#if this doesnt readmore we'll fix it tomorrow

[betweenlands]

the sludgeon complex, a retrospective

aka we just did this dungeon blind today and want to word vomit about it rq. sorry if this doesn't readmore, we're on mobile

would like to keep in mind here that we're playing thru the mod rn for fun and for screencaps, so we have projecte installed and are wearing full gem armor (plus carrying a red katar). should be pretty obvious that we can't speak as to health balancing of enemies or obstacles (with ONE EXCEPTION we're gonna get to)

so! it starts kind of slow. you climb up the tower and are told you've gotta light the braziers. which is cool, except you need moss to do that, so i had to craft up a pair of shears and run into the nearest non-sludge biome to grab some. no idea what you're supposed to do if there's no moss nearby or you don't have octine/syrmorite for tools. perish, i guess?

braziers then spawn some cool lil salamander mage enemies before turning on a light-reflection puzzle. full disclosure, we dig these usually, but the weird barriers in the tower made it more tedious than fun. just let me access the whole room, devs, it's okay, you don't need to make me run up and down the tower like ten times.

anyway: beams of light get shot into a plinth and it's labyrinth time. boy howdy, the aesthetic is immediately alarmingly grungy. literally took one step into the place and was accosted by, uh, no light way to put this - wall centipedes?

the deal with the labyrinthine vaults is twofold: each layer has a key symbol you memorize, then you navigate the vault to the door and input that key symbol. each layer also has 1-3 different obstacles or enemies to keep an eye out for. rapid fire enemy review time

starting strong with Wall Centipedes. we stabbed the wall and got an egg sac. gross but neat.

shamblers! they're like. xenomorph type monsters except they shoot their tongue out of their mouth at you across the room. you're probably supposed to block these with your shield. i like them a lot, even if they're a bit brightly colored

ughhhhh the infinitely spawning sludge worm eggs are annnoyyyyyiiiiinnggg. there's another enemy on this layer, the lamprey - and it's equally kind of annoying, because it does a ton of decay and for some reason has a vaccum attack. also, really could've gone without the spike traps, those didn't really add anything.

this is where things get interesting! first off: sludge jet turrets are really cool and glowy and i think they're neat. and then we have the miniboss on this level, the barrishee. fuck, man, it's cool as HELL - this was the one thing we were spoiled on before entering and even then it spooked us. basically: there's two doors in this layer, one is a mimic and turns into a giant monster you have to fight. it's so good.

pink mushrooms that blind and decay you. i don't understand why they're pink, the color choice there is weird? this layer introduces puffshrooms, though, and dang they're cool. really nice design, and their ability is to very temporarily snag whatever you have in your main hand if you're caught in the blast. wonderful and glowy. i love em.

moooole peopleeee, mooole peopleee- okay, yeah, they're called crypt crawlers, but they're mole people. anyway, they're pretty standard enemies. sometimes the ceiling falls on you. apparently there's a second door that leads to the crypt here, but uh... we didn't find it on our first pass (at least not the "correct" way), so we're not gonna cover that yet

moving walls. this was a really rad gimmick up until we found out that the door was at the end of the corridor and got repeatedly smushed by the wall as we tried to put the correct code in. while in gem armor, it dealt a little under half our health bar. that's frankly unacceptable for damage that was literally unavoidable. just make it so that the door doesn't spawn in a place that gets you smushed, please...

AND NOW. THE PIT. OF DECAY. holy fucking moly this thing's design is rad. starts strong, with a massive clockwork ring around a pit in the center of the room; there's a puzzle element to this fight that i adore, namely figuring out that you've gotta shoot the mirrors on the hanging thing in the center of the room in order to lower a plug into the pit. aiming is a bit finicky and i think the timer on how long it takes before the seal rises again could be a bit more lenient.

then you seal the pit. then the seal gets destroyed. then the boss is... a brown tentacle. yeah, this was a huge letdown from phase one's intricate design; having the sludge menace be just sort of a gunky brown tube is so boring after the wildly cool design of the pit seal itself. hell, half the normal mobs in the sludgeon look cooler. the puffshrooms look cooler.

after i finished slapping the tentacle around, i went back upstairs to find some cool things and some not cool things.

cool: while grabbing some of the neat ladder blocks, it turns out we'd missed some in-between passages that lead to the crypt. ran into it, got a sword, and ran out. the winding walkways were very fun to traverse!

not cool: those fucking sludge worm eggs kept spawning for some reason. also, i couldn't pick up the alcoves or the dungeon door puzzle key blocks, which made me very sad because i wanted them for decor, dang it!

as a last note, there's also mobs - called ash sprites - that come out of the urns in alcoves sometimes when you break the aforementioned urns. behavior/ai wise, they're basically just vex but with a cooler design and they don't die after a set period of time. they can get annoying. i would very much appreciate if they moved just a bit slower so that they were easier to kill.

7/10 the barrishee and the first pit of decay phase slapped so hard that everything else paled in comparison

#betweenlands #btl #txt #orig #long post // #if this doesnt readmore we'll fix it tomorrow