the most undead this side of the Soul Bed, conscientiously keeping the front looking nice without ever looking downstairs at the ghostly menagerie? Do the regular votive offerings keep the blasted things calm?
A Lord of the Lost Ones can kill me in a hit or two, they could certainly murder the hell out of some Watchdogs.
As usual, the worldbuilding provides you with a cool thing with absolutely no explanation.



I own a bunch of solar walkway lights just like this for my backyard. Just because you’re a red-eyed wight with an axe doesn’t mean you don’t know how to accessorize your lair. Good on you, mate.

- The only map marker up for Soltyris is an odd bluish one, but what the hey, I’ll follow it. It takes me southeast of Duneville and out into the ocean, but I figure, there’s an island on the map, maybe that’s it?
Nice day for a swim, anyway.



- No, that is apparently that one tropical island with the cultists and their evil sea god Kor.
On the upside… yeeeessss…
I do get some extremely lategame revenge on that Desert Spider Queen that was such a bastard back in the day. So worth it.

- The map marker keeps pointing southeast, though…welp.



https://imgur.com/a/ziruc6D

I have made a mistake.


The Takeaway:
It was a looonnng swim back to the mainland.
Next time, I actually get back to work on this Let’s Play now that the holidays are over, and we get this endgame done.

So apparently it took me around 20 days to make it back to land. Nevermind. Into the endgame we go!


- Well, first I happen to wander by a Keeper who tells me “I’ve heard some rumors about your favorite school of magic… Dangerous waters you’re treading in, be careful.”
That’s pretty rad. Like, somebody finally noticed I’ve been summoning monsters and ripping the souls out of people and stuff! Riiiight at the end. But good hustle anyway, you random Keeper.
I wonder if there are different lines for when you’re NOT mainlining Entropy magic. Like, “Oh, you seem to like fireballs. That’s cool I guess.” or “Why would you even pick Alteration magic, that was a terrible idea.”

- Anyhow, off we go to another meeting at the Big Table. It’s just down to Sha’Rim, Tealor Arantheal, Your Waifu (mine’s Jespar) and yourself. We’re not even sitting around the Big Table anymore, more clustered in a corner as we hold the briefing.
Points of interest:
1) Tealor says: ‘I suppose you already know that Vyn hasn’t always been like it is now. In the time of the Pyreans it was one big continent, which they called Pangora.’
And… no? Was I supposed to know that? That seems like a pretty huge thing to have tucked away in the cliffnotes somewhere, although to be fair you don’t often go up to people in real life and say, “So as you know, the continents used to be one big super-continent called Pangaea…”
2) The City of Floods has been found! It is, conveniently, directly under our feet, in the depths of the Undercity somewhere.
Tealor frames this as ‘It was always thought that the City of Floods was located somewhere in Qyra…’ which suggests that the Order leadership were planning to maybe charter a boat and make us travel to another continent to find the Numinos? I mean, I’d be fine, we’d probably just timeskip loading screen right to it, but that would have been super inconvenient for the characters in the story.
3) Endraleans believe that the Black Guardian is a demon that exists down in the depths of the Undercity, and you can hear his scream if you listen carefully.
Sha’Rim believes this to be wind whistling through the caverns, but how much do you want to bet I’m gonna have to kill an actual Black Guardian before this is all over?

- Tealor wants to leave immediately.
There’s this cute bit where Sha’Rim is like ‘Are you sure you don’t want to think this through-’ and Tealor just repeats, stone cold, ‘Ready your equipment. We’ll meet at the gate to the Undercity.’

- I’m sent to talk to Archmagister Lexil Merrayil like a gopher to pick up the Word of the Dead and some thing related to the Numinos. He’s not nearby where the quest marker takes me, and the novice there is like ‘Don’t worry, he’ll be back in a minute.’
And I immediately think, ‘Fuck’ and start summoning my swords. This character build is kind of weak to ambushes, and there’s basically no reason for this to happen if it’s not going to be Plot Relevant.

- The Novice seems to be a fan, and her voice is noticeably young and, well, cute.
She swiftly segues into telling her Tragic Backstory, where her parents and sister got butchered by Coarek and she arrived to watch them burn along with their house.
I feel like this would actually be more impactful if this was Elia, the named Novice from that tiny sidequest from back at the beginning. Especially since...



