Part 6: The Giants
After you touch-down at the giant's land, Gustav gives you these "friendly" directions for how to reach the giants:
"That way. Enjoy your walk!" How kind. Upon arriving at the village outskirts, Ariane makes this remark:
"I'm dying to see this giant!" I hope that's foreshadowing and the giant crushes her under his fist. But alas no, and the giant greets you:
Holy smokes, what is it about this game and… smokes? What if I was underage? What a great thing to teach kids. Sharing tobacco is the traditional way to extend cordial greetings. Tobacco. Smoke. Buy cigarettes.
Go into the town, you have to leave your knife and machete behind to enter. It's supposed to "protect the city" which is BS because some giants have control over matter. Having a knife will do you no good if your enemy can transport a rock into your brain with his thoughts. Or just transport your heart out of your body … using his hand… shouting Kali-ma, Kali-ma… KALI-MA! Back to the game. Let's check out the pansy gardener.
"I cultivate plants that I then see to serve as dwellings." Wow, he's greedy, selling dwellings for cash. Shouldn't they be a communal society and he does it just to help everyone survive? And his dwellings suck anyway; they lack a ceiling… or enough walls to provide insulation... or somewhere to sleep (see what I mean to the left a few pics down).
In fact, there's not really any point to having a shelter, it never rains. Even though the gardner's as capitalistic as a corporation, you've got to help him out for free, of course.
Go see the fisherman, and give him the tobacco. He's really grateful for it, almost like it's an addictive drug. The fisherman is one of the coolest characters in the game, the programmers gave him a sense of humor, check it out:
"OK, I won't have budged an inch!" He admits that he doesn't ever move, fantastic!
The weird thing about the fisherman is that there's a boy standing next to him who look important, but does nothing. You can't talk to him or anything. Weird. Also, it seems that the fisherman has boycott that capitalist pig farmer's dwellings; this one's made of stone.
The most annoying thing about getting to the fisherman is that the path is glitchy. Two footpath symbols appear: one right next to him and one closer to you. Of course, you can't take the one close to the fisherman. That's just a decoy hotspot that does absolutely nothing. Shame on you if by now you expect the footpaths to make sense. Rollover the image to see what I mean. (In fact move your mouse on and off it real fast, what a nasty fisherman.)
So help the fisherman, and go check out the healer.
She's always waving her arms meditatively over that lifeless mastodon. Seriously, let it go; you've been working on it for days and it hasn't moved. I don't even think its breathing. She's probably just barely keeping it from rotting because she has nothing better to do.
Alright, so after doing everyone's menial tasks, go check out the valley of the spirits. It's a magic, floating island... which is kind of cool.
But the puzzle to get up there is the most annoying time-consumer ever. There are 6 posts and a tongue statue. Each post has a leaf that can cover a hole in the post. Cover 2 leaf-posts and then pull the tongue to hear a weird wind noise, repeat.
Sounds pretty basic, but it takes forever. There are around 10 screens that you have to walk around to reach the poles and you have to go through the leaf-covering tongue-pulling bit SIX TIMES. This puzzle was clearly just a time filler, and it is annoying as hell.
You're supposed to figure out the sequence of posts by examining the arches you pass on the way there, but to be honest I was getting game burnout by now and just looked up the solution online. Which, thank God I did because if you screw it up I've read the puzzle doesn't reset itself. Did you have to make this puzzle so incredible bad?
Another thing I don't get is that when you cover the leaves and pull the tongue you get a different wind sound for each combo. Is that really possible? Can strategically placed poles with covered and uncovered slits create noise patterns that fill an entire valley? Somehow, I think they just pulled this out of their tongue statues down under.
So, you waste 20 minutes of your life moving leaves, and down comes the floating island. Guess who's there? That creepy bastard, Adam.
By now, I've been playing the games for days and I have nightmares where Adam pops up and says, "Hello, Ariane." He just gives me the willies. Ariane, if you trust this guy, maybe you'd also enjoy walking in dark alleys late at night exclaiming how all your money doesn't fit in your new wallet.
Adam lets you know that there's a disturbance in the garden and that you can see the spirits using the "clean vegetable lens from a mollusk". I kid you not. WTF is a clean vegetable lens and do mollusks really produce that? I asked Google, and all I got was references to this stupid game so, the answer is no. I still don't understand why an animal would produce a vegetable lens. I think this would be a good item to use to confuse the hell out of people in 20 questions.
Luckily, you have a living mollusk, so now all you have to do is get that sucker's lens. There is no life-form too low for Ariane to steal from. Although Ariane will rob people blind, it seems she won't kill shellfish, so you can't just smash the shell.
So here's the solution, completely self-explanatory: Go to the mage fighting arena, drop an empty shell into the bowl, drop the living shell into the bowl. You're hoping that the shellfish will choose a new home, but give it some persuasion.
Drop a mastodon hair into the bowl (mollusks hate mastodons, mastodon hairs and anything having to do with mastodons) and the thing will choose a new home. Smash the shell BAM! (finally, some violence!) and steal the lens. Here is the lovely sequence finished.
Now, I'm still not sure how you were supposed to figure out that you had to transfer the mollusk's shell, or that mastodon hair was pivotal in the transfer. There were seriously no clues to it in the game. The closest thing I could find to a clue was back up in the garden when I went to replace the lens, there's a statue of a mastodon head. But if that was supposed to be a clue, it was terrible. It was small and easily mistaken as decoration.
And check out this "mollusk", I got the best shot of it I could, but it moves really fast (mollusks can really haul ass). It's basically just a worm, and is kinda gross.
The worst part of this puzzle for me was that it glitched out in the middle. I went to the bowl before I knew about the lens, and by just pointing and clicking, dropped the empty shell in, completing part of the puzzle. I went on, did the terrible wind-puzzle, figured out what the bowl was for, and went back to drop the living shell in.
But it wouldn't go in. Somehow by starting that too early, I messed up the game. I couldn't pull my empty shell out but I couldn't add the living shell or mastodon hair. The game was laughing it's ass off at me. Not only that, but since I had dropped the shell in so long ago, all my saves were corrupted by this glitch.
I had to start again from the very, very, very beginning. And this, my friends, was the gaming straw that prompted me to write this review. So I started this horrible game over taking pictures and making notes along the way. Trying to document all the horrors as I relived them. The worst part was doing the garden tongue puzzle twice.
This time, I got the thing to work and went to fix the garden so I could see the spirits and figure out why they were in disharmony, which was the plot line I was fed. But once I replaced the lens, nothing happened.
I went to see Adam hanging around the entrance to the garden. He gives me advice, then leaves, managing to maintain his reputation as the creepiest PAC game friend I've ever seen:
"We shall meet again, Ariane." Shudder.
And here's his helpful advice before he leaves:
"Try to recover the harmony of the garden" How, Adam, how? Why don't you tell us what we need to do? I am not a mind-reader or magician. I've already scared mollusks into new shells with mastodon hair, what more do you want from me? I figured the solution must be back in the village so I go down. Ariane gives us this comment about the garden on our way down.
"There's nothing else of interest over there." Wow, what a relief. I guess we don't actually have to deal with the spirits or their problems. All we had to do was a half-assed job, which I am satisfied with. I think the programmers were going to have a bigger puzzle there but got lazy (and maybe just added more posts to the wind puzzle) which floats my boat. Let's get the hell out of this crazy mollusk-hating village.