Black Crypt: Lost

The other teleporter back at the hub leads to a red area. I guess yellow was too similar to the regular wall color. It's certainly...there. Not that I don't appreciate this sort of art direction, I love '70s Italian horror films, but this feels gratituous. We're not doing it for the cool factor, we're doing it because we can. This opening section has an openable door and a switch. The switch reveals a bit more hallway, with a plaque:

"A year of death
Counted in souls
One for each moon
Four is your goal."

So...find four keys? Four of something, I guess. What's behind the door?

Oh, niches with skulls in them. This feels like a trap. There were a ton of skull enemies last time. And it turns out to be correct. Pick one up, and a fireball spell is cast on your party. Use the skull you get and a skull enemy pops up. Maybe, I'm not sure. Hang on, we've just seen a plaque with a riddle on it. Maybe there's a connection? The fourth skull? No. The fourth on the left. Now what?

I sort of end up brute-forcing this puzzle. There's one right in front of the door, one at the end and then another one somewhere inside. Looking back, I can see two of them are clearly indicated, but I'm not sure how the last or the odd one out connects up. The last skull causes a click and a switch pops up which opens the passageway further. This has another plaque with months on it. February, April, July, October. This one I get, and might explain the last one, except that it wasn't the exact last skull. I guess I just dump the skulls then?

So I go to take the skulls based on what months they would correspond to. This doesn't work. Okay, maybe it's in the opposite direction. No, that's not it either. This is getting to be annoying. I bruteforce it and that does nothing. Okay, what am I missing? I take a peak at the guidebook and apparently these things were opened in a sequence. Looking at both plaques, I'm not sure how the sequence is being hinted at, since it goes third, seventh, twelveth, then sixth.

There's probably going to be a bit about puzzle design when I reach the final entry, but it can't be the months, since there's nothing to connect them to those skulls. I can kind of see a year corresponding to three, since the number of days starts with a three. The number of moons could also mean twelve, since that's sort of what a month grew out of. Souls I could see being connected to the death gems you find on the ground beforehand, but that's because I paid zero attention to them. Very gamey idea, in a bad way. There's no reasonable way to figure this out, I'm just grasping at straws after the fact. And I don't mean this in a sense that I usually do this, because usually the problem is that this puzzle could have been given hints much better. This ain't that, this is impossible for me to parse. There are no easily noticeable visual differences, though I think there are some if you can see one next to another one.

Moving on, there's some more of all three enemies that have been in this section, and another death gem next to a piece of meat and a potion of cure disease. Two locked doors and one I can open. This leads to a hallway which damages you for no explained reason. Presumably, it's due to the heat, but the game neglects to mention this. There's another water fountain, but more importantly, a key and a robe of the forest, which does some good on my druid.

The door this opens leads to a wall. I kind of figured this by checking the map, but I tried it anyway since it seemed like it might be a trap. The other door has a different lock, so this is correct. I wish it was, because instead it's a sort of walk-through wall maze. Sort of because, well, there's not really much maziness to it, but it feels like one. There's even a plaque mentioning that the druid hero of the great war died here. I find what might be his stuff, which includes a leather armor +2 I had no reason to care about, and fortunately, another key. The door this opens leads to a fountain and the first proper dark area of the game. That means I can finally take advantage of that light spell! How well does it work?

Now, I'm not going to use words like, awful, terrible, or even unforgiveable. What I am going to say is that is that this screenshot of me fighting something in the dark was very soon after I entered the darkness. This can't have been more than twenty seconds if I'm being generous. This is shorter than most grindcore songs, unless they're literal joke ones. This is a large area to go through, even if there's not much in it. Beyond a few floating skulls, there's a coffer with a scroll next to it. That tells me that the archdruid, Oak Raven is buried in a white oak coffin. Am I going to have to rob his grave? Sigh...

The end of it appears to be a small room in the center of a large outside hallway. Only, it isn't, it just has some minor stuff, I missed another room. I do get twenty seconds, but it is annoying to rush this way. The second room, on the side, is where the actual loot is, a shiny new helmet and the key. This level is starting to feel long in the tooth, and it seems the developers agree with me, because the last part is just answering the questions about the archdruid I just mentioned. But you know, not as two words, as one word. Sigh...

Among many other other defense items, including vaguely named magical helmets Mage Bane and Helm of the Triton, I find the Wisdom of the Druids, a spellbook for the druid. This has Pestilence, Chant of Doom, attack spells, Cure Wounds, healing, and Cure Poison, self-explanatory. Good to have, even if poison hasn't come up in ages. There's also the key down, allowing me to reach the next section.

...At which point the game won't let me continue. As I've sort of glossed over, you need to do a disk switch between major sections. I've done it about half a dozen times before, but there are three sections so far, the times in the past were to get water. This time the game just says the disk is write-protected (which it isn't) and fades to black afterwards. Nothing. At first I thought I might be able to fix this by just saving, but this prompts the same kind of error. Neither reloading a save from the start of this section or redownloading the game files seems to work, so this, alas, is where I'm ending the game.

This Session: 1 hour

Final Time: 9 hours 50 minutes