That’s right, crisp, fresh meat, just like Dream Dad always liked.
The High Ones proceed to speak through the poor girl, all ‘The Beacon won’t burn, it never will! Thousands have tried it before you, and they all failed!’ and ‘The Light will burn you, it will devour you until there’s nothing left!’
So I suppose all the dreams of fire and Dream Dad were a metaphor for the Light, which is apparently the Cleansing. Or possibly the High Ones.
It’s a little unclear, because the novice takes this opportunity to explode into bones and ectoplasm, the Beacon catches fire, and Lexil and I have to kill a few possessed Keepers.



Being set on fire apparently doesn't damage the Beacon significantly.

- There’s a nice feeling of uncertainty here.
Did the Sigil Stone stop protecting us, or did it never do so to begin with and we just deluded ourselves with thoughts of safety? Could the High Ones have reached out their hand and taken us at any time, refraining only from some alien amusement or sense of fair play?
Lexil is a good choice for this bit I think, above and beyond that he can check the Beacon and make sure they didn’t damage it too much. If this was Jespar he’d be taking a cavalier approach; if it was Tealor, he’d be speaking in his Reassuring Dad Voice. But Lexil is an intellectual, he seems like kind of a worrier, and he has this alto type of voice that comes across as an ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear’ sort of guy. He’s never been a party member, so I have no idea if he can even throw down if he has to.

- Oh, and the Nehrimese are in the city again. Lexil runs to the outlook and you can kind of see a reddish light like firelight in the dark clouds down below; presumably, the city is on fire.
It turns out the Truchessa betrayed everyone, took the Sigil Stone and a third of the Order’s Keepers down to Coarek and let him into the city in exchange for a promise not to harm anyone.
That worked out just about as well as you would expect, and she probably got hard murdered by him. She probably should have expected that when he crucified everyone he could catch outside of the city, but desperation can give people some weird ideas.

- I think we’re supposed to assume the Sigil Stone being gone is why the High Ones can possess us, although the way that worked was that Constantine and Lexil shattered the stone and gave us all a piece of it, so hypothetically we all still have our Sigil Stone chunks and should be safe as houses?
Maybe without the main Stone the little bits don’t work, or once Coarek got the Stone (or his High One masters did) he could somehow shut off its protection. Magical law of sympathy where something affecting the main Stone affects all the little ones, I don’t know.
Point is, anyone can get possessed at any time, probably. Lovely.

- There’s a Keeper bleeding out against the fountain who explained the whole Truchessa plot. Credit where it’s due, she is a fantastic voice actor. Not just the lines themselves, but the slow pauses… there’s something in her tone that really feels like she’s about to start choking on her own blood.
There’s a particularly cool line where she begs Tealor to forgive her, because she doesn’t want to die Pathless. Apparently Tealor is the local Fantasy Pope, and can absolve her of sins or excommunicate her at will.
Cool sprite, too.



I just wish this was Natara rather than a nameless Keeper, trying to account for herself before death claims her. Tealor’s pain would have been delicious. Having Disapproving Order Mom axed offscreen, as this Keeper suggests Coarek did, is kind of disappointing.

- There’s a big rousing speech from Tealor, how the three-dozen or so Keepers and Arcanists here have to hold the line while we descend into the bowels of the city to find the Numinos. He says up front that there is no winning endgame that gets us out of this alive. Killing Coarek’s delusional soldiers is pointless; the High Ones are all that matter. Once we light the Beacon and burn away the High Ones, Tealor intends to surrender. Coarek will probably kill us all, but Tealor considers this death to be meaningful, to be a sign. A sign of what or to whom, I’m not sure. To other faithful, or rebels against Coarek’s mad rationalist dogma?
Whatever the case, I’m kind of hoping we get to do it that way. Killing all the High Ones and then surrendering to Coarek after his masters are dead and any hope of ‘ascension’ pointless would be pretty amazing. Maybe his blood pressure would sky-rocket and we can make him stroke out from sheer rage.



I also really appreciate the Keeper helmet you can see on the right there. Did they get a design upgrade recently? I feel like I’d have noticed if they were rocking a Roman-esque laurel leaf design with snarling great cats on their pauldrons and the top of their helmets.

- Anyway, Tealor gets a rousing cheer, and everyone (left) is down for a heroic last stand.
Apparently there’s a secret way down into the Undercity we can take, too, since the city is full of enemy soldiers.
Back during the last Undercity riots the Order dug some tunnels to pump poison gas in and end the threat that way. Yikes. Score one for ruthless paranoia, I guess.
Well, there’s our route secured.
Let’s go digging into the depths, shall we?


