Part 16

Picking back up, we’re in this luxurious underground cavern complete with wall lighting. It’s quite a contrast, since most of the action in this chapter takes place…



“Ugh, snowfields. This reminds me of Northwall. Hopefully there won’t be some tree full of reincarnated star-crossed lovers here.”

“You have lived a strange and in some ways terrifying life.”

“That’s tr..agh!”



“And having things like that jump out at me isn’t making it any less terrifying!”

Our first enemy in the fourth area is this little guy, a snow rat. They’ll appear, hide under the snow, and then pop out to attack you. They’ve got all of 8 HP and are worth more than twice as much experience as anything in the last area. Clearing out the lair releases a girl…



“There’s something… off… about that girl…”



Next up, after another lair of snow rats that doesn’t contribute anything of importance, we get a lair of Devils. They mostly flitter about and are a lot less trouble if you use magic to attack them. They’re sturdier than the snow rats or just about anything else we’ve faced thus far, but are worth 85 EXP in comparison to the 20-30 of monsters on the seabed. And then…



“Ugh! Green cherries!”

“No! No cherries! Bad yeti!”

Yeti are an order of magnitude tougher than most of what we’ve dealt with in the past, but they’re relatively slow and easy to deal with. You do want to attack from the sides, however, as they’ll sometimes make a rushing attack.



“Just… grandpa? Whose grandpa?”



Climbing up the mountain further there are some ice slides that can speed your way down and that you can slowly struggle upwards. They’re not that much of an obstacle most of the time. At the bottom of this one another yeti lair nets us 40 gems as a prize in a chest.



A nearby devil lair pushes us up to our next level and… wait, I’ve got the dream rod equipped? That’s a bit of an oversight!



“Dead reindeer frozen in the snow. That’s.. depressing.”

“Would it make you feel better to know that they’re just sleeping?”

“I know dead when I… wait…”



“Okay, mind made up. I want them dead!”

To make matters worse, bone deer will occasionally send their heads flying around after you. You can’t kill them until the head rejoins the body. Pretty creepy. This lair or the next releases a new denizen of the underground:



“Sentient food. Wonderful.”




The next area of the snowfields is a giant plain patrolled by snow rats and other monsters along with sentient, hostile snowballs. They start out small and rapidly grow larger as they pursue. Right now our only method of dealing with them is to maneuver to get one of those rocks between us and them so that they’ll smash themselves apart. The last sword in the game can be used to defeat them for 2000! experience.



Progressing across this area is pretty much a matter of going from monster lair to monster lair and dodging snowballs the entire way.



The last link in the path pops out two more lairs under the eye of a devil lair, giving a bit of a challenging fight and releasing…



“Huh, I’m starting to think that they mean grandpa as in “hey gramps,” not actually being somebody’s grandpa.”

“So far we’ve got two grandpas and one girl. Seems pretty standard to me.”

“Don’t forget the sentient fungus.”

We also release a snail. This area is… a bit strange.



Climbing up the slopes leads to a treasure trove, which also includes 50 gems, an empty chest, and some new armor.



In addition to being a straight up upgrade, the magic armor has the additional utility of cutting the cost of using magic in half. It’s almost worth keeping it around even when you get new armor just for that benefit if you’re running low on gems.



Just past, we get to slowly climb an ice slope while devils swoop around us. It’s actually a pretty nasty setup. Clearing the nest releases a boy to match the girl we released earlier.



Directly up the slope, we have the door to the next area, an ice cavern.



Being indoors doesn’t stop it from being infested with ice rats who are holding a girl in their lair. So far we’re at two grandpas, two girls, a boy, a mushroom, and a snail, but this’ll make more sense later.




The ice works just as ice usually works in video games, letting us get started in one direction but not stop until we hit a rock or wall.



Eventually we can work our way over to this slope, giving us a chance to go after the Bone Deer. This is also a nice shot of one with its head detached.




Continuing around a yeti lair gets us our second level up this update. The experience scaling is actually right about spot on in this game most of the time and it works out pretty nicely. Our new armor has once again given us an edge in defense, but that’ll catch up soon enough. Clearing the lair releases another boy, but this one has something to say:




“Mushroom shoes? Well, sign me up!”

“See, they’re not just for eating. Very efficient if you can eat them and make shoes out of them.”




Clearing the next lair lets us get back to the caverns, and gives us a name for them. Seems… portentous.

Next update: Sticky shoes, snail jockeys, a new sword, and explanations.