The Takeaway:
Overall, very dramatic and almost cinematic chain of events, even if the logic connecting events is a little shaky. Why did handing over the Sigil Stone lose us the protection of the chunks we carry? Why would the High Ones possess a couple of us and then let the rest of us go? How did she get out to meet Coarek through Sha’Rim’s entropic barrier? How did she let Coarek in through the barrier? If there are thousands of Nehrimese like Tealor suggests and there’s no point in trying to throw them out of the city, how did we do that very thing like 3 days ago when they sailed into the harbor and started murdering everybody last time?
Possibly this will all make sense at some point. I mean, I could probably take ten minutes and come up with satisfactory (-ish) answers to all of them. Guess we’ll see!

Gonna try and get another update out shortly, since I’m off tomorrow; we’ll see how that goes, I guess.

- Just as a side note, it’s weird that the same old Keepers that have always taken up guard positions at doors or in the hallway leading to the Big Table are all ‘Leave this to us, but hurry’… yet are still guarding random doors. You’d think they’d be over there, holding the gates to the Sun Temple.
Who knows, I’m not some kind of expert in heroic last stands.

- There’s a brief aside with Jespar, who wants to know if I’m really down for Tealor’s glorious symbolic surrender.
Since there’s sadly no ‘But it would be funny watching Coarek’s face turn purple wouldn’t it’ option, I have to admit if there’s a way to duck out before the curtain call, I’m for it.
Hopefully Jespar isn’t going to try and cut a deal with Coarek or something, that never ends well.

- So down into the depths we go, finding something like a small three-way war between the possessed, plunderers out for a quick buck, and Coarek’s army.
Everyone has taken a level or three in badass when I wasn’t looking; even the rando plunderers are pretty hearty. Deathstorm’s self-damage tick is too high and its output too mediocre (albeit area-of-effect), so I have to leave that to Sha’Rim and wade in, swinging swords and popping potions.
It does a pretty good job of proving the wisdom of Tealor Arantheal not sending us all out for some last glorious sally like Commander What’s-Her-Face wanted; even fighting like 15 of these guys is pretty hard. Trying to fight a city full of them would be impossible.

- There’s also quite a few ghosts, wisps, and ghost-serpents here and there.
Life in the Undercity must be hard as hell. Not only are you probably suffering from flesh-maggots, not only is the orphanage run by Vatyr, but goddamn ghosts all up in your business.
Oh, and everything is on fire.



- There's this cool mini-cutscene on the way, with a Nehrimese soldier standing over a pair of Undercity dwellers with an axe. It's not just murder, though; it's like a religious debate, just with axes.
This guy came fucking prepared for this, okay? When the girl begs, 'We're a peaceful order!' he actually has his bible or chant of light or whatever the heck the local holy book is called, and he can quote it chapter and verse. All the parts where the Radiant Being Which Was Malphas decided to smite some heathens, you know, 'And thousands of lightning bolts crashed down onto the wretched city, destroying everything,' like that.
This small piece of dialogue is actually what I love about Enderal. Because look, make no mistake; this Nehrimese guy is wrong, because people who invade their neighbors and put them to the torch are never right.
But SureAI was confident enough in its players' intelligence to allow him to have a point. You can see where he's coming from; the average Path-abiding citizen is a good person (/occasionally hateful xenophobe), but the Order is a monolithic entity that rules much of the world, and that's a situation ripe for abuse. And the Light-born were apparently of the 'rain of fire' variety of conversion strategy, as you would do if you were some kind of near-omnipotent wizard-god-king.
The Nehrimese are murderous assholes, but widespread revolution doesn't just spring up without a cause. They got that way in response to systematic abuse from a strict caste system that allowed slavery and who knows what else under its rule.
This? This right here? This is my jam.

- I ding Level 58 on the way to Sha’Rim finding just the right rocky wall to entropy into dust to get access to the City of a Thousand Floods.
… How exactly did you know to do that, Sha’Rim? That map we got from the Star Fathers would have to be really specific.
Also, you know… I’m wondering about that name. City of a Thousand Floods. Why would you name your city that if I’m not going to have to be doing a lot of swimming and/or drowning?
Or some kind of Noah parallel, I dunno.

- Solid art (architecture) direction for the City of a Thousand Floods. SureAI doesn’t just throw a crumbling city at you when they can throw an overgrown crumbling city full of waterfalls at you instead.
The waterfalls kind of remind me of the building complex beneath the Living Temple; it makes me think this was just an architectural style for the Pyreans, rather than rising water levels or climate change during the 50,000 years in between their time and ours, or something.
The Pyreans just appreciate a good waterfall.



- Now that we’re in the Pyrean city proper, there’s rather a lot of Lost Ones down here, which the High Ones possess and fight us with.
I don’t think these are Pyreans, since those appear to have charcoaled into black carbon statues all over the place.




I wonder if these are the remains of adventurers and grave-robbers that have found their way to the Pyrean city only to meet their end, or if the High Ones have been secretly moving Lost Ones down here to use as a small army.
Either option presents pretty interesting follow-up questions: ‘How’ and ‘Why’, respectively.

- All the way down here, Tealor has been the pillar of strength. When the visions cause Sha’Rim to wonder if we’re still part of the Cycle (oh hey, by the way, the visions are back), he refutes him. Tealor is certain: We’re closer than any have come before to lighting the Beacon. We will succeed. The High Ones are running out of tricks, reduced to throwing possessed corpses at us.

- So of course, that’s when the High Ones show up to throw a trick at him. They tune up the video reel, all the carbonized Pyreans’ eyes light up (are they a power source? Is this the Pyrean High One speaking to us?) and it’s movie time.
Apparently, Young Tealor (with a glorious head of hair) was a bit of a dick. He had a kid with one of the Light-born (and boy, wouldn't that be a story all on its own), and rather than taking the child away himself as she asked, he refused to abandon his position and title and had one of her assistants raise the kid instead.
And didn't get smote for his arrogance. I wish I knew literally anything about this Light-born Indara. I don't think this is the one that managed Qyra, where Tealor accidentally a war...
This kid, of course, is the one (Narathzul?) who killed all the Light-born, including his mom I guess?
So the child Tealor refused to abandon his position for made his position superfluous by killing all Tealor’s gods (plus throwing him in jail for like 10 years).

- Tealor is… upset. ‘Swinging greatsword at phantom of younger self’ upset.
I wish there was time to talk to him about this, because holy cow would that be a conversation. Young Tealor is such a different person. Not all the way, Current Tealor is still pretty arrogant and high-handed at times and he would be an inflexible and implacable enemy. But these days he couldn't give a fuck about the office and his high position. A decade or two in prison really mellowed him out, and taught him more humility than the average Keeper. He takes the long view, but he's at least aware of the cogs that make up the grand design.
The High One clearly thinks this was the 'and that was when it all started to go wrong' moment, and I wish I knew if Tealor agreed. Given the way he just about bisected his younger self with a greatsword, I'm thinking he does.

- And then, having gotten the last laugh by dragging out Tealor’s dirty laundry, only then does the High One try to kill us all with red glowy phantoms. I mean, why just murder a guy when you can fuck with him and then kill him, amirite? I’m right.
So we start fighting our way up the stairs to the Pyrean temple in a pretty badass sequence. Most of the phantoms are swinging ghostly swords, but there are at least two lich-type guys (like the Darkhands) and a giant.



- And then, while we’re all congratulating ourselves on being stone-cold badasses who don’t give a fuck, the High Ones bring in their Heavy: a phantom dragon who spits very real fire.
The front façade of the temple collapses on us (the game takes away control to have the Prophetess look up as the giant cyclopean masonry blocks come crashing down), and then… darkness. Darkness and fire.


The Takeaway:
I’m really digging this segment so far. Going from secret passage to afire Undercity to the picturesque (if corpse-y) City of a Thousand Floods keeps things visually interesting, and each leg of the trip is only three or so vistas (fights or scenes or whatever) so it doesn’t feel like a slog.
The enemies look really cool, both the Lost Ones with the glowing eyes and the red smoke monsters.
They're still fleshing out their goddamn characters with unique, interesting character beats, even this late in the game. Hopefully Sha'Rim gets something next, because I can never read that guy.
But my favorite bit is probably that one little conversation between diametrically opposed viewpoints, irreconcialable differences settled with the axe. I'm not sure if SureAI has something concrete to say about all these themes they're throwing around, but even if they're just using them to flesh out their world, this is the good shit, fam.

And still so many - and juicy! - chunks for you to go through.
Very interested on how you will take what follows.